A column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, submitted March 19, 2022. — J.R.
Manny Farber
While preparing a book that collects some of my film criticism, jazz criticism, and literary criticism and tries to correlate certain shared formal attributes of the three corresponding arts, I’ve been lamenting the absence of recordings of the very jazzy and literary lectures on film that Manny Farber gave at the University of California, San Diego in the 1970s, some of which I attended. They seemed improvised, even though he spent a long time preparing them.
Sometimes he delivered portions in voiceovers while the film was still running, as if having an argument with the filmmaker. For those who can now read Farber In Spanish, his breezy, blustery style also seems Influenced both by jazz and the writers he read, although the fact that he hung out with East Coast action painters also left a mark. In short, his writing and his lectures were both performative events full of suspenseful moments and humorous surprises.
J-P Gorin
So is Jean-Pierre Gorin’s A “Pierrot” Primer, a DVD extra on the 2008 Criterion edition of Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which quotes Farber but converts the Farber delivery into a style entirely Gorin’s own. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 17, 1999). Thanks to the courtesy of Tom Colley at the Video Data Bank, I’ve finally been able to see this strange film again, almost 23 years later, and have added a few second impressions and second thoughts. — J.R.
This 1998 Caspar Stracke feature is one of the rare experimental films in 35-millimeter, and though I could preview it only on video, it kept me fascinated even in that format. Stracke describes it as moving in a circle with neither a beginning nor an end; in the version I saw, the credits come in the middle. A lecture on the philosophical and psychoanalytic implications of the invention of the telephone by theorist Avital Ronell eventually turns into a story in black and white about a woman who has a lotus blossom growing in her left lung; at different times this film comes across as documentary, essay, performance art, and silent throwback (complete with intertitles and irises), and the capabilities and rhetoric associated with both computers and VCRs play a part in the continuously shifting and evolving discourse. Stracke will be present at the screening. Kino-Eye Cinema at Cinema Borealis, 1550 N. Milwaukee, Friday, September 17, 8:00, 773-293-1447. Read more
A low-budget no-brainer, Run Lola Run is a lot more fun than Speed, a big-budget no-brainer from five years ago. It’s just as fast moving, the music is better, and though the characters are almost as hackneyed and predictable, the conceptual side has a lot more punch. If Run Lola Run had opened as widely as Speed and it too had been allowed to function as everyday mall fodder, its release could have been read as an indication that Americans were finally catching up with people in other countries when it comes to the pursuit of mindless pleasures. Instead it’s opening at the Music Box as an art movie.
Why try to sell an edgy youth thriller with nothing but kicks on its mind as an art movie? After all, it’s only a movie — a rationale that was trotted out for Speed more times than I care to remember. The dialogue of Run Lola Run is certainly simple and cursory, but it happens to be in subtitled German — which in business terms means that it has to be marketed as a film, not a movie. Read more
From the Chicago Reader in late August, 2005. — J.R.
Working without a script, the edgy British independent Michael Winterbottom (24-Hour Party People) shoots a young couple (played by Kieran O’Brien and American nonprofessional Margo Stilley) having real sex and alternates these scenes with numbers from nine London concerts (mostly rock) that their characters attend over a few months. Beautifully shot on DV by Marcel Zyskind, with minimal dialogue but voice-over narration from O’Brien, this 2004 feature is short on story and character yet usually holds its own as spectacle. The music and the body types may be familiar to a fault, but the performances are expressive. 69 min. (JR)
From the Chicago Reader (September 3, 1993). — J.R.
SON OF THE PINK PANTHER
* (Has redeeming facet)
Directed by Blake Edwards
Written by Edwards, Madeline Sunshine, and Steve Sunshine
With Roberto Benigni, Claudia Cardinale, Herbert Lom, Debrah Farentino, Robert Davi, Shabana Azmi, and Burt Kwouk.
Son of the Pink Panther is the eighth or ninth Pink Panther movie, depending on how you keep count — the press materials choose to ignore Bud Yorkin’s 1968 Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin, a flop that pleased no one. It also represents the third time writer-director Blake Edwards has resumed the series after announcing it was definitively over. The first dormant period was 1965-’74, after the successive and successful releases of The Pink Panther and A Shot in the Dark in 1964. The second, 1979-’81, followed The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978) — which were even more successful at the box office than the first two.
