Publications & Events
Note: Corrections for this section are welcome. Please contact me at jonathanrosenbaum at earthlink dot net.
I retired from the Chicago Reader at the end of February 2008, so people wishing to contact me for professional reasons should email me at the above address, not at the Reader or at Facebook or at The Auteurs.
For a list of my dozen books and links for ordering them on Amazon, go to this link. (Following the advice of Arindam Datta, a correspondent from West Bengal, India, here is another link that allows one to access an online version of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies.)
My first book as an editor, Rivette: Texts and Interviews (1977), was never reprinted and is difficult to come by nowadays, but virtually its entire contents (apart from the annotated filmography), as well as most of my articles about Jacques Rivette, are now available on an excellent web site, “Order of the Exile,” devoted to Rivette.
Recent and Upcoming Publications
The paperback edition of my 2004 collection Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Johns Hopkins University Press), with a new Afterword that includes some additions to my list of 1000 favorite films, came out in 2008.
For over three years now, Plot Ediciones in Spain has been announcing on their website a forthcoming Spanish edition of Essential Cinema, with an earlier version of the same new Afterword, but they stopped responding to my emails about two years ago, so I ‘m not at all confident that this is happening. (Update, 1/28/09: Although the publisher remains completely incommunicado, Lola Mayo recently wrote my friend Adrian Martin that she’d just been recruited by them to revise and proofread the Spanish translation, and that the book will be coming out “shortly” after she finishes this work. Almost a year later, I suspect this must have been some form of wishful thinking–which must also account for why Plot continues to list the book as “forthcoming” on its site. Or maybe, like the unauthorized 1999 Brazilian edition of my Greed book that the British Film Institute denied the very existence of, even after selling the rights of it to Rocco, this is simply an ongoing project that Plot for some reason doesn’t want me to know about.) Meanwhile, I can happily announce that another Spanish publisher, Errata Naturae Editores, has purchased the rights for a Spanish translation and edition of Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, a 2003 collection I coedited with Adrian Martin, which it currently plans (hopes?) to bring out on 1 November 2010.
My other most recent book is Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 2007).
The University of Chicago Press will be publishing my next collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, in September 2010.
I’ve just posted a new article for DVD Beaver, a site I’ve written for many times in the past, about some of my favorite 1930s films. (For links to my 11 previous articles on this site, go here.)
September 29, 2009: Less than two hours before I left home for a ten-day trip to Europe (Paris and Vienna), an “opinion editor” at the New York Times, apparently spurred by my recent (and very brief) post on the subject, asked me to write 300 words or less about some of the issues rasied by Roman Polanski’s recent arrest in Switzerland for a Times blog, “Room for Debate”. This was posted around the same time I was crossing the Atlantic. And as a belated spinoff of sorts, I was asked by Der Standard, a leading Vienna newspaper, to write something roughly three times longer about this topic in relation to contemporary public discourse in the U.S., during my final day in Vienna (October 9). This has never appeared, however, so I went ahead and posted the article here and am still awaiting a promised kill fee for the piece.
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and I have published a dialogue about Kiarostami’s Shirin in the Chicago Reader (October 22). I’ve reposted it here.
For its huge, 308-page 10th issue, the online and profusely illustrated Spanish magazine SHANGRI-LA has devoted over a third of its first pages to the late Edward Yang, including a translation of my 1997 essay about him, “Exiles in Modernity” (pp. 25-35).
And Ehsan Khoshbakht’s online Notes on Cinematograph has just posted a translation of my essay “Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephila” in Farsi. (His jazz blog is well worth checking out, too.)
Salon has asked me to write briefly about my favorite film of the 2000s, for the launch of their film blog in early December. Guess which film I picked.
Among other end-of-the-year wrap-ups, I’ve participated in Miriam Bale’s “The Discerning Person’s Guide to Underrated Christmas Movies” in The L Magazine and polls conducted at DVD Beaver, Film Comment, Indiewire, Moving Image Source, Sight and Sound, and The Village Voice.
On Film Festivals, an anthology edited by Richard Porton for Wallflower Press’s Dekalog series, recently published, includes a long autobiographical piece by me in it.
My article about Emile de Antonio’s Mr. Hoover and I has been translated into Italian for a retrospective catalogue in Trieste edited by Federico Rossin, American Collage: Il Cinema di Emile de Antonio.
