Jonathan Rosenbaum

Posted by New Lines (https://newlinesmag.com/) with a different title on June 28, 2023:

It is a pity and a paradox that Jafar Panahi — Iran’s most important living filmmaker, in my judgment (at least among those I’m familiar with) — seems to be valued in the West more for his persecution than for his filmmaking. His first feature, “The White Balloon” (1995), became the first Iranian film ever to win a major award at the Cannes Film Festival (the Camera d’Or), and his four subsequent features — “The Mirror” (1997), “The Circle” (2000), “Crimson Gold” (2003) and “Offside” (2006) — all won awards at major festivals. But it wasn’t until Panahi was arrested in 2010, sentenced to six years in prison and banned from all filmmaking activities for the next 20 years that he was noticed in the mainstream press in the West. (He was charged with “propaganda against the system” for attending the funeral of a student killed during the 2009 Green Movement protests and for attempting to make a film sympathetic to that rebellion.)

Since then, Panahi has miraculously managed to make five more features in defiance of the ban, appearing as himself in each of them. Severely limited in terms of their resources and shooting conditions, the films have nonetheless garnered more attention than the five features made between 1995 and 2006, prior to his arrest. Read more

This is my text, read aloud for an audiovisual essay on Arrow Films’ new digital release of Red Angel.Due to a technical glitch in my sound recording, Arrow had to omit the last portion of my narration, which is retained here. — J.R.

Hello. My name is Jonathan Rosenbaum and I’m a Chicago-based film critic. Thanks to a research project that I embarked on in the late 1990s, and which I was able to pursue in both the United States and in Japan, I estimate that I’ve been able to see around 40 of Yasuzo Masumura’s 55 features. These 55 features were all made between 1957 and 1982. And on the basis of the 40 or so that I’ve seen, I would offer the generalization that Masumura’s best features often tend to be the ones in black and white and Cinemascope that were made in the 1960s, which was his most prolific period, and that a good many of them star the wonderful young actress Ayako Wakao, whom he first encountered when he was working as an assistant director to Kenji Mizoguchi on the latter’s final feature, Street of Shame, only two years before Masumura directed her in his own second feature, The Blue Sky Maiden. Read more

Commissioned by the Belgian web site Cinetek and posted in December 2022.

Displacement in relation to language stands at the center of André Delvaux’s troubling and troubled Un soir, un train (1968) — so precisely and so relentlessly that even the disquiet created by the collision of disparate nouns in the poetic title (a time and a place/ thing/vehicle, improbably yoked together like a chance meeting between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table) arguably becomes lost or at least diluted in its English translation. One Night… A Train, by contrast, feels like the opening phrase in a familiar-sounding narrative, a prosaic flow of words that accounts for the three- period ellipsis, continuance replacing collision. And somewhere in between this collision and this continuance is the sort of stasis or uncertainty of both time and place evoked by the Flemish title of the Johan Daisne novella that the film is loosely based on, De trein der traagheid, which my Google translation engine, recognizing it as Dutch, translates as “The Train of Indolence”.

In the film, a conflict is being played out between Mathias (Yves Montand), a Flemish linguist and literature professor, and a theatrical stage designer named Anne (Anouk Aimée) who left France to live with him in Belgium and feels both excluded and scorned by the Flemish members of Mathias’ circle. Read more

From the November 2024 Sight and Sound:

The best and worst to be said about Francis Ford Coppola is that he’s a compulsive reviser of his own self-portraits — not only when it comes to rereleasing new versions of his Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, and The Cotton Club, but even when it comes to his dropping and then reintroducing the ‘Ford’ in Francis Ford Coppola.

Part of what’s both fascinating and frustrating about his most ambitious and audacious film, developed over more than four decades, is the degree to which it revels in its own revisions — provocatively superimposing what looks like later drafts over earlier ones rather than using them as replacements. Far from emerging sadder but wiser, Megalopolis lands in our laps both happier and dumber for its lack of inhibitions. It becomes conventionally digestible only when it occasionally turns into an old-fashioned love story.

