Jonathan Rosenbaum

My column for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine, adapted from a longer piece written for The Chiseler and submitted in August 2020. — J.R.

En movimiento: Herzog’s Tweet Factor

Jonathan Rosenbaum

When I first saw Aguirre, the Wrath of God, set in 16th century Peru, what impressed me the most was what Werner Herzog cheerfully but cynically revealed about his opening intertitle:  “A large expedition of Spanish adventurers led by Pizarro sets off from the Peruvian sierras in late 1560. The only document to survive from this lost expedition is the diary of the monk Gaspar de Carvajal.” At his Cannes premiere in 1973, Herzog admitted that this was a total lie, invented because he reasoned that people wouldn’t accept the film’s premises otherwise. 

His Family Romance, LLC (2019) employs the same ruse.  The real Tokyo company that this film is about rents out actors to play the roles of family members, friends, or functionaries for lonely individuals — e.g., a divorced father whom a 12-year-old girl hasn’t seen since her infancy, or a bullet-train worker who needs to be shamed by his boss for bungling a precise train schedule. The resulting feature has been described as a mixture of documentary and fiction, but apart from the company’s founder, playing himself, the entire film is fictional—scripted by Herzog and shot by him with a tiny camera, with actors playing all the characters. Read more

Six years have passed since I wrote six essays on each of Jacques Tati’s features for Taschen’s recently released and massive five-volume book package The Definitive Jacques Tati, which actually includes eight contributions by me by reprinting my 1972 interview with Tati for Film Comment without its introduction and my 1983 essay “The Death of Hulot” for Sight and Sound. But I’m credited for nine items, because volume #2, Tati Writes, containing eight screenplays or treatments, includes the never-made Confusion, which erroneously lists me as one of Tati’s three coauthors, along with Jacques Lagrange and Dominique Bidaubayle. (Afterthought, July 2022: Having recently returned from a superb edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, where one of the highlights was Jean-Baptiste Péretié’s Jacques Tati, Tombé de la Lune — by far the best and most thoughtful documentary about Tati that I’ve seen — I was delighted by Péretié’s basic understanding that Tati essentially “wrote” and “thought” his scripts with and through his body. Whatever words that got scribbled down, by Tati or by others [not including me], were strictly for the convenience of others.)

Truthfully, I read this treatment of Confusion, or some version of it, in French after a few sessions of working with Tati, when I was lent a copy to read overnight, but there’s absolutely nothing in it that can be attributed to me. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 27, 2007). — J.R.

For my money, this 1935 feature is the most interesting and audacious movie George Cukor ever made. Katharine Hepburn disguises herself as a boy to escape from France to England with her crooked father (Edmund Gwenn); they fall in with a group of traveling players, including Cary Grant (at his most cockney); the ambiguous sexual feelings that Hepburn as a boy stirs in both Grant and Brian Aherne (an aristocratic artist) are part of what makes this film so subversive. Genre shifts match gender shifts as the film disconcertingly changes tone every few minutes, from farce to tragedy to romance to crime thriller — rather like the French New Wave films that were to come a quarter century later — as Cukor’s fascination with theater and the talents of his cast somehow hold it all together. The film flopped miserably when it came out, but it survives as one of the most poetic, magical, and inventive Hollywood films of its era. John Collier collaborated on the script, and Joseph August did the evocative cinematography. Screening in 16-millimeter; 95 min. Admission is free. a Sat 7/28, 7 and 9 PM, Univ. Read more

My column for the December 2019  Caimán Cuadernos de Cine. — J.R.

En movimiento: Denial Incorporated and Cinematic Substitutes

Given how much we watch [TV] and what watching means, it’s inevitable, for those of us…who fancy ourselves voyeurs, to get the idea that these persons behind the glass — persons who are often the most colorful, attractive, animated, alive people in our daily experience — are also people who are oblivious to the fact that they are being watched. This illusion is toxic.

—David Foster Wallace

Insofar as “political correctness” often functions as a sad form of compensation for political powerlessness — so that one winds up eagerly penalizing a Roman Polanski or a Woody Allen for a real or imagined crime committed decades ago largely because one can’t find a way of getting rid of a Donald Trump in the present — the degree to which simple denial plays a role in governing one’s consumer choices needs to be recognized. What may be most significant about the flood of negative reviews in the U.S. given to Joker after both a slew of domestic mass shootings and the film winning a Golden Lion from Lucrecia Martel’s jury in Venice is how similar these reviews were to one another in both their phraseology and their arguments, comprising a herdlike form of collective expression that has to blame a movie for its frustration because it can’t (or at least won’t) blame the American gun lobby. For Read more

From the Chicago Reader, probably in its October 1, 1992 issue. (The Reader‘s web site claims absurdly that this capsule was published in 1985, two years before I moved to Chicago and seven years before this film was made.) The second illustration below is from the recent Criterion box set devoted to the so-called Koker trilogy, in which Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and I provide the audiocommentary to this film. — J.R.