Peter Sellers, the star of the series, died in 1980. But with a perversity and cynicism matched only by commercial greed, Edwards managed to grind out two more Clouseau films in the 80s, Trail of the Pink Panther (1982) and Curse of the Pink Panther (1983), which I’ve never managed to bring myself to see. Read more
These two features, which open the Film Center’s month-long series “Gilding the Cage: French Cinema of the Occupation,” show that there are both rational and irrational ways of understanding the period. Bertrand Tavernier based his fascinating drama Safe Conduct (2001, 163 min.) on the memories of two of his friends — Jean Aurenche, an apolitical screenwriter, and Jean Devaivre, an assistant director who served as a member of the Resistance. It’s the most textured portrait of the Occupation I know, exploring the complex moral choices each man faced in working for a German film production company. By contrast, Marcel L’Herbier’s La nuit fantastique (1942, 100 min.) is a whimsical yet brittle nocturnal fantasy that consists mainly of a nerdy Parisian student’s expressionistic, romantic dream about pursuing an imaginary beauty. It’s the first film scripted by Louis Chavance, editor of L’Atalante and writer of the corrosive Le corbeau (showing next week), and it oddly evokes both The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Eyes Wide Shut in its troubled moods and dreamlike studio settings (e.g., a formal ball at the Louvre, complete with magic show and trapdoors). Its illogical drift seems to convey the creepy collective unconscious of the occupation, so indelibly that even the happy ending turns out to be deeply disturbing. Read more
A programme by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Ehsan Khoshbakht (Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna, June 2024)
Introductory note by Jonathan Rosenbaum
In 16 shorts made over a stretch of almost a quarter of a century (1929-1953), Duke Ellington and his Orchestra perform in a variety of settings, often with dancers and singers – including Billie Holiday in Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life. The latter cuts freely between Ellington alone in thoughtful composing mode, Ellington in a tux performing the same extended composition with his band at a concert, arty images of men engaged in heavy labour, a wordless church sermon, a nightclub floorshow, and even a short stretch of story showing Holiday being pushed to the ground by an ungrateful lover before singing there about her misery – a near replica of the musical setup accorded to Bessie Smith in her only film appearance six years earlier.
Indeed, although the pleasures to be found here are chiefly musical, the narrative pretexts for these performances offer a fascinating look at how both jazz and Black musicians were perceived and expected to behave during the first three decades of talkies. At least half of the films are Soundies made for sound-and-image jukeboxes in the 40s, but even these often trade on narrative details such as the adoring women digging the solos by Ray Nance, Rex Stewart, Ben Webster, and others at an “eatery” after hours in Jam Session (1942), or the spectacular dancing by athletic jitterbugging couples in Hot Chocolate (Cottontail) from the same year. Read more
This 1990 sequel to the beastie movie of 1984, directed like its predecessor by the irreplaceable Joe Dante, relocates the hero and heroine (Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates) in New York, where they’re both working for a vain tycoon named Daniel Clamp (John Glover)an obvious conflation of Donald Trump and Ted Turnerin a midtown skyscraper, where the gremlins manage to run loose and cause all sorts of mischief. Solid, agreeable entertainment that basically consists of plentiful gags and lighthearted satire spiked with Dante’s compulsive taste for movie references, humorously scripted by Charlie Haas but without the darker thematic undertones and the more tableaulike construction of the original. You may want to see this more than once in order to catch all the peripheral details, but there aren’t any depths to explore, just a lot of bright, free-floating comic invention. With Robert Prosky, Robert Picardo, Christopher Lee, Kathleen Freeman, and many cameos (including Daffy Duck and Leonard Maltin). 106 min. (JR) Read more
The boldest and arguably one of the best of Peter Greenaway’s fiction features, this extremely odd and perverse conceptual piece (1986) certainly isn’t for every taste, although Sacha Vierny’s cinematography makes it so luscious that you may be mesmerized in spite of yourself. The title refers to a European zoo; the curious plot involves two brothers who work as the zoo’s curators and who lose their wives in a freak auto accident. Only partially a narrative film, this elegant puzzle also involves amputees, painting, a menage a trois, and decomposing animalsalong with many other thingswhich are intricately interrelated thanks to Greenaway’s icy brilliance. Definitely a one-of-a-kind movie. With Andrea Ferreol, Brian and Eric Deacon, Frances Barber, and Joss Ackland. 115 min. (JR) Read more
(A 1987 review from the Chicago Reader.) Whoopi’s back, and the LAPD’s got her. One has to wait about 90 minutes before the cartoonish slam-bang action, bloodbath gore, and Whoopi Goldberg’s wisecracks about the size and threatened fate of diverse penises subside long enough for her to act: one nice little scene to show her character’s vulnerability and preach the evils of hard drugs before the movie reverts to the same nonsensical overkill of violence and tough talk. The characters are uniformly cardboard — including bits by Jennifer Warren and Brad Dourif, and a larger part with Sam Elliott as a crook’s bodyguard who turns into a pussycat in order to win the heart of Goldberg’s Dirty Harry cop. The notion of a black female detective who’s harder than anyone else in the Western Hemisphere seems to hark back to the fantasies of certain black exploitation films of the 70s, but the movie has too little imagination to do much with this conceit other than repeat it endlessly. Tom Holland directed from a script and story credited to three individuals, anyone could have knocked this one out during coffee break. The title, incidentally, refers not to Goldberg but to a brand of lethally cut cocaine, the ostensible pretext for all this mayhem. Read more
Trevor Vartanoff, one of the frequenters of this web site, has come up with an invaluable gift to me and to others — an alphabetical master index of all (or almost all) the postings here, complete with links. “I found it useful,” Trevor just wrote me, “maybe you or readers will too.” (2021 postscript: sorry for the links here that no longer work.) — J.R.
