Jonathan Rosenbaum

From the Chicago Reader, 2/15/02, and tweaked today, 9/4/23.

With Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, and Ousman Sembene still active, one can’t call Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira the only old master we have left in cinema. But how remarkable to see someone in his mid-90s enjoying one of the richest and most productive periods of his career–five extraordinary and very different features since Inquietude in 1998. This is partly thanks to the resourceful producer Paulo Branco (who also sponsors Raul Ruiz); unfortunately, none of the five has found U.S. distribution (unlike de Oliveira’s previous releases, The Convent and Voyage to the Beginning of the World, which were less interesting but had bigger stars). The fourth and fifth (I’m Going Home, a superbly unsentimental story about an aging actor, and Oporto of My Childhood, an imaginative documentary about de Oliveira’s hometown) haven’t even made it to Chicago festivals yet. Word and Utopia (2000) offers another example of how de Oliveira has enlivened his stately style through vigorous direction of actors, mainly through Lima Duarte’s performance as Antonio Vieira, an outspoken 17th-century Jesuit priest who championed the rights of Brazilian Indians and won the support of both the pope and Queen Christina of Sweden. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (May 1, 1988). — J.R.

Arguably Louis Malle’s best work (1960). Based on Raymond Queneau’s farcical novel about a little girl (Catherine Demongeot) left in Paris for a weekend with her decadent uncle (Philippe Noiret), this wild spree goes overboard reproducing Mack Sennett-style slapstick, parodying various films of the 1950s, and playing with editing and color effects (the cinematography is especially impressive), all in an effort to create equivalents to Queneau’s extravagant wordplay, though gradually it becomes a rather disturbing nightmare about fascism. Forget the preposterous claim by at least one critic that the movie’s editing influenced Alain Resnais, but there’s no doubt that Malle affected Richard Lester — and was clearly influenced himself by William Klein, credited here as a visual consultant and responsible for much of the wide-angle look. A rather sharp, albeit soulless, film, packed with ideas and glitter and certainly worth seeing. In French with subtitles. 93 min. (JR)

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From Time Out (London), Sept. 27—Oct. 3, 1974. –- J.R.

‘Amarcord’ (Curzon, Warner West End) is Fellini at this ripest and loudest, which is not to say always at his best. Recreating a fantasy vision of his home town during the fascist period, with generous helpings of soap opera and burlesque, he generally gets his better effects by orchestrating his colorful cast of characters around the town square, on a boat outing, or at a festive local wedding. When he narrows his focus to individual groups, he usually limits himself to corny bathroom and bedroom jokes which produce the desired titters but little else. But despite the ups and downs, it’s still Fellini, which has become an identifiable substance like salami or pepperoni that can be sliced into at any point, yielding pretty much the same general consistency and flavor. There are the expected set pieces (family dinner, fascist rally), the customary cartoon cut-outs (a blind accordionist, a tobacconist with breasts the size of watermelons), and the tearful tones of Nino Rota, as evocative as ever. Fellini’s home town would have liked it. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

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From Sight and Sound (Autumn 1976). — J.R.

Behind the credits, a face peering out through a window; a downward pan revealing a vertiginous drop to the courtyard below; a pan back to the window and round the court to another face, a girl’s, which quickly turns into Roman Polanski’s; a continuing movement past a chimney, across more windows-down one side of the building, over a railing and up another side — eventually coming round to the door leading to the street, which Polanski enters . . . If the remainder of The Tenant were as impressive as the first shot, we conceivably might have had a masterpiece on our hands. Nearly as concise as the extended crane shot opening Touch of Evil, it differs from the latter by arranging its arsenal of elements into a non-narrative pattern — a set of materials which, except for the girl turning into Polanski, are related spatially but nor chronologically, until Polanski’s entrance through the street door launches the story proper.

A naturalised Pole named Trelkovsky is interested in seeing a flat, and the unfriendly concierge (Shelley Winters) gives him a hard time about it, agreeing to take him upstairs only after he slips her some money. Read more

From Cinema Scope no. 91, Summer 2022.

Apart from those few who managed to escape from totalitarian regimes and occupied countries, most North Americans know as little about living under a dictatorship and/or in an occupied territory and what that entails as I do. For the past two decades, I’ve been periodically arguing that progressively minded Yank cinephiles missed the boat in the ’60s and ’70s by focusing too exclusively on Godard, Bertolucci, and similarly oriented Western leftists while ignoring the far more politically and formally radical inventions of Eastern European cinema by Chytilová, Jancsó, and Makevejev, among others — an avoidance that largely came about because we didn’t know more about what was happening in those parts of the world. A comparable limitation in the 1930s and 1940s led critics such as Dwight Macdonald to focus far more on Eisenstein and Pudovkin than on Dovzhenko, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, even a passionate Dovzhenko fan such as James Agee was fairly clueless about the political difficulties this Ukrainian filmmaker was having with the Russians.

Bearing this shared ignorance in mind, all of the most striking releases I’ve encountered this spring —Serge Loznitsa’s Donbass (2018), on DVD from Salzgeber & Co. Read more

A chapter from Film: The Front Line 1983. — J.R.

Born in Konstanz, Germany, 1942.