I’m finally holding in my hands cem mil cigarros: os filmes de Pedro Costa (Lisboa: Orfeu Negro, 2009), a beautifully produced hardcover 337-page Portuguese collection edited by Ricardo Matos Cabo that I’ve contributed an article to, about Casa de Lava. And I eagerly await an English-language edition, which I’m told is at least theoretically in the works.
My lengthy article about Manoel de Oliveira for the July-August 2008 issue of Film Comment is available here. And my 1981 essay about his Doomed Love, reprinted in my 1995 collection Placing Movies, was recently translated into Portuguese and also reprinted again in English in a 2008 exhibition catalogue published by the Museu Serralves.
My thanks to Michael Guillen in Berkeley for doing such a great job of referencing and cross-indexing much of my writing about Jacques Tati, with a good many quotes and links (many of them back to this site).
I’ve contributed many pieces to Chris Fujiwara’s Defining Moments in Movies and a couple to Dennis Lim’s The Village Voice Film Guide (both 2007), and also contributed a chapter on “Wonder” (”Kid Stuff”) to another collection, Time Out 1000 Films to Change Your Life (2006).
I’ve published eleven articles on the web site Moving Image Source since it was launched in June 2008 (a month after this web site started), including most recently one about Clint Eastwood’s critiquing of his own persona in White Hunter, Black Heart. (On the evening of January 28, I’m giving a guest lecture on this film at Northwestern University, in Sara Vaux’s Clint Eastwood course.) My article about Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s remarkable and neglected 1953 short Statues Also Die was posted on November 6, and my review of In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles by Chris Welles Feder (Algonquin Books on Chapel Hill), appeared a week later. Prior to those two, my most recent piece is about Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (posted September 22).
My essay “From Playtime to The World: The Expansion and Depletion of Space within Global Economies,” which will also be included in my next collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia (see above), is making its first appearance in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, an excellent new anthology edited by Nataša Ďuroviĉová and Kathleen Newman, New York/London, Routledge (AFI Film Reader series). That’s The World, in fact, that the cover still comes from.
Committed Cinema: The Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; Essays and Interviews, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in September 2009, leads off with two essays of mine. on La Promesse and Rosetta.
I expanded my 1993 essay about Luis Buñuel’s The Young One for the Australian DVD of this film, released on the Madman label.
An ancient piece of mine, to be called “Elia Kazan, Seen from 1973,” will appear with a new preface in a forthcoming critical collection being edited for Wesleyan University Press by Lisa Dombrowski, Elia Kazan Revisited.
I reviewed Kazan on Directing in the July-August 2009 issue of Film Comment. I also wrote a short (300-word) review of Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton for their March-April 2009 issue.
One of my most interesting and challenging recent assignments has been to write the Introduction for the Chinese translation and Chinese edition of James Naremore’s More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, my favorite book about film noir (and reportedly the first Chinese book about noir to be appearing). This introduction has been posted here.
Whenever Stop Smiling releases its final issue — a mammoth production devoted to Stanley Kubrick, also slated to come out eventually as a book– this will contain an exchange between Naremore and myself about Kubrick’s early films, as well as additional bits by me about Eyes Wide Shut and Naremore’s book On Kubrick.
The Oxford American, which discussed my work in the editorial of its June 2009 issue (not online), has also recently posted an interview with me on its web site.
I’ve written something short and personal about Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible for The Current, an online blog maintained by Criterion, which has been posted along with a clip.
For a forthcoming Criterion DVD, I’ve contributed a joint audio commentary to Kiarostami’s Close-up with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. And for a box set devoted to Rossellini’s “war trilogy,” I’ve written a short essay about Germany Year Zero that Criterion has also published here.
For a British Film Institute DVD, I’ve written a short essay on Sally Potter’s always-neglected and splendid The Gold Diggers (1983), a feminist avant-garde musical which features, by Babette Mangolte’s own account, her best black and white cinematography.
I’ve also written liner notes for the DVD of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, released by The Cinema Guild.
An essay of mine entitled “End or Beginning: Sixty Years of Moviegoing (in Alabama and Elsewhere)” appeared in May 2009 in the Norwegian magazine Z.
The Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea recently published two short pieces of mine about early films by Pere Portabella in a bilingual monograph about that filmmaker, and I’ve contributed an extended piece about Pedro Costa for their festival in spring 2010.
I’ve reviewed the disappointing new Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice, for Slate. And I have another recent piece in Slate about some of the mystifications of DVD packaging in relation to film history.
I’ve written a new essay about Roberto Rossellini’s India Matri Buhmi for an extremely handsome, beautifully illustrated new collection just published in India by The Shoestring Publisher, Outsider Films on India, edited by Shanay Jhaveri. (You can order it from Amazon in the U.K. by following the above link.) It also includes essays by many valued friends and colleagues, including Erika Balsom (on Malle’s Phantom India), Tom Gunning (on Lang’s two Indian films), Priya Jaikumar (discussing Renoir’s The River with Jhaveri), Jhaveri himself (on Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah), James Quandt (on Corneau’s Nocturne Indien), Adrian Martin (on Duras’ India Song), Kaunteya Shah (on Pasolini’s Notes for a Film on India), Shah and Jhaveri (on Tanner’s Une Ville à Chandigarh), and Leslie Ann Thornton and Tom Zummer (two more theoretical pieces), and I strongly recommend it.
Starting with the fall 2008 issue of Film Quarterly, I’ve been writing for that magazine with some regularity as a “writer-at-large”. In the Fall 2008 issue, I had an essay about Adam Curtis; in the Winter 2008-2009 issue, I had an article about two films by John Gianvito, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein and Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (also posted here); I had a short piece about sexism in the early French New Wave in the Spring 2009 issue, and, most recently, an essay about and dialogue with Chicago filmmaker Peter Thompson in the Fall 2009 issue. For the next summer issue (2010), I’ll be doing a dialogue with Pedro Costa.
I’ve written a short essay about Jacques Tati’s Parade — his last film, and his least known — for the recent BFI release of that film on DVD in the U.K.
I’ve written a polemical article about the critical reputation of The Godfather and its first sequel (and some of the ideological ramifications of this) for the Dutch magazine De Filmkrant’s special English-language newspaper that appeared at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in late January 2009. The editor, Dana Linssen, kindly granted me permission to post it post here. And I have an article in their follow-up, 2010 issue about Pedro Costa’s Ne Change Rien.
The web site Close-up has reprinted my essay “Sign and Cinema” from the Second Run DVD release of In the Land of the Deaf, where it serves as liner notes.
I wrote an overview article about Nagisa Oshima, in conjunction with a retrospective at the Walter Reade cinema in New York, for the October 2008 issue of Artforum. More recently, I’ve written a short piece about Carl Dreyer for their web site (in conjunction with a Dreyer retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), another short piece about Jim McBride’s early films for a retrospective held at Anthology Film Archives, and a third short piece on Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.
I’ve also written a short piece, “History and Egotism: Me and Orson Welles“, for the FIPRESCI web site (along with a more recent piece for them about a couple of films at the Seattle International Film Festival — an article that I’m still waiting, probably in vain, for them to run). And on the same site, I have pieces in the first and third issues of their magazine Undercurrent.
Among the magazine symposiums I’ve participated in lately are one on cult films in Cineaste, where my responses are fairly terse, and another one on cinephilia for Framework 50 (1/2, 2009).
My review of the recent critical biographies of Otto Preminger by Chris Fujiwara and Foster Hirsch was in their summer 2008 issue of Cineaste. (It isn’t available online.) My response to a symposium on Internet film criticism is in their fall 2008 issue. And my reviews of Chris Fujniwara’s Jerry Lewis (University of Illinois Press) and Tony Pipolo’s Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film (Oxford University Press) will appear in future issues.
Meanwhile, for the second edition of James Quandt’s mammoth anthology of critical pieces about Bresson, I’ve been participating in an email symposium that he’s been conducting with Nicole Brenez, Kent Jones, Dan Morgan, and Brian Edward Price.
There’s a revised second edition now (2009) of Frank Films: The Film and Video Work of Robert Frank, a 2003 collection edited by Brigitta Bürger-Utzer and Stefan Grissemann; both editions include my consideration of my own favorite Frank film, C’est vrai! (One Hour).
