For the past eighteen years, ever since I retired from my post as the main film critic for the Chicago Reader, this web site, jonathanrosenbaum.net, has been offering free access to most of my writings from the last half-century, receiving close to a thousand visits from readers around the globe every day. To keep it going and myself going as well, expanding its offerings in the process as a Substack resource, I find I need to monetize it, and for this I need help, expertise, and online savvy.
For anyone willing and able to help me make this transition and profit from it, I can offer a revenue share as 20% of the first years’ profit, or if you’d like to help build this publication together, or think you might be, email me your thoughts about how you’d like to partner in this venture. We can take things from there and I look forward to hearing your thoughts about this. jrosenbaum2002@yahoo.com Read more
We already know from his imaginary conversations with his very own “Orson” in The Eyes of Orson Welles (2019) that the presumptions of Mark Cousins respect no natural boundaries apart from those of his own hubris. So he doesn’t even need to credit himself as the writer of the 14-hour marathon Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema(2018)—available on four Region B Blu-rays from the BFI containing ten chapters apiece—even when his text is being dutifully delivered by Tilda Swinton (as in the first chapters), or Jane Fonda, or another high-profile woman, because he knows that his credit as director and his characteristically friendly stream-of-condescension have already registered his fingerprints on every frame—which is literally true, insofar as his series’ widescreen aspect ratio reconfigures the compositions and frames of many of the films he claims to be celebrating. (Though I have to admit that Julia Solntseva’s The Golden Gates (1971), a tribute to the director’s late husband Alexander Dovzhenko, reconfigures the aspect ratios of Dovzhenko’s masterpieces no less ruthlessly and systematically than Cousins does with other filmmakers.) Meanwhile, the patter he assigns to Swinton et al defines the significance, meaning, and value of every clip before we can begin to respond to it on our own—indeed, it precludes any sort of response from us apart from passive assent before we move on to the next clip. (Cousins Read more