The conceit of imagining New York in terms of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BC (an attempted coup d’état to overthrow the Roman consuls with a populist revolt) entails not only a collapse of today, tomorrow, and yesterday, but alternate versions of all three, ergo a city reinvented whenever there’s a new scene to unravel. Read more

Simon Petri-Lukács conducted the following online interview with me, about 5,000 words long, and requested that I post it here.(I’m sorry that many or most of Simon’s links as given no longer work, but many can be reached via my site’s search engine.) In fact, it’s an extended sequel to the in-person interview that he did with me in the lobby of my hotel in Budapest when I briefly visited that city in February 2022; the photo below shows us there and then, with a couple of friends. I’ll let Simon take over from here. — J.R.

I interviewed Jonathan Rosenbaum back in February when he visited Budapest. Then, I asked him to be the Jewish Museum’s special Skype-guest later this year and to have a discussion about Elaine May, following her first ever retrospective in Hungary. Because of the pandemic, of course, the retrospective had to be postponed. This interview covers, among other things, the topic of our cancelled Q&A. Furthermore, it offers a broader look at Jonathan’s favorite comedies and his opinions on Jewish stereotypes in American films. It also includes a discussion of his 1997 book, Movies as Politics and the role of literature in his life.

One thing I regretfully forgot last time was to recommend certain works of Jonathan which are available to everyone on this website – except for those periods when he circulates certain articles, but sooner or later they’ll all be there. Read more

Published by DVD Beaver in April 2006. I’ve updated this to include further links for films that have subsequently become available; there are in fact quite a few of these, and, unless I’ve missed something, only one title that isn’t currently available, The Argyle Secrets. — J.R.

Most of my favorite offbeat musicals are commercially available on DVD, and I wrote about them for DVDBeaver in March. I can’t say the same about most of my favorite noirs, and I’m not sure why this is so.

It’s also important to stress that “noir” isn’t a genre; it’s a category that’s applied retroactively to films with certain traits in common — a practice started by French critics and eventually continued by us Yanks and others. (Check out James Naremore’s definitive 1998 book on the subject, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.) This makes it something more flexible than a genre, and I’ve tried to honor this factor in some of my choices.

In the following list I’ve managed to make peace with myself by appending one SBA title (which stands for “should be available”) to each one that you can currently buy, in the same general category, with brief explanations added. Read more

My column in the Winter 2021 issue of CinemaScope. — J.R.

Teaching an online course on Agnès Varda at the School of the Art Institute this fall for 39 students has put me in regular touch with Criterion’s superb 15-Blu-ray box set, The Complete Films of Agnès Varda, every week. The packaging reminds me in some ways of the handsome 78 rpm albums I used to cherish as objects and totems in the mid- to late 1940s, when I was still a toddler, although Criterion’s version of this sort of assembly, held in a box, manages to be neater and more compact. There’s also a richly illustrated and annotated 200-page book inside the box, with essays by Amy Taubin, Ginette Vincendeau, So Mayer, Alexandra Hidalgo, and Rebecca Bengal, and excellent “program notes” on all the films by Michael Koresky. In short, plenty to keep a coronavirus shut-in busy, even without a course to teach. 

The course has gradually brought home to me the complexly ambiguous lesson that Varda wasn’t really or exactly an auteur, at least not in the boys’-club meaning of that term as it’s most commonly used. But not being an auteur gave her a kind of freedom and a form of elasticity denied to most auteurs. Read more

From the Chicago Reader (July 23, 1999). — J.R.

It’s not at all surprising that Abel Ferrara’s most recent feature (1998) has failed to find an American distributor or that some of his most eloquent defenders have labeled this transgressive adaptation of a William Gibson story the collapse of a major talent. A murky and improbable tale about prostitution, industrial espionage, and manufactured viruses, it works on the very edge of coherence even before the final 20 minutes or so, during which earlier portions of the film are replayed with minor variations and additions. On the other hand, few American films in recent years have been so beautifully composed and color coordinated shot by shot, and the overall experience of an opium dream is so intense that you might stop making demands of the narrative once you realize that none of the usual genre expectations is going to be met. Almost all the principal action occurs offscreen, and most of Ferrara and Christ Zois’s script concentrates on scenes between a corporate raider named Fox (Christopher Walken); his deputy, X (Willem Dafoe); and Sandii (Asia Argento, daughter of cult horror director Dario Argento), an Italian prostitute hired to seduce a Japanese scientist. Read more