“Global Discoveries on DVD”, my column in Cinema Scope — my 28th of these to date — is online. Several previous columns are also available on the Cinema Scope site, and I recently discovered that Annett Busch at Missing Image — a German web site originally created around a video store in Munich — has provided links to at least a dozen of these on the same page. Thanks to the discovery, I noticed for the first time that the online version of my 17th column, “Textual Issues,” was inadvertently renamed “Perversities” — the same title as my 16th column — online, an error that was subsequently corrected on the Cinema Scope site. (Also on the Missing Image site, along with many links to various items on this web site, Annett Busch has posted the original, unedited draft of my review of Serge Daney’s last two collections, volumes 1 and 2 of La Maison Cinéma et le monde, commissioned by New Left Review for their July/August 2005 issue. You can alternately purchase the edited and somewhat expanded version of this for three quid at their web site.)
Meanwhile, I continue to write a bimonthly column, “En Movimiento,” for Cahiers du Cinéma España, which started with their first issue in May 2007; my 16th column for them will appear in February 2010, and my 15th is in their December issue. I also reviewed Funny People for their last September issue.
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Upcoming and Recent Events
On Friday, January 15 at 7 pm, I introduced a screening of Margot Benacerraf’s 1959 Venezuelan film Araya at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films, and lead a discussion afterwards.
For my month-long series at the Austrian Film Museum, “The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S.,” which was also a sidebar at the Viennale later the same month, I held a press conference and spoke at some of the first programs in the series on October 5-9. I’m sorry that my teaching schedule in Scotland (see below) precluded attending the Viennale, but at least I was around to help launch the series beforehand. I prepared a book-length (184-page) bilingual catalogue for this retrospective, all of it written by me, with reprinted articles and capsules as well as new material, which is now available from both the Film Museum and the Viennale. (It can also be ordered from German Amazon here for about 20 Euros plus postage — a rather steep price, although this is a handsome, coffee-table-size volume.) And if you speak German and want to access an Austrian TV report about this retrospective, including an interview with me, you can do so here. (Richard Porton, one of the editors at Cineaste, was kind enough to cite this catalogue in Moving Image Source’s end-of-the-year feature.)
Along with a few other friends of the late Filippino film critic Alexis Tioseco, I was interviewed about him for Singapore radio, on a segment that was broadcast on October 11.
After less than a week of R & R back in Chicago, I flew back to Europe again to teach at the Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, from October 19 through November 7. Apart from half a dozen classes I taught and/or lectures I gave there (see photos above, the second with Dina Iordinova, the director of their Film Studies program), I also gave lectures at the University of Kent in Canterbury on October 29 and at the University of Glasgow on November 4.
Back in Illinois, I spoke about my book Essential Cinema and other topics to librarians at the North Suburban Library Center in Wheeling on November 12.
On December 1, I gave a lecture at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond similar to the ones I gave in the U.K. in St. Andrews, Canterbury, and Glasgow, entitled (like my forthcoming book) “Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia”. And on December 2, I gave yet another lecture with that title at Chicago’s Newberry Library.
On January 18-24, I attended the Tromsø International Film Festival, the largest film festival in Norway, where introduced Peter von Bagh’s Helsinki, Forever (a film I selected), spoke about Orson Welles and on a panel about film festivals, and also spoke about film criticism to a gathering of Norwegian film critics.
Later in the spring and summer, I also expect to be attending South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and the French Film Festival in Richmond, Virgina, both in March, the Oberhausen Film Festival in late April and early May, a film festival called Kinotavr in Sochi, Russia in early June, Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy in late June and early July, and a critic’s week in Córdoba, a province in Argentina, in late July
In Norway, I was briefly interviewed by Maria Kuvshinova for her Russian web site open space; here’s the link to the interview that she just sent to me.
Prior to Oberhausen, on April 22, I’ll be giving one of the two opening lectures at a three-day conference to be held at the Arsenal in Berlin, “Post-cinema: The Dissolution of Limits in Film,” which is being organized by Gertrud Koch, Kolker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothoehler.
I’m proud to be featured, along with many others, in the cast of a A Woman Apart, a documentary in progress by Larry Kamerman about my friend Jackie Raynal, a trailer for which can be seen here.
Michael Reano recently interviewed me for 24 x 24, a documentary he’s making with Bud Young about Michael Wilmington.