Known less accurately as And Life Goes On . . . (to distinguish it from Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But), this 1992 masterpiece by Abbas Kiarostami uses nonprofessional actors to restage real events. Accompanied by his little boy, a film director from Tehran drives into the mountainous region of northern Iran, recently devastated by an earthquake that’s killed more than 50,000 people. He searches through various villages for two child actors who appeared in Where Is the Friend’s House? (a 1987 Kiarostami feature), but what we find is more open-ended and mysterious: the resilience and in some cases the surprising optimism of people putting their lives back together, the beautiful landscapes, the alternating and overlapping viewpoints of the director and his son. A picaresque narrative with a profound sense of place and a philosophically weighted use of the long shot that occasionally calls to mind Tati, this haunting look at what does and doesn’t happen to people confronted by natural disaster won the Rossellini prize at the 1992 Cannes film festival, and it’s still one of the very best Iranian features I’ve seen. Read more

From the June 9, 1989 Chicago Reader. –J.R.

PIERROT LE FOU

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard

With Jean-Paul Belmondo, Anna Karina, Dirk Sanders, Raymond Devos, Graziella Galvani, Roger Dutoit, Hans Meyer, Jimmy Karoubi, and Samuel Fuller.

All the good movies have been made. — Peter Bogdanovich to Boris Karloff in Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968)

Two or three years ago I felt that everything had been done, that there was nothing left to do today. . . . Ivan the Terrible had been made, and Our Daily Bread. Make films about the people, they said; but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it? I was, in a word, pessimistic. After Pierrot, I no longer feel this. Yes. One must film everything — talk about everything. Everything remains to be done. — Jean-Luc Godard in an interview about Pierrot le fou (1965)

After many years out of circulation, Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature is finally back, in a sparkling new 35-millimeter ‘Scope print, and the Film Center is celebrating with a week-long run. Looking at it again almost a quarter of a century after it was made, 20 years after its initial U.S. release, is a bit like visiting another planet; it’s an explosion of color, sound, music, passion, violence, and wit that illustrates what used to be regarded as cinema. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 1, 1992). — J.R.

It’s a critical commonplace that the only good film of William Faulkner’s work is The Tarnished Angels (from Pylon) though some critics give an additional nod to Tomorrow for Robert Duvall’s performance. I would add this 1949 adaptation of Faulkner’s early response to southern racism, improbably made at MGM, though shot mainly on location in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Perhaps because he was a southerner himself, Clarence Brown, best known as Greta Garbo’s favorite director, brought an unusual amount of feeling and taste to the material. An uppity black man (Juano Hernandez) is accused of murder, a potential lynch mob forms as he refuses to defend himself, and a white boy he’s befriended tries to get to the bottom of what actually happened. The story is treated with an unsensationalized and unsentimentalized clarity that seems unusually sophisticated for the period, and the other cast members — David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Porter Hall, and Elizabeth Patterson — are almost as good as Hernandez. 87 min. (JR)

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In retrospect, it’s amazing to me how many good films I saw in 1998 — as evidenced by my ten-best piece for the Chicago Reader, published January 8, 1999. (P.S. The still at the very end of this article is from Masumura’s Red Angel, which I’m happy to say is now available on DVD, along with most of the films on this ten-best list.) 

On September 24, 2010, “The Stunner” [sic] sent me the following message on MUBI: “I found this entry on your blog, about Manoel de Oliveira’s ‘Inquietude’ on your top 10 movies of 1998:’I prefer the French and Portuguese title of this three-part feature — which my dictionary defines as ‘disturbed state’— to its English title, Anxiety.’ A better translation for ‘inquietude’, in my opinion, would be something like ‘intranquility,’ ‘agitation’, or “inquietness’ — these are all good and quite literal translations and I, being Portuguese, think they are accurate synonyms.” — J.R.

What do we mean when we declare something or someone “the best”? Last month, during my first visit to Tokyo, I served on a panel about the late Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu along with director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hou’s principal screenwriter, the president of Tokyo University, and two French critics associated with Cahiers du Cinema. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 1, 1993). — J.R.

