Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the December 1981 issue of American Film. I was quite unhappy with the way this article was edited at the time, but having discovered my original submitted draft quite recently (in mid-November 2011, 30 years later), I’ve decided to resurrect it here, including my own title. (Theirs was “Looking for Nicholas Ray”.)

My working assumption in restoring original drafts on this site, or some approximation thereof, isn’t that my editors were always or invariably wrong, or that my editorial decisions today are necessarily superior, but, rather, an attempt to historicize and bear witness to my original intentions. It was a similar impulse that led me to undo some of the editorial changes made in the submitted manuscript of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), when I was afforded the opportunity to reconsider them for the book’s second edition 15 years later (available online here) — not to revise or rethink my decisions in relation to my subsequent taste but to bring the book closer to what I originally had in mind in 1980. — J.R.

By and large, the last three decades in the life of film director Nicholas Ray can be divided fairly evenly into three distinct parts. Read more

From Oui (February 1975). The word “coyness” was misprinted as “boyness,” and I wondered at the time if this might have been an editor’s Freudian slip. –- J.R.

The Arabian Nights. In his treatment of The Arabian Nights, Pier Paolo

Pasolini has created what might be considered his first pagan film — a work in

which Western coyness and guilt about sex (and most of the other varieties of

20th Century angst) seem to have mysteriously vanished. Shooting an odd batch

of tales within tales in gorgeous sections of Yemen, Ethiopia, Iran and Nepal,

Pasolini delves into a sort of fairy-tale anthropology that is often most luminous

when it’s least comprehensible. The storytelling is ponderous, but the moods

are spellbinding. The magic that we usually associate with these tales is kept

in the wings until the later sequences and is awkwardly handled when it appears.

It’s the magic of the people and the places that holds Pasolini’s interest,

and the quality that most sustains this genuinely other-worldly film is its almost

primeval strangeness.

–JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Read more

From Sight and Sound (Spring 1976). –- J.R.

Numéro Deux

If Numéro Deux is the most important film of Jean-Luc Godard in nearly a decade — specifically, since 2 ou 3 Choses que je sais d’elle -– one should explain at the outset what gives these films privileged places within his oeuvre. Focusing in 35mm and wide screen on a fictional working-class family, both are essentially bound up in issues of representation, and neither allies itself to any organized political faction or has any links with the Dziga-Vertov Group and/or Jean-Pierre Gorin. The point of this distinction is that Godard’s pre-eminence has always stemmed directly from his grasp of the problems of representation — a line of inquiry leading from the jump-cuts of Breathless to the fragmented double-images of Numéro Deux -– and that his political commitments have always been inscribed within this concern; it is highly debatable whether he has contributed anything of value to political thought apart from this context. Yet broadly speaking, the increasing emphasis in his work after 2 ou 3 Choses — in La Chinoise,Weekend, 1 + 1, Le Gai Savoir and all the subsequent ventures — has until now been more on the ‘signified’ (subject) and less on the ‘signifier’ (manner of representation), away from investigation and towards didacticism. Read more

From a 1989 catalog that I wrote most of for the Walker Art Center, Cinema Outsider: The Films of William Klein (an interview that accompanied this piece will also be posted on the site in a couple of days). I worked for Klein briefly in 1973, when I was living in Paris, translating a script of his called Demain la ville from French to English so that Elliott Gould, who was being considered as one of the leads, could read it. (A portion of this script was later transformed into Klein’s The Model Couple.)  — J.R.

Anybody who pretends to be objective isn’t realistic. — William Klein on cinéma-vérité (1)

I have a great feeling of nostalgia for the expressionist film. Although I don’t know why I say nostalgia: such films are still being made, and as far as l’m concerned we can never go beyond expressionism. Bill Klein’s Mr. Freedom, for example, is a completely expressionistic film. Maybe that’s why it provoked such violent reactions: some people just can’t accept having reality transposed to another level. — Alain Resnais (2)

One of the limitations of conventional film history, with its subdivisions of schools and movements, is that many interesting filmmakers who are unlucky enough to exist apart from neat categories tend to disappear between the cracks. Read more

From The Soho News (June 24, 1981). — J.R.

