Jonathan Rosenbaum

Claude Lanzmann’s 2001 documentary about an uprising of Jews at a Polish death camp. Yehuda Lerner, one of the prisoners who shut down the camp, was only 16 at the time, though he’d already managed to escape from eight Russian camps; Lanzmann interviewed him for his monumental Shoah (1985) but then decided this story deserved a film of its own. Clearly he values the uprising as a rejoinder to the usual charge that Jews offered little resistance to the Nazis (Hannah Arendt omits the incident from her Eichmann in Jerusalem), so it’s no surprise when Lerner’s testimony culminates in a prolonged recollection of triumphantly killing two German soldiers with an ax. The film’s methodology is practically identical to that of Shoah: Lerner’s account is translated on-screen from Hebrew into French, which is then subtitled in English (in fact, bits of the Hebrew original are edited out to save time), and sometimes Lanzmann illustrates it with contemporary shots of the places where the events unfolded. 97 min. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (September 3, 1999). — J.R.

A shocking and controversial masterpiece, Yasuzo Masumura’s no-bullshit antiwar film tells of an army nurse (Mizoguchi discovery and Masumura regular Ayako Wakao) in the Sino-Japanese war who sexually services an amputee and falls in love with a drug-addicted surgeon. Shot in black-and-white ‘Scope, this 1966 feature can’t be recommended to the squeamish or to viewers bound to the politically correct, but neither its nuanced eroticism nor its passionate, unpredictable moral focus can be easily shaken off. Roughly contemporary with M*A*S*H (as in Altman’s film, scenes of war-front surgery provide a corollary to Vietnam), it sometimes suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme — how to preserve one’s humanity amid impossible circumstances — but its ethics are considerably more developed. This single screening of a 35-millimeter print is an encore to Facets Multimedia Center’s revelatory Masumura retrospective last year, an opportunity equal to discovering Samuel Fuller, Nicholas Ray, or Douglas Sirk. In some respects Red Angel is the strongest Masumura film I’ve seen, and on September 25 Facets will screen his Hoodlum Soldier (1965), which I haven’t [yet] seen; both screenings are part of an ongoing series, “The Return of the Japanese Outlaw Masters.” Read more

I’m mainly reprinting this early review for the Chicago Reader, run in their July 22, 1988 issue, for theoretical reasons rather than because of any intrinsic or enduring interest in the movie involved —- which may well limit or even eliminate the piece’s interest for some readers. When I started reviewing for the Reader and discovered that I had to assign a rating, from one to four stars, to all the films I reviewed at any length, a longstanding Chicago custom, my impatience with this requirement, which struck me as both arbitrary and absurd, is part of what yielded the following. Another part is the sometimes necessary pretense of knowledge by reviewers about matters they know little about. –- J.R.

MIDNIGHT RUN

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Martin Brest

Written by George Gallo

With Robert De Niro, Charles Grodin, Yaphet Kotto, John Ashton, and Dennis Farina.

by Jonathan Rossenbaum

Review #1

There’s a certain unavoidable imposture in the way critics (and the Academy Awards) generally break commercial movies into constituent parts and distinct contributions. To do this is to assume, first of all, that a movie’s official credits are an accurate indication of who did what offscreen, which is often not the case. Read more

Except for Iguana, which is almost completely unknown, this wry 1974 feature is probably the most underrated work by Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop). Shot by Nestor Almendros on location in Georgia (partly in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown, which seems appropriate), it follows the absurdist progress of a man who trains fighting cocks (Warren Oates in one of his best performances) and who takes a vow of silence after his hubris nearly puts him out of the game, though he continues to narrate the story offscreen. Produced by Roger Corman as an exploitation item for the drive-ins, this performed so badly in that capacity that it was recut and retitled more than once (as Born to Kill, Wild Drifter, and Gamblin’ Man). But as a dark comedy and closet art movie, it delivers and lingers. With Richard B. Shull, Harry Dean Stanton, Millie Perkins, and Troy Donahue. 83 min. (JR)

From the January/February 2013 Film Comment. — J.R.

The Forgotten Space
Allan Sekula & Noël Burch, U.S.

