Jonathan Rosenbaum

Commissioned by Stanley Schtinter in the summer of 2019 for the limited LP release of Carles Santos’ soundtrack score for Pere Portabella’s Vampir Cuadecuc in early 2020. I received a copy of this LP from Stanley earlier that month — on the final day of a Portabella retrospective in London that began in November, when I gave a lecture at Close-up and Portabella himself, who’d just turned 93, was amiably present.  — J.R.

Masterpieces have many possible ports of entry. My own passport into Pere Portabella’s Vampir Cuadecuc (1970) — first seen multiple times at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 1971 and then celebrated in my festival coverage for the Village Voice — was composed of rampant cinephilia crossed with political ignorance, as well as a fascination with William S. Burroughs’ use of cut-ups in Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961-1966), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962-1967) to create scrambled syntax (echoed in Portabella’s capacity to shift his narrative focus within single shots from the Dracula story itself to the filming of it). I knew then that Portabella, one of the Spanish producers of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, had his own passport confiscated as punishment by Francoist Spain, accounting for his absence in Cannes, and that his film was mostly a silent documentary of the shooting of an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by one Jesus Franco, accompanied by musique concrète. Read more

Submitted on October 29, 2020. — J.R.

Five Best Digital Releases

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: The Complete Fourth Season (Warner Archive, four DVDs)

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The Complete Films of Agnès Varda (Criterion, fifteen Blu-Rays).

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Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel (Second Run Features, two Blu-Rays)

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Kira Muratova’s Second Class Citizens (one Russian DVD).

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Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory (Grasshopper Film, one Blu-Ray, one DVD)

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I’ve ignored precise dates because Johnson-Trump have brought history to an impasse, and one country’s 2019 release might not even arrive in the mail before 2020. I’ve included A Bread Factory even though it includes my own public interview with its writer-director. Teaching a course in Varda made me appreciate that she knew how to generate her own best extras (none of which, alas, I could show on Zoom). The final season of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend deserves recognition for resurrecting the Hollywood musical to serve the specific needs of the present while triumphantly proving that sitcom characters can actually grow. English subtitled Muratova is most easily tracked on YouTube, and I can’t even identify the Russian label of this welcome DVD release.

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NEW: Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, USA)

OLD: Une Histoire de Vent/A Tale of the Wind (Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan, 1988, France)

Two quixotic adventures in filming the unfilmable, both made by indefatigable masters of bearing witness.  Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 2, 2004). — J.R.

I don’t have much patience with colleagues who dismiss Charlie Chaplin by saying that Buster Keaton was better (whatever that means). To the best of my knowledge, with the arguable exception of Dickens, no one else in the history of art has shown us in greater detail what it means to be poor, and certainly no one else in the history of movies has played to a more diverse audience or evolved more ambitiously from one feature to the next. The recent European release of his eight major features on DVD, digitally restored and with superb bonus materials, has been matched over here by only four titles so far, including Modern Times (1936), the second of his two Depression-era masterpieces — though viewing it on a big screen is required for maximal impact. The opening sequence of the Tramp on the assembly line is possibly his greatest slapstick encounter with the 20th century, and as Belgian filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne brilliantly observe on one of the DVD extras, the famous shot of his being run through machinery equates him with a strip of film. Still, there’s more hope here than in City Lights, perhaps because this time the Tramp has Paulette Goddard, another plucky urchin, to keep him company. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (October 3, 1995); slightly tweaked in late 2013.  — J.R.

If, like me, you find things to admire in many of Gus Van Sant’s films, you may be especially gratified by what he’s done with this satirical anti-TV script by Buck Henry — suggested by a real-life crime and adapted from a Joyce Maynard novel — and a spot-on performance by Nicole Kidman that may be the best of its kind since Tuesday Weld’s wicked sexual turns in Pretty Poison and Lord Love a Duck. Charting the ruthlessness of an ambitious bimbo telecaster in Little Hope, New Hampshire, this staccato black comedy sustains its brilliant exposition and narration until the plot turns to premeditated murder, complete with hapless and semicoherent teenage accomplices. The movie loses much of its pitch and many of its laughs at this juncture, and there’s an uncomfortable tendency to equate the falsity and venality of TV too exclusively with Kidman’s character, thereby bypassing golden opportunities offered by Wayne Knight (as a station boss) and an uncredited George Segal to make the target less gender specific. But much of this is good nasty fun, with a fine secondary cast that includes Matt Dillon, Joaquin Phoenix, Alison Folland, Casey Affleck, Illeana Douglas, and Dan Hedaya; also look for striking cameos by David Cronenberg and screenwriter Buck Henry. Read more

Commissioned by The Chiseler, and posted there on July 4, 2020. — J.R.

My first encounter with Werner Herzog was at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 1973, where I first saw Aguirre, the Wrath of God in an English-dubbed version that included, if memory serves, a few Brooklyn accents in 16th century Peru. (This is why it took some rethinking and retooling before the film could be successfully exhibited in the U.S., in German with subtitles.) But what flummoxed me the most  — in spite of the film’s awesome visual splendor and its crazed poetic conceits — was what Herzog revealed about the opening intertitle when I asked him about it during the Q & A.

The intertitle: “After the conquest and sack of the Incan empire by Spain, the Indians invented the legend of El Dorado, a land of gold, located in the swamps of the Amazon tributaries. 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.” Herzog’s cheerful admission: the bit about the document and the diary was a total lie, invented by him because he reasoned that people wouldn’t accept the film’s premises otherwise. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (October 21, 1994). This is also reprinted in my collection Movies as Politics. — J.R.

