Publications & Events
Note: Corrections for this section are welcome. Please contact me at jonathanrosenbaum at earthlink dot net.
An index of all my long reviews for the Chicago Reader can be found here.
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 University of Chicago Press will be publishing my next collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, in October 2010.
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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, Plot Ediciones in Spain has been announcing on their website a forthcoming Spanish edition of Essential Cinema, although they stopped responding to my emails about two years ago and their web site no longer appears to be functioning. In early 2010, however, I did have an exchange of emails with Lola Mayo, who is proofreading and revising the Spanish translation and assures me that this book will be coming out eventually, even though no publication date has been set so far. Meanwhile, I can happily announce that another Spanish publisher, Errata Naturae Editores, 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 plans (or hopes?) to bring out on 1 November 2010. (Here is a link that suggests it may actually be happening.)
My other most recent book is Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 2007). One of its pieces, an essay on F For Fake written for the 2005 Criterion DVD of the film, has also been recently reprinted (in English) in the 4th issue of the trilingual Italian online magazine La Furia Umana, which has a very sizable section devoted to Welles, including an excellent discussion of Welles’ Heart of Darkness project by James Naremore; and in the same issue, among much else, there’s also a provocative piece by Adrian Martin about “pulp poetry”. And my last chapter, on Welles’ Don Quixote, has appeared in a new Spanish collection, Espejos entre ficciones. El cine y El Quijote (2009), edited by Carlos F. Heredero and published by the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales.
Speaking of which, I’ve recently written an essay about Welles for the Barnes and Noble Review. The same piece has turned up on Salon’s web site, with a different title and headline.
I’ve 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 never appeared, however, so I went ahead and posted the article here.
On March 4, 2010, “Room for Debate” asked me, “Do the Oscars Undermine Artistry? And Salon asked me for my quick reactions after the awards ceremony.
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa and I have published a dialogue about Kiarostami’s Shirin in the Chicago Reader (October 22). I’ve reposted it here. (Note: I will also be writing the liner notes for the Cinema Guild’s forthcoming DVD of this film.)
David Kalat and I have done a joint audio commentary for the forthcoming Masters of Cinema DVD and Blu-Ray releases of the newly restored 150-minute version of Metropolis, due out in the U.K. this fall.
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).
Ehsan Khoshbakht’s online Notes on Cinematograph has posted a translation of my essay “Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephila” in Farsi. (His jazz blog is well worth checking out, too.) And he recently emailed me that “Your Letter from Chicago has been translated into Farsi and published in the 410th issue of Film Monthly.” It turns out that the translation was done by Saeed Khamoush — the same person who compiled and translated into Farsi an unauthorized collection of 13 of my Chicago Reader pieces that was brought out by Mehraz, a publisher in Tehran, in 2001. (For those who might be curious, these 13 pieces were reviews of Boys Don’t Cry & The Straight Story, Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace & Trekkies, Gabbeh & She’s So Lovely, The Decalogue & Fargo, M, The Truman Show, American Beauty, Secrets and Lies, The Apostle & Kundun, Mars Attacks!, Breaking the Waves, Dead Man, and Eyes Wide Shut, in that order.)
Salon 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. In March, for its June issue, Sight and Sound polled me and several other critics about their favorite film books (a feature available online here), and in April, Miradas de Cine polled me and several others about the films of the past decade (best and most overrated) for their 97th issue. (Last year, they similarly took a poll about films of the 1930s.)
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.
Every few weeks or months, I stop off at the Chicago Reader to pick up mail sent to me from the few remaining outlets who assume I still work there (I retired from the staff in late February 2008). Most of this consists of press releases from New York’s Film Forum and Fedex packages marked “extremely urgent” from the frugal folks at Disney who continue to send me via express mail trailers for all their releases, none of which I ever requested or look at. But a recent batch also included a collection issued by the Centipede Press, Studies in the Horror Film: Night of the Living Dead, including a reprint of the chapter on George Romero in Midnight Movies, the book I wrote with J. Hoberman, a chapter erroneously credited only to me. But I’ve since discovered that this is a print-on-demand book and Jim Hoberman will be properly credited in future copies.
I’ve just received news that Casablanca Publishers will be issuing a Czech translation and edition of my book on Dead Man, for which I’ll be writing a new Foreword.
cem mil cigarros: os filmes de Pedro Costa (Lisboa: Orfeu Negro, 2009) is a beautifully produced hardcover 337-page Portuguese collection edited by Ricardo Matos Cabo that I’ve contributed an article to, about Casa de Lava. 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’m especially proud to be associated with the Fujiwara collection, one of the very best mainstream books about movies that I know, and am delighted to have recently received a copy of the 2009 Italian edition, Cinema: 1000 Momenti Fondamentali (see above).
