Monthly Archives: May 2026

Black-And-White World [BLACK GIRL]

From the Chicago Reader, April 21, 1995. It’s lamentable that, although Black Girl is now available on DVD from New Yorker, the color sequence in it appears in black and white. (In fact, I only saw this sequence in color for the first time when I showed this film in a course on world cinema of the 60s that I taught in Chicago in 2008.) To see this sequence in color, order the film’s BFI edition from Amazon UK. — J.R.

Black Girl

Rating **** Masterpiece

Directed and written by Ousmane Sembène

With Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Momar Nar Sene, Anne-Marie Jelinck, Robert Fontaine, Ibrahima Boy, and the voices of Toto Bissainthe, Robert Marcy, and Sophie Leclerc.

If you trace African film back to its first fiction feature, it is only 30 years old. Yet far from being underdeveloped, it begins on a more sophisticated level than any other cinema in the world. By some accounts Ousmane Sembène’s hour-long Black Girl was made in 1965, by others 1966, a characteristic ambiguity when it comes to African movies. Do you date them according to when they were made or when they were first shown? And given the scant and largely unreliable print sources that we have to check, how can we be sure about either date? Read more

Why I Like TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE: A Conversation with Justin Bozung

The following is a slightly revised and rearranged dialogue recorded for a podcast in January 2014 and reworked a little over a year later for a  book by Justin Bozung about Norman Mailer’s films, then cut from the book due to a lack of space the following year. –- J. R.

 Mailer in Provincetown

Tough-Guys-Dont-Dance

JUSTIN BOZUNG: My first question for you is, Why in the hell are you and I the only two people in the world that love this film?

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: Well, we aren’t quite the only two — there’s also my friend Mark Rappaport, who, like Mailer, is both a filmmaker and a writer. But it’s true, there aren’t many others. And I can’t speak authoritatively about why other people don’t like the film, but I will say that I’ve never been a fan of Mailer’s three previous films. And I use the word “film” deliberately and advisedly, because Tough Guys Don’t Dance is above all a movie; it’s the only thing of his that has some resemblance to Hollywood. And he has a flair for it.

I saw what I believe was one of its first screenings, soon after it was (probably) shown at Telluride, at the Toronto Film Festival. Read more