*** ED WOOD

(A must-see)

Directed by Tim Burton

Written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski

With Johnny Depp, Martin Landau, Sarah Jessica Parker, Patricia Arquette, Jeffrey Jones, Bill Murray, Lisa Marie, George “The Animal” Steele, and Vincent D’Onofrio.

*** PULP FICTION

(A must-see)

Directed and written by Quentin Tarantino

With John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, Maria de Medeiros, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer, Harvey Keitel, Eric Stoltz, Rosanna Arquette, Christopher Walken, and Tarantino.

[The media] ask those who know nothing to represent the ignorance of the public and, in so doing, to legitimize it.

— Serge Daney, Sight and Sound

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. — Orson Welles

In Vamps & Tramps, Camille Paglia’s latest collection of sound bites and press clips, one finds an extended account of her long-term obsession with Susan Sontag, including the following nugget: “She is literally being passed by a younger rival, and she’s not handling it, I’m afraid, very gracefully. . . . I am the Sontag of the 90s, there’s no doubt of it.” Read more

From the July-August 2005 issue (NLR 34) of New Left Review. 

An English translation of the first Daney collection cited below came out this year. — J.R.

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From the April 8, 1994 issue of the Chicago Reader. When I reprinted this article in my 1997 collection Movies as Politics, I gave it a different title: “Polanski and the American Experiment”. 

For me, The Ghost Writer is Polanski’s best film since Bitter Moon, and  his most masterful, although his subsequent Venus in Fur and Based on a True Story, both more subdued and subtler, are more interesting, especially as thoughtful autocritiques. — J.R.

**** BITTER MOON

Directed by Roman Polanski

Written by Polanski, Gerard Brach, John Brownjohn, and Jeff Gross

With Peter Coyote, Emmanuelle Seigner, Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Victor Bannerjee, Sophie Patel, and Stockard Channing.

Fairly late in What? (1973), Roman Polanski’s least seen and least critically approved feature — an absurdist, misogynist, yet oddly affectionate ‘Scope comedy filmed in the seaside villa of its producer, Carlo Ponti — the bimbo American heroine (Sydne Rome), an Alice set loose in a decadent wonderland belonging to a dying millionaire named Noblart, wanders for the second time into a living room where she encounters a middle-aged Englishman. Once again this Noblart employee bemoans his arthritis, cracks his knuckles, then sits down at a piano to play the treble part of a Mozart sonata for four hands. Read more

From the December 15, 1997 Chicago Reader.

For better and for worse, James Cameron’s hokey yet moving $200 million blockbuster (1997) tells you quite a bit about first class, a little about third class, and nothing at all about second class. This is mainly because Titanic, unlike most disaster movies, has virtually no subplots; the whole 194 minutes pivot around a fictional love story on the doomed ship between a rebellious bride-to-be (Kate Winslet) and a penniless artist (Leonardo DiCaprio). The elemental style and broadly defined characters recall D.W. Griffith at times (though there’s no equivalent to either of the Gish sisters), and for a movie set in 1912 this seems entirely appropriate. Some of the invented story is certainly fanciful, and a few details are downright stupid, yet overall what the movie has to say about its era and, more implicitly, our own in terms of class rings true. All things considered, Titanic is old-fashioned epic filmmaking that carries a wallop. With Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Frances Fisher, David Warner, and Bill Paxton. (JR)

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Written for the 2019 catalogue of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. Tim Lucas has helpfully and subsequently furnished us with the following on Facebook: “According to his autobiography, Roger Corman — then a script reader at Fox — retrieved this script from a slush pile and presented it to a producer acquaintance as having worth, given a proper rewrite. He did it himself, then presented it to the producer, who — without telling him — got the film greenlit as a Peck vehicle and took all the credit. Corman promptly quit his job and set about becoming a producer outside the Hollywood studio structure.” —  J.R.

Commonly described as an “adult” Western, The Gunfighter (1950)  differs from both the Freudian Pursued (1947) and the classical The Furies (1950).  Though it comes close to equating screen time with real time, without any rhetorical emphasis (as High Noon brings with clocks), its method is historical revisionism, postulating a “real” West that tragically undermines the ones we accept in other Westerns. It plays an intricate double game with genre expectations, satisfying some demands and implicitly chiding us for certain others. Significantly, the film’s first and final images are almost identical but register as antithetical in moral significance. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (January 1, 1998). — J.R.

Jean-Luc Godard takes on the Bosnian war in this 1997 French-Swiss production, broken into four segments: “Theater,” “You Don?t Fool With Love in Sarajevo,” “A Film About In-Tranquillity,” and “For Ever Mozart.” No Godard film is devoid of interest, and all his work (with the arguable exception of some of his post-’68 efforts, like Un film commes les autres) is worth seeing, but this treatment of war as bad theater and the vicissitudes of the film business strikes me as being his least-inspired feature since the late 60s. Working with a cast of unknowns who are encouraged not to outshine one another, and staging bits of Bosnian warfare on property that belonged to his late grandparents in Switzerland, he makes his isolation and his distance from his contemporary subjects more of an issue this time. An erotically framed, beautifully lit female torso in a doorway, imitating a Bosnian corpse, points to where some of the problems lie. The unidiomatic title, by the way, is a somewhat forced bilingual pun that can also be read as “pour rever Mozart,” i.e., “to dream Mozart.”

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