By common consent, one of Alfred Hitchcock’s poorest and least personal works (1939), though it has some compensations. The last film he made in Britain before moving to the U.S., it’s adapted — like Rebecca, his first American picture — from a Daphne du Maurier novel, about an 18th-century nobleman in Cornwall who doubles as the head of a band of smugglers. If this quirky pasteboard effort belongs to anyone, it’s Charles Laughton, who plays the lead with some wit and energy and also served as coproducer. Sidney Gilliat, Joan Harrison, and J.B. Priestley all worked on the script, and Maureen O’Hara, Leslie Banks, and Robert Newton costar. 98 min. (JR)

From the Chicago Reader (August 30, 1991). — J.R.

DEAD AGAIN ** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Kenneth Branagh

Written by Scott Frank

With Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, Derek Jacobi, Andy Garcia, Hanna Schygulla, Robin Williams, Campbell Scott, and Wayne Knight.

The most instructive evening I’ve spent in the English theater was the first time I went, in the mid-60s, to a series of three one-act plays written by and starring Noel Coward called Suite in Three Keys, which may well have been Coward’s last stage appearance. In retrospect, what seemed so peculiarly English about the whole experience was the communion that existed between Coward and his audience. The plots of all three plays were negligible and the repartee more standard-issue than brilliant. All that really mattered, it seemed, was the mysterious intimacy, the almost conspiratorial rapport between Coward and his public, which had more to do with personality than with narrative, character, or even performance in the usual sense. The overall effect seemed to have a lot more to do with entertainment than with art; the feeling was much closer to that of patrons crowded around a piano in a pub than to theatergoers pondering lofty questions like the meaning of life. Read more

From the April 1, 1988 Chicago Reader. — J.R.

Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 1985 feature, set in the remote wilds of Tibet with a cast of local nonprofessionals, is a breathtaking spectacle in ‘Scope and color, perhaps the most personal of all the Fifth Generation Beijing films to have emerged from the People’s Republic of China (at least until Tian’s subsequent The Blue Kite). Tian’s originality and mastery of sound and image communicate directly, beyond the immediate trappings of the film’s slender plot (a horse thief expelled from his clan) and regional culture (Buddhist death rituals), expressing an environmental and ecological mysticism that suggests a new relationship between man and nature. Tian had said that he made this for the 21st century, yet even today it’s a film of the future. In Mandarin with subtitles. 88 min. (JR)

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Australian critic Adrian Martin has called this no-budget wide-screen video from South Korea a small trash-art masterpiece, arguing that some effects are as dexterously staged as in a Sam Raimi movie but conceding that others fall flat as a pancake. Since fall 2001 it’s been making the rounds of international film festivals, picking up various fans and dissenters en route, and though I’m closer to the former, you should know what to expect: Working the backstreets of Seoul, a Lolita-age hooker in school uniform gets killed by an evil teacher and sliced and diced by a gang, but she returns to wreak vengeance after being stitched back together by a mad scientist — all in an hour. If you can accept such a premise, you’re bound to admire director Nam Gee-wong’s energy and resourcefulness with a threadbare budget. In contrast the accompanying three-minute experimental video Ya Private Sky seems like random aggression, though director Stom Sogo reports that he whittled it down from five hours of Super-8 footage. (JR) Read more

From the Chicago Reader (December 20, 1991). — J.R.

HOOK

** (Worth seeing)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Jim V. Hart, Malia Scotch Marmo, and Nick Castle

With Dustin Hoffman, Robin Williams, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins, Maggie Smith, Caroline Goodall, and Charlie Korsmo.

BUGSY

*** (A must-see)

Directed by Barry Levinson

Written by James Toback

With Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Elliott Gould, Joe Mantegna, and Bebe Neuwirth.

Wistful self-portraits of their respective stars — Steven Spielberg and Warren Beatty, two aging boy wonders lusting after the old magic — Hook and Bugsy are also lengthy meditations on investments, financial as well as spiritual. Coincidentally both projects were conceived seven years ago and have been gestating ever since: Spielberg started planning a straight version of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in 1984, then decided to concoct an updated sequel set in the present, and the same year Beatty commissioned James Toback to write an original screenplay about Bugsy Siegel, which started out as an epic about his entire life and was gradually whittled down to cover only the end of his life in the 1940s. Hook is contrived to move from gloom to joy, while Bugsy charts a slow downward spiral into melancholy; but both movies leave one with a sense of failed purposes — and of an obstinate will to believe that exceeds the meaning or logic of any actual belief. Read more