Four years ago, in Sarajevo, I assigned my filmmaking students at Film.Factory to make five-minute “remakes” of Seijun Suzuki’s Pistol Opera. One of those students, Ghazi Alqudcy, asked me to costar in his own film, A Celebration, along with Gonzalo Escobar Mora — who subsequently moved to Chicago for a spell, along with another of my Film.Factory students, Emma Rozanski.
Here is Ghazi’s film:
password: filmfactory
[5/28/18] Read more
This was written for a brochure to accompany a retrospective held by Northwestern University’s Block Cinema in January 2008. — J.R.
ZHANGKE JIA, POETIC PROPHET
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
What is it about Zhangke Jia that makes him the most exciting
mainland Chinese filmmaker currently working? It might be
oversimplifying matters to describe this writer-director, born in
1970, as a country boy. But the fact that he hails from the small town
of Fenyang in northern China’s Shanxi province clearly plays an
important role in all his features to date. (I’m less certain about what
role it plays in his two recent documentaries, Dong [2006] and
Useless [2007].) Like William Faulkner and Alexander Dovzhenko,
Jia is a hick avant-gardist in the very best sense — someone whose
outsider/minority status enhances both his humanity and his art.
Working in long, choreographed takes, and mixing realistic accounts
of working-class life with diverse forms of cultural shock and fantasy
ranging from animation to SF to rock, he already qualifies as a poetic
prophet of the 21st century, and not only for China.
He attended the Beijing Film Academy, where he
completed his first film, the one-hour Xiao Shan
(Going Home, 1995). I haven’t seen it, but according
to critic Kevin Lee, it’s about a country boy and
unemployed cook in Beijing who wants to go home for
the Chinese New Year and runs into numerous obstacles,
and it utilizes literary intertitles (which also crop up in
his last two features). Read more
From the April 9, 1993 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
A masterpiece by Stanley Kwan, the greatest Hong Kong film I’ve seen (also known as Ruan Ling Yu and Center Stage). The story of silent film actress Ruan Ling Yu (1910-1935), known as the Garbo of Chinese cinema, it combines documentary with period re-creation, biopic glamour with profound curiosity, and ravishing historical clips with color simulations of the same sequences being shot — all to explore a past that seems more complex, mysterious, and sexy than the present. Maggie Cheung won a well-deserved best actress prize at Berlin for her classy performance in the title role, and a large part of what Kwan does as a director is to create a kind of nimbus around her poise and grace. (If I had to pick Kwan’s Hollywood equivalent, I’d opt for George Cukor.) Kwan also creates a labyrinth of questions around who Ruan was and why she committed suicide — a labyrinth both physical (with beautifully ambiguous uses of black-and-white movie sets) and metaphysical — and keeps these questions perpetually open. You should be prepared for a picture that lasts 146 minutes and invites you to relish every one of them — not only the stylish beauty of an imagined Shanghai film world of the 30s, but also the flat abrasiveness of Kwan chatting with Cheung on video about what all this means and coming up with damn little. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (October 4, 2002). — J.R.
The fourth feature of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (after Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia) is a stridently wacky romantic comedy that stands or falls on whether you find Adam Sandler funny as a small businessman working out of a warehouse in greater Los Angeles. He didn’t make me laugh once, and neither did his costar Emily Watson, though Philip Seymour Hoffman, in what amounts to a cameo, made me laugh once or twice. I tend to like quirkiness, but this arch effort is so eager to be quirky nearly everything winds up willfully mannered, from Jon Brion’s flashy percussive score to the hyperbolically absurdist plot. Still, I wouldn’t have minded the Hollywood schlock lurking behind the studied weirdness if I’d believed in any of the characters on any level. With Luiz Guzman. 91 min.[2020 postscript: This movie lingers in my memory more pleasantly than this capsule review suggests, which must mean something positive] (JR)
Written for the Viennale in August 2020 for a late October publication called Textur #2 and devoted to Kelly Reichardt. — J.R.
“More nameless things around here than you can shake an eel at.”
— King-Lu in First Cow
I suspect that the first important step in learning how to process Kelly Reichardt’s films is discovering how not to watch them. A few unfortunate viewing habits have already clustered around her seven features to date, fed by buzz-words ranging from “neorealism” (applied ahistorically) to “slow cinema” (an ahistorical term to begin with) — especially inappropriate with a filmmaker so acutely attuned to history, including a capacity to view the present historically — and, in keeping with much auteurist criticism, confusing the personal with the autobiographical.
Interviewed by Katherine Fusco and Nicole Seymour, the coauthors of a monograph about her, Reichardt rightly resists fully accepting any of these categories,[1] however useful they might appear as journalistic shortcuts. (E.g., J. Hoberman on Wendy and Lucy in the Village Voice: “Reichardt has choreographed one of the most stripped-down existential quests since Vittorio De Sica sent his unemployed worker wandering through the streets of Rome searching for his purloined bicycle, and as heartbreaking a dog story as De Sica’s Umberto D.”) Read more
The following exchange appeared in Cinema Scope no. 8, September 2001. — J.R.
