Jonathan Rosenbaum Interview by Noel King (2002), Part 2

From Framework (volume 45, number 1, Spring 2004). Because of its length, I’m running this in two parts. — J.R.

This interview took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 20, 2002 — if memory serves, at the Abasto shopping mall, where the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film was then being held.

NK: How did you come to film criticism and film journalism? You start out in the States and have some years in Paris and then London and then back to the States.

JR: Like most other film critics of my generation I didn’t set out to be a film critic. I was a writer from very early on and my family was involved in the film business but my initial interest was in being a fiction writer. I wrote fiction in high school and in college and was hoping, very unrealistically, to have a career as a novelist.

NK: The fiction writer aspect survives into the opening page of Moving Places where you riff on the opening of William Faulkner’s Light in August.

JR: My MA thesis was on Light in August. At the time I got fed up and quit graduate school I was working on a novel and somebody I knew from college offered me a job editing a collection of film criticism. Read more