From the Chicago Reader (November 1, 1987). — J.R.
Reefer Madness comes to Beverly Hills in the affluent 80s. Perhaps not since Midnight Express had we gotten so much sanctimony and glitz simultaneously; while the earlier film worked up a righteous indignation about the conditions of Turkish prisons — not for Turks but for well-bred Americans — this 1987 movie reserves all its pity about the ravages of cocaine burnout for the children of multimillionaires. Adapted by Harley Peyton from Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, the story focuses on three high school graduates — an upright college kid (Andrew McCarthy), his former girlfriend (Jami Gertz) who now works as a model and dabbles in coke, and a would-be record producer and disco manager who’s fatally hooked on the stuff (Robert Downey Jr.) and follows their tribulations through the Christmas holidays. Marek Kanievska (Another Country) directs with relentlessly fancy visuals in a series of opulent southern California settings; Ed Lachman’s cinematography is letter perfect as always in its handling of light and color (assisted here by Barbara Ling’s flashy production design), but it’s a pity to see it wasted on such claptrap. (JR)
My contribution toThe Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929-1959, edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht, and published this month to accompanythe Locarno Film Festival’s retrospective curated by Ehsan.
It’s fitting that Andre de Toth’s spikey, achronological, and boisterously all-over-the-place autobiography of 1994 lacks an index and is entitled Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. Given his wanderlust, the somewhat splintered career it produced, and his resistance to being pinned down by the expectations of others, it’s hardly surprising that recognition of de Toth as an auteur arrived only belatedly, at least in the English-speaking world, decades after the publication of Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema. Among the recipients in Fragments’ two pages of “dedications” are his seven wives (one of whom was Veronica Lake) and nineteen children or stepchildren, adding to the burgeoning list of all the people, forces, and inclinations that subdivided him, leading to many paradoxes as well as some confusions.
De Toth’s boastful account of his Hungarian childhood largely consists of descriptions of both the schools he got expelled from and the pranks leading to each of his expulsions. From the outset, he establishes himself as someone who loves to tussle, with friends as well as adversaries. Read more
This was published in the September-October 1995 issue of Film Comment, as a sidebar to https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2024/06/ambiguous-evidence-cozarinskys-cinema-indirect-tk/– J.R.
Partisan
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
As a member of the FIPRESCI jury at Berlin that gave this year’s Forum prize to Edgardo Cozarinsky’s 68-minute Citizen Langlois, I’d like to quote our citation: “For a brilliant essay revealing a multifaceted grasp of a major pioneer for whom cinema was the ultimate nationality.”
Indeed, at a time when much of what passes for film history is being regulated nationalistically, by state bureaucrats — a process observable in such projects as the British Film Institute’s “A Century of Cinema” series (which stepped off in Berlin with Edgar Reitz’s Night of the Directors), and in the blatantly pro-industry PBS miniseries calling itself American Cinema -– Cozarinsky’s film carries a distinct polemical charge. For Henri Langlois, the unruly and passionate founder/gatekeeper of the Cinémathèque Française spent his life railing against state bureaucracies, and most of his legacy would be unthinkable without this sustained resistance. His eclectic partisanship is more than adequately matched in a personal essay that is as much about exile as Cozarisnky’s One Man’s War and Sunset Boulevards.
Viewers looking for a comprehensive dossier may be as disappointed as the Gaullist bureaucrats were when they demanded strict accounts and an orderly catalog from Langlois. Read more
Manny Farber, one of his earliest critical defenders, once described Michael Snow to me as “a prince”, and there’s no question that he was a proud bohemian who carried his own sense of royalty within the art world with grace and style. European fans such as Jacques Rivette who mistook him for an “American” (he was born and died in Toronto) may not have understood that the state funding that allowed Snow to flourish in Canada wouldn’t have been as feasible in the U.S. It’s even been speculated that if Snow hadn’t filmed his 1967 Wavelength in a Manhattan loft during his extended New York sojourn, many of us might never have heard of him. It was basically the enthusiasm of New York critics—Farber, Jonas Mekas, Annette Michelson, and, perhaps most of all, P. Adams Sitney and his term “structural film”—that placed Snow on the map, even while such reference sources as Ephraim Katz’s A Film Encyclopedia and David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema failed to acknowledge his existence.
Starting out as a self-taught jazz pianist who evolved from Dixieland to bebop (and later, to free jazz), Snow turned next to painting, sculpture, instillations, photography, film (starting in animation), video, holography, audio, and conceptually shaped books such as Cover to Cover (1975) and High School (1979).Read more