What do I know about Ulrike Ottinger? Not much, but enough to make me want to know more.  Admittedly, I’ve seen only her last two features. And on the basis of a single viewing about a year ago, Freak Orlando is a decidedly uneven film, definitely hit-or-miss in its overall thrust, and conceivably full of as many misses as hits. Like it or not, though, the film can be regarded as a  kind of climactic summa of the performance-oriented European avant-garde film, from Carmelo Bene to Philippe Garrel to Marc’O to the collaborations of Pedro Portbella* to Christopher Lee —  to cite the names of four leading figures of excitement and interest in this category whose careers  I lost track of after moving back to the U.S. from Europe in 1977. Insofar as Freak Orlando can be regarded as the Monterey Pop or Woodstock of the European avant-garde performance movement, it’s a valuable and fascinating document to have, and one therefore has reason to look forward to its release in this country…Ticket of No Return, on the other hand, strikes me as a fully achieved  work  — one of the few true masterpieces of the contemporary German avant-garde cinema — making Ottinger an obligatory inclusion for this book. Read more

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

This ambiguous comic masterpiece (1999, 118 min.) could be Abbas Kiarostami’s greatest film to date; it’s undoubtedly his richest and most challenging. A media engineer from Tehran (Behzad Dourani) arrives in a remote mountain village in Iranian Kurdistan, where he and his three-person camera crew secretly wait for a century-old woman to die so they can film or tape an exotic mourning ritual at her funeral. To do this he has to miss a family funeral of his own, and every time his mobile phone rings the poor reception forces him to drive to a cemetery atop a mountain, where he sometimes converses with a man digging a deep hole for an unspecified telecommunications project. Back in the village the digger’s fiancee milks a cow for the engineer while he flirts with her by quoting an erotic poem that gives the movie its title. Over half the major characters — including the crew, the dying woman, and the digger — are kept mainly or exclusively offscreen, and the dense and highly composed sound track often refers to other offscreen elements, peculiarities of Kiarostami’s style that solicit the viewer’s imaginative participation. What’s most impressive about this global newspaper and millennial statement is how much it tells us about our world — especially regarding the acute differences in perception and behavior between media experts and everyone else. Read more

Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma

**** (Masterpiece)

Directed and written by Jean-Luc Godard

Ironically, the two greatest works by the two most innovative filmmakers of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette, were originally designed as TV series. Rivette’s 760-minute, 16-millimeter serial Out 1 (1971) was rejected by French state TV, and he spent most of a year editing it down to a 255-minute version to show in theaters, Out 1: Spectre (1972). Less a digest than a perverse variant — some shots were rearranged so that they had radically different meanings and contexts, and much of the comedy was turned into psychodrama — it’s the only version that’s ever shown in the U.S., though it hasn’t been screened for years. The original — almost certainly the best film ever made by anyone about the 60s counterculture and its demise — still shows periodically in Europe.

Godard’s eight-part, 264-minute video Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998), conceived and made over 20 years, has fared better, but it’s still pretty hard to come by. The only version ever sold in France is a lousy mono video transfer; a package of CDs and books in several languages transcribing major portions of the stereo sound track came out here years ago. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 21, 2006). — J.R.

Made at Fox on the heels of The Girl Can’t Help It, this inventive 1957 comedy by Frank Tashlin is his most avant-garde (surpassing even Son of Paleface) and probably his most political — and therefore one of his most misunderstood. Tashlin adapted a Broadway play by George Axelrod, discarding almost everything but the title, the advertising milieu, and actress Jayne Mansfield. Shot in glorious color and CinemaScope, the film stars Tony Randall as a Madison Avenue executive who recruits Mansfield to endorse his product, and it presents a thoughtful and multifaceted polemic against the success ethic (a key line: “Success will fit you like a shroud”). Like Chaplin’s A King in New York, released the same year, the movie delivers a devastating caricature of 50s America; both directors, anticipating Jean-Luc Godard’s journalistic directive that one can — and must — place everything in a film, created dystopian versions of New York in which TV and advertising (rightly perceived as synonymous) obliterate the divisions between public and private. In keeping with George S. Kaufman’s maxim that “satire is what closes on Saturday night,” Rock Hunter flopped at the box office and was disastrous for Tashlin’s career. Read more

The following was written at some point in the early 1980s, as a kind of postscript or pendant to my first book, the autobiographical Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (New York: Harper & Row, 1980; 2nd ed.,  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). I was living in Hoboken at the time, and secretly in love with another writer whose first name was Veronica. A slightly altered and doctored version of this piece eventually turned up in Ian Breakwell and Paul Hammond’s English anthology Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing (London: Serpant’s Tail, 1990). The version here has also been altered and doctored a little, and I’ve added all the photos, including those of the Ritz before and after its 1985 restoration. — J.R.

Putting Back the Ritz

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Between about 1947 and 1951, when the Ritz Theater in Sheffield, Alabama was still open (it was built in 1928 and received an Art Deco upgrade for talkies about five years later), my main encounters with the place, between the ages of four and eight, were on trips with my father across the river to pick up the final reports on the daily receipts on all four of the Rosenbaum theaters our family owned in Sheffield and Tuscumbia. Read more