Jonathan Rosenbaum

The main introduction to my first collection, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (University of California Press, 1995). My apologies for not updating the links. — J.R.

This book is intended as a companion and sequel to an autobiographical experiment I carried out in the late 1970s, published in 1980 by Harper & Row as Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. The present volume doesn’t require a reading of that earlier book — long out of print, though recently reprinted by the University of California Press so as to reappear alongside this collection; however, since many of this volume’s premises are predicated on either extensions or inversions of the premises of its predecessor, a few words about that book and the material it covers are in order.

Most of Moving Places is concerned with my childhood in northwestern Alabama, specifically in relation to my family and what was known as the family business from around 1914 to 1960. This business began when my grandfather, Louis Rosenbaum, started operating his first movie theater in Douglas, Wyoming, and it existed until Rosenbaum Theaters, owned by my grandfather and managed by my father, was sold to a larger chain. I was born in 1943, and the family business afforded me a steady diet of free movies through the age of sixteen, when I went away to school in Vermont. Read more

Here is a chronological list of many of the book reviews and longer pieces on literary and related subjects found on this web site, with links added in a few cases; capsule reviews of films are omitted, and this list is otherwise far from complete, especially regarding many more recent posts:

Review of A MOVEABLE FEAST (Bard Observer, September 1964)

Review of THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (Bard Observer, May 1966)

“I Missed It at the Movies: Objections to ‘Raising KANE’” (Film Comment, Spring 1972)

Review of JEAN RENOIR: THE WORLD OF HIS FILMS (Film Comment, January-February 1973)

Review of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (Village Voice, March 1973)

“Raymond Durgnat” (Film Comment, May-June 1973)

Review of Dwight Macdonald’s DISCRIMINATIONS (Village Voice, Oct. 1974)

Review of Gore Vidal’s MYRON (Village Voice, Nov. 1974)

Review of Noel Burch’s THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE (Sight and Sound, Winter 1974/75)

On Jean Renoir [book review] (Film Comment, May-June 1976)

“Film Writing Degree Zero: The Marketplace and the University” (Sight and Sound, Autumn 1977)

Review of Noel Burch’s TO THE DISTANT OBSERVER (American Film, July-August 1979)

Review of Graham Greene’s DR. Read more

From Movies of the Fifties, edited by Ann Lloyd (London: Orbis Publishing, 1982). Prior to this, it was published in one of the “chapters” of The Movie in 1981 or 1982, but I’m no longer clear about which one. — J.R.

For two centuries, Japan chose to isolate itself from the rest of the world. Then, in 1894, the American Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and ‘rediscovered’ the Japanese islands. Yet nothing was known about Japanese cinema in the West for almost another century. The difference was that whereas Perry had come upon a country that appeared technologically backward, the west encountered a cinema that was, on the evidence of the films that began to be shown in the Fifties, every bit as advanced as its own.

By and large western recognition and appreciation of Japanese films can be said to have dated from the appearance of key movies at the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals.Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 and the same honor was bestowed upon four films by Kenji Mizoguchi in the succeeding years. The films were: Saikaku Ichidai Onna (1952, The Life of Oharu),Ugetsu Monogatari (1953, Tales of the Pale and Silvery Moon After the Rain), Sansho Dayu (1954, Sansho the Bailiff ) and Yokihi (1955, The Empress Yang Kwei-Fei). Read more

My book Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press), intended by its editor-publisher to launch an annual series, regrettably lasted for only one other volume, by David Ehrenstein, after two other commissioned authors failed to submit completed manuscripts. Miraculously, however, this book remained in print for roughly 35 years, and now that it’s finally reached the end of that run (although some copies can still be found online), I’ve decided to reproduce more of its contents on this site, along with links and (when available) illustrations. I’m beginning with the book’s end, an Appendix subtitled “22 More Filmmakers,” which I’m posting here in three installments, along with links and (when available) illustrations. — J.R.

MAURIZIO NICHETTI is a name I happen to know strictly by chance. My last trip to Europe (and only trip to Italy) consisted of three days at the Venice Film Festival in 1979, where I was invited to participate in a conference devoted to Cinema in the Eighties. And as I noted in an account of that conference in the December 1979 American Film, one film that I happened to see during those three days, Maurizio Nichetti’s Ratataplan — a first feature with an onomatopoeic title based on the sound of a drum cadence — may have actually suggested more about the subject of the conference than any of the lectures I heard. Read more

My book Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press), intended by its editor-publisher to launch an annual series, regrettably lasted for only one other volume, by David Ehrenstein, after two other commissioned authors failed to submit completed manuscripts. Miraculously, however, this book remained in print for roughly 35 years, and now that it’s finally reached the end of that run (although some copies can still be found online), I’ve decided to reproduce more of its contents on this site, along with links and (when available) illustrations. I’m beginning with the book’s end, an Appendix subtitled “22 More Filmmakers,” which I’m posting here in three installments, along with links and (when available) illustrations. — J.R.