A mind-bending essay film about sea cargo in the contemporary global economy, filmed mainly in four port cities (Bilbao, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and Rotterdam) and what the filmmakers call “the industrial hinterland in south China and the transport hinterland in the heart of Holland.” Too political for mainstream taste, obligatory for everyone else.—Jonathan Rosenbaum Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 15, 1988). Having seen the gorgeous new restoration of this film a little over three decades later, it looks even better now, although my demurrals remain the same. — J.R.

WINGS OF DESIRE

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Wim Wenders

Written by Wenders and Peter Handke

With Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Curt Bois, and Peter Falk.

They all have weary mouths,

bright souls without a seam,

And a yearning (as for sin)

often haunts their dream.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Angels”

Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are angels who hover over, swoop across, and cruise through contemporary Berlin in Wim Wenders’s new feature, eavesdropping on the thoughts of the city’s inhabitants like readers browsing through the books in a library. They are not angels in the conventional sense of blessed or fallen souls; rather they are more or less the angels of Rilke’s poetry — the imaginary beings that dominate his first two Duino Elegies and that, according to Rilke, have more to do with “the angelic figures of Islam” than they do with Christianity.

All of which may make Wings of Desire seem esoteric and forbidding to moviegoers who, like me, have only a glancing acquaintance with Rilke, speak no German, and have never before heard of “the angelic figures of Islam.” Read more

From the June 6, 1997 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Le samourai Rating *** A must see

Directed and written by Jean-Pierre Melville

With Alain Delon, Francois Perier, Nathalie Delon, Caty Rosier, Jacques Leroy, Jean-Pierre Posier, and Catherine Jourdan.

The Birth of Love Rating *** A must see

Directed by Philippe Garrel

Written by Garrel, Marc Cholodenko, and Muriel Cerf

With Lou Castel, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Johanna Ter Steege, Dominique Reymond, and Marie-Paule Laval.

If much of French cinema can be said to derive from the famous Cartesian phrase “I think, therefore I am,” why does it yield so many realistic movies? Certainly fantasy remains central to a good deal of French art, past and present, but if you compare the films of early pioneers like the Lumiere brothers to those of Thomas Edison, you might conclude that the French have a certain edge in seeing clearly what’s right in front of them. I found that of the dozen French movies I recently saw in Cannes and Paris, six were strictly realist in a way that few American features are: a cheerful Pagnolian hand-me-down (Marius and Jeannette), a Blier road movie for grown-ups (Manuel Poirier’s Western), Manoel de Oliveira’s moving French-Portuguese self-portrait, which features Marcello Mastroianni’s last performance (Voyage to the Beginning of the World), an experiment in first-person camera involving adultery (La femme defendue), a mysterious meditation on rural French punks (deceptively titled The Life of Jesus), and a spirited comedy by and with Brigitte Rouan (Post-coitum, animal triste). Read more

Commissioned by Arrow Video for their box set The Rainer Werner Fassbinder Collection, vol. III, released in summer 2022. -- J.R.                                                                                

“Capitalism is the plague. Criminals are its gods.”                                                                                                                         --Fassbinder during the German trailer of Gods of the Plague                                                                                    

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was only twenty-four when he made his first four features in 1969, the third of which was Gods of the Plague. Years later, when he compiled a list of what he believed were his ten best features, Gods of the Plague made it into fifth place. The only other very early film on this list was his seventh feature, Beware of the Holy Whore — one of the six feature-length works he made in 1970 -– which figured in first place.

An inveterate list maker who plainly enjoyed that somewhat adolescent pastime, Fassbinder also ranked his ten favourite films made by others (topped by Luchino Visconti’s The Damned) and his ten favourite actresses and actors, both in the films of others and in his own films: Marilyn Monroe, Hanna Schygulla, Clark Gable, and Armin Mueller-Stahl. He also plausibly put himself at the top of his list of the ten most influential German New Wave directors.

One can argue that early Fassbinder is very much a matter of certain raw and irreducible basics – including the contradictions that would haunt the remainder of his prolific oeuvre, which ended, sadly yet predictably, with his drug-fueled death in 1982. Read more