Jonathan Rosenbaum

I’ll concede that Todd Solondz’s absorbing 134-minute epic of sexual disgruntlement in the New Jersey suburbs (1998) is worth seeing, and not only for shock value. But I don’t think it deserves all the high marks it’s been getting for compassion and understanding, especially given its campy use of elevator music whenever the misery of its large cast of characters gets too close for comfort. Everyone who likes this movie calls it disturbing, but what disturbs me most is the self-loathing laughter it provokes, similar to what one often hears at Woody Allen and Michael Moore comedies. So even if I’m touched by the treatment of a child molester who loves his son, I don’t like that I’m also supposed to sympathize with the molester when he’s working as a therapist who doesn’t listen to his clients. An obsessive primitive with a clodhopper sense of excess, Solondz has already proved in Welcome to the Dollhouse (a better film overall) that he can carry dark obsessions further than most. But he still stoops to teenage gross-out antics like those of the Farrelly brothers, calling it art rather than entertainment and knowing that the media eagerly charting Clinton’s semen flow will go along. Read more

For me, the two best talking heads in Sacha Jenkins’ recent documentary, Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues, are those of Orson Welles and Ossie Davis, both of whom significantly started out as performers and theater people. Welles — whom we hear as the film begins, warmly introducing Armstrong as a friend on a TV talk show, explaining that he once planned to make a film that would recount the history of jazz through Armstrong’s life — insists on his preeminence as a performer “not on the principle of escapism but on the principle of affirmation.” Given that the entire career of Armstrong as a blazing maestro of the cornet and trumpet can be summed up by the word “affirmation”, Welles’s introduction couldn’t have been more apt.

Written for the first paper issue of New Lines Magazine, January 15, 2023. (Note: The version posted here is somewhat different.)

Ossie Davis, who once had a character in his play Purlie Victorious say to someone, “You’re a disgrace to the Negro profession,” recalls that he and his friends used to laugh derisively at Satchmo’s performing antics and clowning as a creepy form of Uncle Tomism until the two of them worked together on a movie, A Man Called Adam (1956). Read more

From the Chicago Reader (June 17, 2005). –J.R.

This fascinating oddity from Alain Corneau (Tous les matins du monde) adapts Amelie Nothomb’s autobiographical novel about the office life of a young Belgian (Sylvie Testud) working for a huge corporation in Tokyo. Though she’s spent her childhood in Japan and speaks fluent Japanese, a string of cultural blunders leads to one humiliating demotion after another. Testud took a two-month crash course in the language to play this part, and though the notations on cultural difference are far richer and subtler than anything in Lost in Translation, I can’t help but wonder what Japanese viewers might think of this film’s blistering critique of some of their hierarchies and protocol. The unconventional take on power and freedom, enriched by a deft use of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, remains that of an outsider. In Japanese and French with subtitles. 102 min. Music Box. Read more

Lewis Milestone’s powerful 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel, starring Lew Ayres and Louis Wolheim, deserves its reputation as a classic. The sound version originally ran 140 minutes, though ultimately (and unfortunately) the studio eliminated about 35 of them. Most of the missing footage was subsequently restored in a combined effort by various archives, and at 132 minutes the film can now be seen for the remarkable work that it is. Milestone’s other 30s work (e.g., Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!) is sorely in need of reappraisal. (JR)

Written for Cineaste Vol. XLVIII, No. 2 but published online due to space limitations . –J.R.

Edited by Mark Webber. London: The Visible Press, 2022. 349 pp., illus. Hardcover: $60.

I can think of at least three reasons why the independent British film journal Afterimage (1970-1987)  isn’t better known in the U.S.: 1. It shares the name of a still-existing U.S. bimonthly devoted to digital media, 2. It only lasted for thirteen issues, and 3. Although it was supported by state funding, like the far better-known Screen, its nature and its influence were (and still are) far less institutional.

The third reason requires some elucidation. The seventeen years of Afterimage’s existence corresponded fairly closely to the founding of academic film studies in both the U.S. and the U.K. Screen sprang from the British Film Institute’s Education Department during the same period, and its pedagogical mission has always been inseparable from its institutional armor, including its dull boiler-plate design and the virtual equation of the positioning of its armchair Marxism with institutional protection. Afterimage was far more independent, exploratory, and eclectic, stemming largely from the passions of a single individual, Simon Field (seven of whose editorials are included, along with his interview with Hollis Frampton) and shifting its focus and aspects of its design with each successive issue. Read more

From the November 1, 1994 Chicago Reader.