PAULA GLADSTONE. In Gladstone’s mainly black-and-white, hour-long, Super-8 The Dancing Soul of the Walking People (1978), possession and. dispossession both happily become very much beside the point. Shot over a two-year period, 1974-1976, each time the filmmaker went home to Coney Island (“I’d take my camera out and walk from one end of the land to the other,” she reports in Camera Obscura [No. 6]; “I’d talk to people on the streets and film them”), The Dancing Soul of the Walking People is basically concerned with the space underneath a boardwalk, a little bit like the luminous insides of a translucent zebra on a sunny day — an interesting kind of space, at once public and private, that is traversed by receding strips of light, camera pans, and people, in fairly continuous processions and/or rhythmic patterns. Read more

My book Film: The Front Line 1983 (Denver: Arden Press), intended by its editor-publisher to launch an annual series, regrettably lasted for only one other volume, by David Ehrenstein, after two other commissioned authors failed to submit completed manuscripts. Miraculously, however, this book remained in print for roughly 35 years, and now that it’s finally reached the end of that run (although some copies can still be found online), I’ve decided to reproduce more of its contents on this site, along with links and (when available) illustrations. I’ll begin with the book’s end, an Appendix subtitled “22 More Filmmakers,” which I’ll post here in three installments, along with links and (when available) illustrations. — J.R.

APPENDIX: 22 MORE FILMMAKERS

All sorts of determinations have led to the choices of the individual subjects of the 18 previous sections — some of which are rational and thus can be rationalized, and some of which are irrational and thus can’t be. To say that I could have just as easily picked 18 other filmmakers would be accurate only if I had equal access to the films of every candidate. Yet some of the arbitrariness of the final selection — particularly in relation to the vicissitudes of American distribution and other kinds of information flow — has to be recognized. Read more

This appeared in The Soho News (August 18, 1981). Apologies for the stupid headline; my editor at the time was addicted to bad puns of this kind.– J.R.

An Enemy of the People

Directed by George Schaefer

Public Theater

Beatlemania — The Movie

Directed by Joe Manduke

A cherished personal project of Steve McQueen, who served as executive producer as well as lead actor, Henrik lbsen’s An Enemy of the People, scripted by Alexander Jacobs, is a lot more appealing and less forbidding than its cultural aura might suggest. That McQueen was unable to get this 1977 film released prior to his death is unfortunate yet unsurprising; given the absence of outlets for movies of this kind in the United States, I would have thought that cable might prove to be its ideal resting place. But at least for us Manhattan country folk, it’s once again thanks to the underappreciated services of the Public Theater that we’re able to see it at all.

McQueen made this movie when he knew that he was dying of cancer and decided that he wanted to be remembered for something more than his blue-eyed beefcake parts. An advocate of Laetrile cancer therapy -– banned by the FDA, and usually pegged as “controversial” in this country – McQueen had to go to a Mexican clinic to get the treatment he wanted and must have had plenty of reasons to identify with Ibsen’s persecuted, innocent, and idealistic hero. Read more

Written for Caiman Cuadernos de Cine‘s November 2018 issue. — J.R.

The three best new films I’ve seen so far this year, all of which qualify as experimental, have all been seen by me without the benefit of an audience: Travis Wilkerson’s Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? was initially presented as a live performance piece, narrated by Wilkerson, and most people have seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Le livre d’image with English subtitles and a carefully arranged four-track sound system, but I’ve seen both films only on my laptop, without any such extras. And so far I’ve only been able to see the final version of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind alone in a screening room. In short, I haven’t yet been able to see any of these films as a physical part of any group, which means that any sense of my being part of an audience has to depend exclusively on the resources of the Internet.

Travis Wilkerson’s remarkable essay film about the murder of a black man by his great-grandfather in Dothan, Alabama in 1946 opened in New York half a year ago. I’m grateful to A.O. Scott for his enthusiastic review alerting me to this film’s existence, which made me forgive Scott for what appeared to be his blindness to the subtler forms of racism and class bias practiced by Woody Allen in the reviewer’s latest “troubled” ruminations about that overrated figure. Read more

An essay commissioned by Masters of Cinema in the U.K. for their DVD of Fritz Lang’s Spione, released in 2005. This is reprinted in my collection Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (University of Chicago, 2010). — J.R.

If Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924) anticipates the pop mythologies of everything from Fantasia to Batman to Star Wars, his master spy thriller of four years later seems to usher in some of the romantic  intrigues of Graham Greene, not to mention much of the paraphernalia of Ian Fleming, especially in their movie versions. No less suggestively, the employments of paranoia and conspiracy by less mainstream artists such as Jacques Rivette (Out 1) and Thomas Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) seem rooted in the seductively coded messages, erotic intrigues, and multiple counter-plots of Spione.

One is also tempted to speak of Alfred Hitchcock, who certainly learned a trick or two from Lang —- though in this case the conceptual and stylistic differences may be more pertinent than the similarities. One could generalize by saying that Hitchcock is more interested in his heroes while Lang is more interested in his villains, and the different approaches of each director in soliciting or discouraging the viewer’s identification with his characters are equally striking, especially if one contrasts the German films of Lang with the American films of Hitchcock. Read more

From Sight and Sound, Winter 1982/1983, and reprinted in my collection Placing Movies. It was initially commissioned by Peter Biskind for American Film, who decided not to run it and paid me a kill fee, so I sent it next to Penelope Houston, who accepted it without hesitation. Originally, this piece was designed to be run with my translation of a brief, early piece by Barthes (“Au Cinemascope,” originally published in Les Lettres Nouvelles, February 1954). To my frustration, after Sight and Sound secured the rights to run this piece, they wound up omitting it due to lack of space, but it has subsequently appeared online in at least two places: here and here (the latter on this site). — J.R.

One reason for looking at the late Roland Barthes’ writings about film is that we all tend to be much too specialized in the ways that we think about culture in general and movies in particular. Far from being a film specialist, Barthes could even be considered somewhat cinephobic (to coin a term), at least for a Frenchman. Speaking to Jacques Rivette and Michel Delahaye in 1963, he confessed, “I don’t go very often to the cinema, hardly once a week” — inadvertently revealing the French passion for movies that can infect even a relative nonbeliever. Read more