In the past, when I’ve interviewed filmmakers it’s been at my own initiative — or at least at the initiative of an editor making an assignment. This time, at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film in April 2001, where I was serving on the jury and introducing Béla Tarr at some of his screenings, someone handed me a tape recorder, and Mark Peranson agreed to transcribe the interview afterwards if I would speak to Béla, who’s been a friend ever since Sátántangó. I hope that the casual grammar on both sides of this conversation doesn’t obscure too much of the meaning. (J.R.)
BELA TARR: […] In Sátántangó, we had a set. The doctor’s flat, it was built.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM: You know, that’s my favorite scene in the film.
TARR: Yes, but it was built! It is artificial, but you don’t feel it in the movie…
ROSENBAUM: Maybe that’s why I like it so much, because it’s in such a small space.
TARR: No, it wasn’t small.
ROSENBAUM: But it feels small in the film.
TARR: Yeah, sure.
ROSENBAUM: Was the actor playing the doctor a professional actor or a nonprofessional? Read more
The following is a one-page story submitted to Anthony Boucher, the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in April 1956, when I was 13, and accepted by him the following month, after a couple of rewrites guided by his suggestions. (The use of the drug “euphorin” was his own idea and invention.) Later that summer, on a family trip to the west coast, we (my parents and one or two of my brothers and I) actually managed to track down Boucher in his Berkeley home (we’d naïvely assumed that the address on his stationary was the magazine’s editorial office) and spent a very pleasant hour or so with him. The story was eventually published in the November 1957 issue (on the last page) and I received a check for $25 for my work. Later the story appeared in Spanish and Japanese translations in foreign editions of the magazine; I still have a copy of each. — J.R.
Now and Then
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
When the time machine started, I realized that I had forgotten to ask the professor its destination. But under the influence of a heavy dose of euphorin, it hardly mattered to me. To escape the tensions of the present, almost everybody I knew was taking the same or similar tranquilizers. Read more
I’ve been asked more than once to comment on Sylvain Chomet’s recent animated feature based on a Jacques Tati screenplay — something I’ve frankly been avoiding, for reasons that I’ll try to explain.
Last February 16, I received a very lengthy email from Richard Tatischeff Schiel McDonald, identifying himself as the middle grandson of Tati, and expressing his upset and anger about this film, which I was hearing about for the first time from him, and requesting that I make some of the information he was conveying to me better known if I planned to write about the film. I wrote him back the next day, and a week later he wrote me again: “I must admit to finding myself in a slightly uncomfortable position in making public the origins of my grandfather’s original l’Illusionniste script which until recently had been a very private family matter. My intentions are not to discredit my grandfather but hopefully by telling what is a very sad story I can shine a light onto a neglected chapter of his life that in part led to the creation of his professional body of work. My grandmother and all his stage acquaintances during the 1930’s/40’s always maintained that he was a great colleague as a friend and artist; he unfortunately just made a massive mistake that because of the time and circumstances he was never able to correctly address. Read more
Chen Kaige clearly intended this Chinese fantasy-action spectacle to top Zhang Yimou’s Hero, and I must admit that I prefer it to the earlier movie: the digital effects are sometimes excessive, yet Chen’s story of a loyal slave, his master, and a wealthy, seemingly doomed princess is more affecting, especially in the closing stretch. Chen’s original U.S. distributor, the Weinstein Company, ordered him to shorten the movie from its original running time of 128 minutes and then dropped it. (It’s worth recalling that his 1996 feature Temptress Moon was severely damaged by Miramax’s recutting.) Now Warner Independent Features is releasing the abbreviated, 102-minute version, and it’s well worth checking out. PG-13. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Esquire, Landmark’s Century Centre.
From Film Comment (November-December 2010). — J.R.
Another Fine Mess: A History of American Film Comedy
By Saul Austerlitz Chicago Review Press, $24.95
As an audacious and ambitious canonizing gesture, this highly readable critical volume comes closer to Sarris’s The American Cinema than it does to Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, if only because the author can always be counted on to have seen the work he writes about. Omissions are of course inevitable, and even though I don’t know Austerlitz’s age, I suspect that most of the lacunae I notice in the creative figures he selects for his 30 chapters and 105 shorter entries — such as Fred Allen, Danny Kaye, Martha Raye, and Red Skelton — are generationally determined for both of us; older and younger readers will come up with other missing names. But the amount that he actually covers is impressive.