Juke Girl is an unassuming Warner Brothers program filler — a Depression movie made in 1942 starring Ronald Reagan as a young socialist hero from Kansas and Ann Sheridan in the tough-and-tender title part. It reminds me of something that Manny Farber said in a recent lecture about what people looked like in 30s films, when “every shape was legitimate,” as opposed to the more constricting notions about what people are supposed to look like in 70s films — a model that remains in force today.

As a general rule of thumb, I think one can argue pretty plausibly that any Warner Brothers Depression film, however minor, has something going for it on a social/aesthetic level that can’t be found in any over-publicized New Hollywood glitz production, however major. This is less monolithic a judgment than it sounds, especially if one considers the radically different notions of audience involved. Read more

From Sight and Sound, Spring 1989. — J.R.

The news of John Cassavetes’ death reached the Rotterdam Festival just as his retrospective was winding to a close, and my initial response was to recall Billy Wilder’s remark at Ernst Lubitsch’s funeral. ‘No more Lubitsch,’ a friend said,  and Wilder replied, ‘Worse than that — no more Lubitsch films.’ On the face of it, it’s hard to think of many directors more dissimilar than Lubitsch and Cassavetes, but each brought to cinema a kind of personal passion that it’s never had before or since, despite the fact that each has had a host of imitators and emulators. It even seems possible that Cassavetes influenced almost as many directors as Lubitsch did. Just for starters, one could cite Peter Bogdanovich, Jean Eustache, Henry Jaglom, Elaine May, Rob Nilsson, Maurice Pialat, Jacques Rivette and Martin Scorsese.

In the case of Cassavetes, though, what I had in mind was something specific — the fact that he hadn’t lived long enough to make a film of his remarkable play A Woman of Mystery, which I had been lucky enough to see during its limited run in a tiny Beverly Hills theatre the summer before last, and which remains one of the key theatrical experiences of my life. Read more

This originally appeared in Film Comment (September-October 1974).

I was shocked in December 2011 to learn of the death of Gilbert Adair, a close friend during the mid-70s (when both of us were living in Paris, and then for some time later, after I moved to London ahead of Gilbert). Although I can’t swear to this, it’s possible that this collaborative interview may be the first thing that Gilbert ever published; at least it’s the earliest piece of his that I know about. With Michael Graham — also, alas, no longer alive — Gilbert and I had subsequently collaborated on a lengthy production piece for Sight and Sound about Rivette’s Duelle and Noroît, recently reprinted in Arrow’s DVD box set devoted to Rivette, available here and here. — J.R.

.

Last June, I invited two of my friends — Gilbert Adair and Lauren Sedofsky — to join me in an interview with Jacques Rivette. All three of us had been dazzled by Céline et Julie vont en Bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating), to the point of considering it the most important new film we’ve seen in years, and it seemed exciting to extend our folie à trois to a meeting with the director. Read more

IL CINEMA RITROVATO

DVD AWARDS 2012

IX edition

Jurors: Lorenzo Codelli, Alexander Horwath, Mark

McElhatten, Paolo Mereghetti, Jonathan Rosenbaum

BEST DVD 2011 / 2012

From The Soho News (February 25, 1981). One can trace some updates on my thoughts about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One over 17 years later and Killer of Sheep over 26 years later by following the links provided here. — J.R.

Feb. 16: A double feature of two class-conscious films directed by Carol Reed , The Stars Look Down (1939) and Kipps (1940), at Theater 80 — my first look at either movie. Trying to arrive at a plausible reverse-angle for the first movie — that is, a precise sense of its audience and context in early 1940, when Graham Greene wrote for The Spectator, “Dr. Cronin’s mining novel has made a very good film — I doubt whether in England we have ever produced a better” — I find myself hopelessly hamstrung, stuck in a narrow sort of timewarp called the present.

The problem is, I can only come up with a romantic, movie version of an English movie audience three years before I was born, a Thomas Pynchon fantasy à la Gravity’s Rainbow (whose sexy, existential London is itself very much a pungent blend of remembered movies from that period). Admittedly, Greene’s oddly familial use of first person plural tells me a little something, too. Read more