Jonathan Rosenbaum

Born July 24, 1944, San Mareno, California. Died May 23, 2013, Chicago, Illinois.

Here’s something I said at a special tribute to Peter held in his presence at Columbia College, on October 4, 2012:

“For me, Peter Thompson is one of those special filmmakers who reinvents cinema for his own purposes, a trait that he shares not only with people like Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, and Jacques Tati, but also with filmmakers like Chaplin, Welles, and Kubrick.

“On some level, all of Peter’s films are mysteries and detective stories, but ones in which Peter is inviting us to join him in becoming the detectives, not in giving us puzzles that he knows how to solve but in inventing new ways for us to share in his curiosity. You might even say that part of the mysteries of his films is determining what they’re about, because in addition to reinventing cinema they might be said to reinvent things like subject matter and research as well as still more difficult-to-define entities such as poetry and history and truth.

“Peter has been a friend for about two decades, but I hasten to add that we became friends because of my enthusiasm for his early work, which existed before we ever met. Read more

This may be Antonioni’s most unjustly neglected fiction feature, at least in the U.S. (though even in France, where it’s on DVD, it’s only available in a box set). I reviewed it for the May 1975 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. –J.R.

Signora Senza Camelie, La
(The Lady Without Camelias)

Italy, 1953                                        Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

If it lacks the final fusion of purposes characterizing a masterwork, La Signora Senza Camelie is nevertheless so unmistakably and remarkably the work of a master that one is shocked to discover the rather cursory critical treatment is has generally been accorded. A frequent bone of contention is Lucia Bosè’s performance as the starlet in search of an identity –- recalling that the part was first offered, in turn, to Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren, and usually implying some difficulty in accepting Bosè as a persuasive Milanese-shopgirl-turned-sex-symbol. Yet what strikes one at once today is how totally her cold, somewhat remote beauty establishes and “places” the tone of the film, clarifying her cosmic distance from the brassy world of popular filmmaking as well as the natural way in which she might become the goddess of such a realm. In anticipation of Godard’s Vivre sa vie, Antonioni brilliantly opens the film with an image of Clara seen from behind, as an anonymous pedestrian -– tracing her fingers across a move poster and then strolling down the street, the camera gliding slowly after her until she turns into the cinema entrance. Read more

Written for Criterion’s Current (web site), April 21, 2009. — J.R.

I recently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given me the most pleasure — the greatest Flash Gordon serial ever made as well as a showcase for the Russian master’s boldest graphics. But ever since I first saw it in the 1960s, this is a pleasure I’ve often had to apologize for, thanks to the vagaries and confusions of cold-war thinking. This thinking maintained that Eisenstein caved into Stalinist pressures, denounced the montage aesthetic that was central to his best work, and turned out an archaic, made-to-order glorification of a dictator.

Part of the problem has been reconciling the film’s multiple paradoxes — how much it functions as Eisenstein’s autocritique and apologia as well as an attack and glorification of Stalin, meanwhile combining elements of both high and low art at virtually every instant with its tortured angles and extreme melodrama. (Though portions of Part II could be termed inferior to Part I, the moment the film switches to color, using Agfa stock seized from the Germans during World War II, it moves into dizzying high gear, reminding us that Walt Disney was one of Eisenstein’s favorite filmmakers.) Read more

Written for The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., a catalogue/ collection put together to accompany a film series at the Austrian Filmmuseum and the Viennale in Autumn 2009. — J.R.

RHAPSODY RABBIT (1946)

Bugs Bunny, dripping with mannerisms associated with classical music and attempting to perform Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody at a concert, is interrupted or distracted by problems with his sheet music, coughs from the audience, a carrot break, and a mouse living inside the piano with both a taste for boogie-woogie and a determination to outclass the rabbit and featured performer. James Agee celebrated this 1946 animated short by Friz Freleng at some length, calling it “the funniest thing I have seen since the decline of sociological dancing”: “The best of it goes two ways: one, very observant parody of concert-pianistic affectations, elegantly thought out and synchronized; the other, brutality keyed into the spirit of the music to reach greater subtlety than I have ever seen brutality reach before.”

WHAT’S OPERA, DOC? (1957)

Eleven years after Rhapsody Rabbit, in 1957, the joint ingenuity of writer Michael Maltese and director Chuck Jones once again demonstrates how Americans can neither feel entirely comfortable with classical music and opera nor leave it alone, resulting here in a love-hate relationship to Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen featuring Bugs Bunny in drag, a golden-helmeted Elmer Fudd, snatches of ballet and Nuremberg lighting, outlandish sets that exceed any possibilities of stagecraft, and what may well be the strangest assortment of abstract shapes to be found anywhere in Jones’s work. Read more

WIDE ANGLE SAXON (1976)

This comic short by Owen Land from 1976 could
conceivably be regarded as the Hellzapoppin of the
American experimental film. Just as Hellzapoppin
alludes to the then-contemporary Citizen Kane,
Wide Angle Saxon includes a parody of Hollis
Frampton’s 1971 (nostalgia), called Regrettable Redding
Condescension (alluding to Land’s own 1971 Remedial
Reading Comprehension), which is credited in
turn to one “Al Rutcurts” (i.e., the word «structural»
spelled backwards). But to complicate matters considerably
(if quite obscurely), Land (or George Landow,
as he was known at the time) converted to fundamentalist
Christianity shortly before making this film,
and we are told at the outset that this film’s nominal
hero, “Earl Greaves,” has recently had a religious
conversion as well.

ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE AS CITED BY SIGMUND FREUD IN WIT AND

ITS RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS, OR CAN THE AVANT-GARDE ARTIST

BE WHOLED? (1979)

Owen Land continues his obscure blend of deconstructive slapstick and

various issues arising from his then-recent conversion to fundamentalist

Christianity in this puzzling if hilarious 17-minute short, during which

a “panderer” in one of the textual interpretations of the Marriage Broker

Joke becomes corrupted into “panda,” and then two men in panda suits

proceed to make a structural film about Japanese salted plums -– or

something like that. Read more

Written for The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., a catalogue/ collection put together to accompany a film series at the Austrian Filmmuseum and the Viennale in Autumn 2009. — J.R.

Nominally a rather silly satire about various fads in 1919 America ranging from Ouija boards and diverse superstitions to crackpot psychological experiments, this energetic Douglas Fairbanks comedy -– the first directorial effort of Victor Fleming, Fairbanks’s former cinematographer –- is chiefly a free-form adventure.

Like the projectionist’s dream in Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr., this is basically an occasion for the star’s athletic stunts and choreographic bursts of ardor and enthusiasm, as well as various playful breaches of the ordinary rules of space and time. Most of the latter occurs within an extended dream sequence that virtually opens the film -– set in motion by a sinister secret experiment being conducted by a mad scientist on the wealthy and brash hero, Daniel Boone Brown (Fairbanks) –- but the climactic rain storm and flood at the end, as the film shifts from New York to the countryside, seems almost equally dreamlike and arbitrary.

Read more

Written for The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., a catalogue/ collection put together to accompany a film series at the Austrian Filmmuseum and the Viennale in Autumn 2009. — J.R.

I was slow to appreciate this masterpiece, which I now regard as Martin Scorsese’s best feature, and I credit Wim Wenders for convincing me that there was far more going on in this movie than I was initially prepared to see. Perhaps the key to this creepy fable about the American obsession with celebrity and media comes in the climactic comic monologue of Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), brimming with self-hatred and shame about his family and his nondescript suburban/ethnic background, which in a way all of the preceding film prepares us for. The script by Paul D. Zimmerman, a onetime film critic at Newsweek, manages to be both non-specific and spot-on about everything that separates the haves from the have-nots -– a subject Scorsese seems to know like the back of his hand, and one made all the more complex by the fact that it’s often hard to separate the privileged from the deprived in this film (a fact spelled out by another troubling climax, the confrontation between Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard). Read more

Recently reseeing George Cukor’s scandalously neglected Travels with My Aunt (1972) helps to clarify how central self-images and sensual discoveries are to his best as well as his most personal films. Travels with My Aunt isn’t on  the same level as Sylvia Scarlett (1935), A Star is Born (1954), and Bhowani Junction (1955), probably my favorites, but it often seems just as personal, and it does have some of the superbly intricate and dispersed ‘Scope compositions that one often finds in the latter two, as well as in Les Girls (1957) and Let’s Make Love (1960), with their own mottled lighting schemes.

(Too bad that Les Girls, also recently reseen, is so unpleasant apart from its choreography and compositions. All the characters are monstrous and the plot is absurd. Why does the Rashomon theme, both here and in Kurosawa’s Rashomon, depend mainly on odious people and motives — unlike Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, which uses a modified version of the same theme and is much kinder to its characters?)

Travels with My Aunt can also be read as a kind of response to the free-wheeling 60s and early 70s, much as Sylvia Scarlett celebrated certain aspects of the free-wheeling and footloose 30s. Read more

Written in January 2006 for 1000 Films To Change Your Life, an anthology edited by Simon Cropper for Time Out. — J.R.

Wonder is closer to being a feeling than a thought, and one that we associate both with children and with grown-ups recapturing some of the open-mouthed awe and innocence that they had as children. Many of us experienced some of this as kids watching the classic Disney cartoon features or certain live-action fantasy adventures like King Kong (1933) or Thief of Bagdad (1940).

Other generations, for that matter, might recall feeling a comparable emotion before the vast spaces of the 1916 Intolerance (whose gigantic Babylon set would eventually be redressed for Kong’s Skull Island) or the 1924 Thief of Bagdad or the 2005 King Kong —- or even in that hokey opening line, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” Or what about the hushed sense of reverence that we bring to the virgin wilderness of The Big Sky (1952), whose very title expresses our feeling of astonishment? It’s a primal emotion, particularly as it relates to cinema in the old-fashioned sense: 35-millimeter projection in palatial theaters, the screen invariably much larger than us (‘Bigger Than Life,’ as the title of a Nicholas Ray melodrama in CinemaScope has it). Read more