Daily Archives: April 29, 2026

Memories of Béla

Jonathan Rosenbaum

This essay was commissioned by the Indian arts journal The Riveraine Muse (based in West Bengal) and published in their Spring 2026 issue (vol. 3, no. 1). I’ve added a few parenthetical notes to identify the photos. –J.R.

I’ve spent most of my life in search of communities I can join without compunction — decidedly not the small town in Alabama where I grew up, and at most only two of the schools I chose to attend as a student: Highlander Folk School in Tennessee (summer 1961), cradle of the civil rights movement in the U.S., and Bard College in New York (1962-66), where my professional and vocational involvements in film and literature took shape. But the only such community that I was invited to join, as a teacher, was film.factory in Sarajevo, over four two-week periods, 2013-2015, and this was entirely due to Béla Tarr (1955-2026), a filmmaker I discovered in Chicago via Almanac of Fall (1984) and Damnation (1988) in 1990, who became a friend around the time of the international premiere of Sátántangó (1994). I had been on the New York Film Festival’s selection committee that had chosen the film, had arranged for its showing at the Chicago International Film Festivalas as a “critic’s choice” of mine, and had found its first American distributor. Read more

WILL THE REAL NORMAN MAILER PLEASE STAND UP (1975 review)

From Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1975, Vol. 42, No. 500.

It’s good to see Norman Mailer’s first three features just out in a two-disc DVD set from Eclipse (it would be great if Criterion could eventually do the same for Susan Sontag’s three fiction features), even though I regret that my two favorite Mailer films — his untitled, ten-minute experimental short from 1947 (recently discovered by archivist Michael Chaiken, who wrote the excellent and provocative notes for the Eclipse set, and which I saw last July at Il Cinema Ritrovato) and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) — aren’t included. (Admittedly, I haven’t yet seen all of Maidstone, which Chaiken makes the most claims for, so these rankings on my part are still subject to revision.)…In his Eclipse notes, Chaiken describes Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? [sic] as “a filmed counterpart to The Armies of the Night“, which parallels my own observation here. Read more