Sometimes the organizational strategies get weird: the chapter on Dustin Hoffman, delving perceptively into the Jewish aspects of his persona, also manages to be a chapter about Warren Beatty. Some of the research is sloppy: Orson Welles couldn’t have “credited” The Power and the Glory as an “inspiration” if he maintained that he’d never seen it. Read more
Name: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Job title: film critic, teacher
Country: USA
Your votes
Comment: Like Welles’ equally worthy Touch of Evil, a monument to hyperbolic excess.
Comment: Like Resnais’ Providence and Françoise Romand’s Mix-up, a masterpiece of magisterial juxtapositions.
Comment: Not only Spielberg’s best picture but also Kubrick’s; a collaboration between a dead director and a friend who survived him seems appropriate for a meditation on the differences between human and nonhuman, living and dead that comprises a searing allegory about cinema itself.
Further remarks: I’ve omitted Chaplin (City Lights, Monsieur Verdoux) Hitchcock (Rear Window, North by Northwest), and Welles (Touch of Evil, Chimes at Midnight) as “goes without saying”. Read more
From Sight and Sound, Winter 1975/1976; also reprinted in my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. — J.R.
Edinburgh Encounters:
A Consumers/Producers Guide-in-Progress to Four Recent Avant-Garde Films
The role of a work of art is to plunge people into horror. If the artist has a role, it is to confront people — and himself first of all — with this horror, this feeling that one has when one learns about the death of someone one has loved.
— Jacques Rivette interview, circa 1967
For interpersonal communication, [the modernist text] substitutes the idea of collective production; writer and reader are indifferently critics of the text and it is through their collaboration that meanings are collectively produced . . .
The text then becomes the location of thought, rather than the mind. The mind is the factory where thought is at work, rather than the transport system which conveys the finished product. Hence the danger of the myths of clarity and transparency and of the receptive mind; they present thought as prepackaged, available, given, from the point of view of the consumer . . .Within a modernist text, however, all work is work in progress, the circle is never closed. Read more
From Cinematograph, vol. 4, 1991; reprinted in both Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism and Discovering Orson Welles. — J.R.
I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theatre meaning: when it becomes a social act.
— Orson Welles, quoted in Collier’s, 29 January 1938
Two propositions:
1. One of the most progressive forms of cinema is the film in which fiction and nonfiction merge, trade places, become interchangeable.
2. One of the most reactionary forms of cinema is the film in which fiction and nonfiction merge, trade places, become interchangeable.
How can both of these statements be true — as, in fact, I believe they are? In the final analysis, the issue is an ethical one. In support of 2, there are docudramas that use spurious means to grant bogus authenticity to fiction (MISSISSIPPI BURNING is a good example), and documentaries that employ fictional devices in order to lie more effectively (e.g., Read more
From The Soho News (February 11, 1981), slightly revised. This is the first of my ten Soho News columns with that title, and the only one without a subtitle. — J.R.
Jan. 23; Arriving at the Collective [for Living Cinema] too late to absorb either of Gail Camhi’s 1980 quickies, I’m plunged almost at once into her lovely 22-minute Bellevue Film (1977-78), also silent, which is just what its title and program note say it is: “A look at physical therapy, having profited from it.”
What’s lovely about that?, one might ask, although no one at this crowded screeni9ng seems to be asking it. Russian Formalism associates art with defamiliarization, “making strange”. Gail Camhi seems to be doing just the reverse – showing how ordinary, say, amputees and their stumps and artificial limbs are, making them familiar and banal presences rather than fearfully charged objects. Yet by removing (to some extent) myth and other forms of fantasy from a hospital ward, she may actually be inviting the aesthetic imagination to relocate itself elsewhere in the film – not merely banishing this imagination to purgatory, as some arguments would have it. Read more
From the Chicago Reader (September 27, 1991). This film is now available on a Criterion Blu-Ray. Although I still have some issues with the film, after reseeing it on this edition, Terry Gilliam’s audio commentary is terrific, and his own enthusiasm for the film is often compelling. — J.R.
THE FISHER KING
Directed by Terry Gilliam
Written by Richard LaGravenese
With Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Mercedes Ruehl, Amanda Plummer, Michael Jeter, and Tom Waits.
Terry Gilliam’s elephantine yet breezy The Fisher King is a gripping new-age extravaganza, visually splendid and adroitly paced. But some gross conceptual cheating — presumably the fallout of commercial ambitions — makes the film a little hard to swallow. Gilliam’s fifth feature (he also directed Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) revels in duality — everything comes in twos — so it’s little wonder it indulges in both duplicity and outright doublethink; the film is also littered with internal “rhymes,” both significant and gratuitous. This duality may come partly from the fact that for the first time Gilliam has not written the script himself — it’s by talented newcomer Richard LaGravenese. At any rate the duality echoes Gilliam’s well-advertised desire to make this both an artistic and commercial success — to prove he can turn out a money-maker (after the box-office flop of Baron Munchausen) and yet retain his reputation as an overachiever in the grand style, a director known for his quirky humor and ravishing visual conceits. Read more