In retrospect, Bernardo Bertolucci’s highly influential fifth feature (1969) — ravishing to the eye but less than fully satisfying to the mind — can be regarded as the lamentable turning point in an extremely promising career that ultimately chose stylishness over style and both over content. Following on the heels of his much superior The Spider’s Strategem and adapted from an Alberto Moravia novel set in 1938, this political thriller follows an Italian professor (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who’s recoiling from his own homosexual impulses as he agrees to work as a police agent during his honeymoon in Paris and assist in the assassination of his former mentor, now a dedicated antifascist. With Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda, Gastone Moschin, and Pierre Clementi. In Italian and French with subtitles. 115 min. (JR)

From the Chicago Reader(1998).

Historical spectaculars tend to fall into two broad categories: myths of origin (Cecil B. De Mille’s 1923 and 1956 versions of The Ten Commandments) and more ponderous inquiries into the hero’s personality (Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia). Chen Kaige’s massive 161-minute epic (1999) about the unification of China, accomplished by its first emperor during the third century BC, attempts an impossible synthesis of these two categories, beginning with Ying Zheng (Li Xuejian), the king of Ch’in, as a charismatic hero and ending with him as a murderous villain, the mantle of heroism having passed to his former mistress (Gong Li) and the mysterious assassin she enlists to kill him (Zhang Fengyi). Though there’s no physical resemblance, it’s impossible to follow the development of Ying Zheng without thinking of Mao — in some respects the last Chinese emperor — but even without that parallel this is a powerful story and a splendid spectacle. Compared with Maggie Cheung, Gong Li is arguably more an iconic star than an actress, but on this outing she gives a pretty impressive performance. (JR)

My column for Caimán cuadernos de cine, submitted in April 2023.

One of the limitations of auteurist criticism is its overlooking of certain remarkable film directors who lack clear auteurist profiles, such as Alfred E. Green, Mervyn LeRoy, and Roy Rowland.

To consider them in reverse order: My work as  consultant on the 1998 re-editing of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil enabled me to become acquainted with Janet Leigh, and when I once asked her whom her favorite director was among those she worked for, her answer was neither Welles nor Hitchcock, both of whom she revered, but the much lesser known Rowland, the first one who directed her (in The Romance of Rosy Ridge, 1947), because he was kind enough to teach her certain basics about moviemaking. When Samuel Fuller cited LeRoy along with John Ford as a role model, I suspect he was thinking not only of LeRoy’s versatility but of his particular distinction in directing such powerful social dramas as I Was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and They Won’t Forget (1937).

Alfred E. Green (1889-1960), a favorite of mine, started out as a silent actor and a director of two-reelers and ended his career directing TV episodes. Read more

From the February 15, 2001 Chicago Reader. 

This brooding chamber piece (2000) about a love affair that never quite happens is so minimalist that it succumbs to the law of diminishing returns–yet for some reason it sticks in my gut. Director Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong’s most romantic filmmaker, is known for his excesses, and in that sense the film’s spareness represents a bold departure. Claustrophobically set in adjacent flats in 1962 Hong Kong, where two young couples find themselves sharing space with other people, it focuses on a newspaper editor and a secretary at an export firm (Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the sexiest duo in Hong Kong cinema) who discover that their spouses are having an affair on the road. Wong, who improvises his films with the actors, endlessly repeats his musical motifs (including a melancholy violin theme and three familiar ballads sung in Spanish by Nat “King” Cole) and variations on a handful of images, rituals, and short scenes (rainstorms, cab rides, stairways, tender and tentative hand gestures), while dressing Cheung in some of the most confining (though lovely) dresses imaginable, with collars like neck braces. This isn’t among my favorite Wong Kar-wai features (in a pinch I’d pick Days of Being Wild, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time, and Happy Together), but that doesn’t mean my eyes weren’t glued to the screen. Read more

From Film Comment, September-October 2000.

GEORGE WASHINGTON David Gordon Green, U.S.A., 2000

“A Terrence Malick rethink of Gummo “? That’s how one reviewer celebrated the curious first feature of 24-year-old David Gordon Green, a Texas-born independent, when it premiered at Berlin — a grim reminder of how closely critics can resemble both publicists and aspiring filmmakers pitching their projects to producers. If we assume that the audience is so jaded it merely wants to mix and match what it already knows, then it’s a logical (if unflattering) label for something new. Or if one’s simply stymied by the challenge of describing a fresh sensibility, some familiar points of comparison are perhaps inevitable. (For me, it would be Thomas Pynchon’s plaintive boys’ tale, “The Secret Integration”, despite some telling differences in class and regional setting.) But the fact is, whatever Green’s misjudgments — starting with the movie’s misleading title and ending with a kid’s cutesy/ unlikely list of favorite heroes for an offscreen shrink — the writer-director should mainly be credited with making nobody’s mistakes but his own.

One can see the sort of thing that prompted the wisecrack: Malick’s poetic Americana and adolescent female narrators, Gummo as a Southern working-class geek festival featuring the wanton murder of pets. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (November 2003).

The title of this 64-minute video by Guy Maddin (Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary) refers to its having been commissioned as a gallery installation for the Rotterdam film festival, to be watched through a succession of arcade-style peep-show machines. Screening here as a self-contained work, it seems like Maddin’s most personal project yet: the hero is a hockey player named Guy Maddin; his mother, like Maddin’s, runs a beauty salon; and Maddin even casts some of his own family members. But the overall feel is phantasmagoric–pitched, like most of Maddin’s work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie. Also on the program are Maddin’s justly celebrated six-minute short The Heart of the World (2000), showing in 35-millimeter, and his five-minute Odilon Redon, or the Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity (1995). Gene Siskel Film Center.

From the Chicago Reader (January 1, 2000). — J.R.

This vulgar Billy Wilder comedy scandalized the Legion of Decency and large segments of the American public when it came out in 1964. At the time Wilder pointed out that the film is about human dignity and the sanctity of marriage, but its undisguised contempt for the American hinterlands and the success ethic makes the sexual element seem dirtier than it actually is. Dean Martin plays a carousing parody of himself, stranded in the godforsaken town of Climax, Nevada, while a desperate songwriter (Ray Walston), hoping to sell him a tune, tries to get him shacked up with a prostitute (Kim Novak) impersonating the songwriter’s wife (Felicia Farr). This restoration includes the original ending, which originally played only in Europe, followed by the forced ending that played in the U.S. Both Martin and Novak are at their near best, and the undertone of small-town desperation in Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s script is effectively captured by Walston and his sidekick, Cliff Osmond. Shot in black-and-white ‘Scope. 126 min. (JR)

Two hypnotic and haunting 2007 features by Spanish experimental filmmaker Jose Luis Guerin, about the same romantic obsession. (The reference points are W.G. Sebald’s novel Vertigo and Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same title.) The silent Some Photos in the City of Sylvia (65 min.) uses black-and-white stills with English intertitles to recount an unseen artist’s return to Strasbourg to search for a young woman he met briefly 22 years earlier while making a Goethe-related literary pilgrimage. The far more elliptical In the City of Sylvia (84 min.) tells the same story with color, carefully articulated sound, and minimal, subtitled French dialogue; in this film the artist returns only six years after his pilgrimage. Both works are mysterious, beautiful, and primal. It’s a pity the first, an intimate study and scenario for the second, is being shown after only one screening of its more languid successor. (JR)

I had to retype this longish position paper  — published in the November-December 1977 issue of Film Comment — in order to digitize it for the manuscript of my  collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia, to be published by the University of Chicago Press in Fall 2010.  Going over every word of it again made me painfully aware of how many typos and other errors it had in its previous appearance. [8/14 postscript: My deepest thanks to Andy Rector at Kino Slang for adding the grubby still that originally ran with this article in Film Comment, thereby allowing me to add it here myself.]

This essay has a literal sequel, “Moullet retrouvé”, also on this site.  –J.R.

À la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions

1. “Every film by Gerd Oswald deserves a long review.” — LM, 1958.

2. Many of you, perhaps most, have never heard of the man. So much the better. Not all news gets into newspapers, and not all movies get into theaters. The sculptor Paul Thek once proposed an interesting solution to the newspaper problem to me: Get rid of all of them, except for one edition of one daily paper (any would do), and pass this precious object from hand to hand for the next hundred years –- then the news might mean something. Read more

According to Wikipedia, this English-America MGM release about an American teenager (Elizabeth Taylor at 17 playing someone a year older) falling in love with and marrying a 40ish British officer (Robert Taylor) whom she belatedly discovers is a Communist spy — effectively directed by Victor Saville, and recently shown on TCM — lost the studio over $800,000, but it doesn’t say or suggest why. I would guess that this was because, intentionally or not, the film manages to persuade us to identify with the tormented middle-aged spy more than with the tormented patriotic heroine. This isn’t a matter of ideology but a function of how the story gets told. The screenplay by Sally Benson (whose stories provided the basis for MGM’s Meet Me in St. Louis) focuses more on the inner conflicts and secret meetings of the spy than those of the callow girl that he falls for and marries, and the fact that the movie literally ends with her agreeing to lie to everyone about her husband’s suicide to support her own country makes his own deceits seem less reprehensible. It’s a funny paradox that a rabid right-winger like Robert Taylor should make us care so much for a Communist spy, but he does. Read more