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 gave 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 next article for them, to appear in August, is about some recent and innovative Russian DVDs devoted to films by Eisenstein and Kuleshov.
For Sight and Sound’s Lost & Found column, I’m writing about Françoise Romand’s innovative and highly unorthodox English-language documentary Mix-up (1985).
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. And, for the same label, I’ll be writing a new essay about Orson Welles’ Confidential Report.
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 Criterion DVD, I’ve contributed a joint audio commentary to Kiarostami’s Close-up with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. I’ve also written an essay for the Criterion DVD of Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, which will be coming out on August 10. 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 written liner notes for the DVD of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, released by The Cinema Guild, and I’ve done the same thing for their forthcoming DVD release of Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin.
I’ve been commissioned by Austrian experimental filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky to write 3000 words about another Austrian experimental filmmaker, Lisl Ponger (see above), for a forthcoming collection about the history of Austrian experimental cinema.
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 published two short pieces of mine about early films by Pere Portabella in a bilingual monograph about that filmmaker (2009), and I’ve contributed an extended piece about Pedro Costa for their subsequent bilingual monograph about that filmmaker, published 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 summer 2010 issue, I did some coverage of South by Southwest.
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. My review of Chris Fujniwara’s Jerry Lewis (University of Illinois Press) appeared in their Spring 2010 issue, and my review of Tony Pipolo’s Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film (Oxford University Press) has appeared in their summer 2010 issue, along with a short essay, “DVDs: A New Form of Collective Cinephilia”.
Meanwhile, for the second edition of James Quandt’s mammoth anthology of critical pieces about Bresson, which will also reprint an essay of mine about Affaires Publiques (Bresson’s first and most neglected film) from Film Comment, I’ve been participating in an email symposium that he’s been conducting with 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 30th of these to date — is online. Several previous columns are also available on the Cinema Scope site, and 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 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 17th column for them is in their May 2010 issue. I also reviewed Funny People for their last September issue.
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Upcoming and Recent Events
it looks like I’ll be teaching film for the art history department at Virginia Commonwealth University during the fall 2010 and spring 2011 semesters. I haven’t yet been offered a contract to sign, but the wheels are turning, and I’m currently planning my fall courses there (a film theory and film criticism course for undergraduates and a film criticism workshop for graduate students).
I attended Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in late June and early July, where I served again on their DVD jury and also gave a talk for the Europa Cinemas workshop “about the current discourse of cinema via blogging and websites.”
On July 22-35, I attended a very exciting and energetic Critics’ Week in Córdoba (Argentina), where, thanks to the help of my interpreters, I managed to participate in all the discussions despite my almost nonexistent Spanish. Below are (a) a photograph of Roger interviewing me for his local TV show, taken by Flavia de la Fuente, who has given very detailed and profusely illustrated daily reports of the weekend (in Spanish) here, at her and Quintín’s blog, and (b) a photo by Ciruja Di Pietro of my two-day seminar, where I’m flanked by my tireless interpreters, Quintín and Diego Lerer (go here for Diego’s own blog and account of the weekend, again in Spanish), who worked in relay. (At Quintín’s preceding two-day seminar, Roger and Diego also furnished me with a sentence-by-sentence rundown of virtually everything that was being said — a remarkable feat.) Gonzolo Maza from Chile, who had also planned to join us, regrettably had to cancel for personal reasons at the last moment.
On July 10, at a screening of Fahrenheit 451 held at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center sponsored by Stop Smiling, Sam Weller and I conducted a brief but very enjoyable live interview with Ray Bradbury via Skype.
I’ll be speaking about some of the themes of my forthcoming collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephila, at York University in Toronto on October 6.
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On March 12-17, I attended South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, and on March 25-28, I attended the French Film Festival in Richmond, Virginia.
On March 24, at 8 pm at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, I introduced a screening of Peter von Bagh’s Helsinki, Forever and lead a discussion about it afterwards.
I served on the FIPRESCI jury at the Oberhausen Film Festival (devoted to short films) from April 29 through May 4, with Gözde Anaran from Istanbul and Claudia Linssen from Berlin as my fellow jurors (see above) ; we gave our prize to Laura Garbštiené’s Film About an Unknown Artist, from Lithuania (see below). I’ve also written a short piece about some of the early silent films shown in Oberhausen that is on this site and has also appeared in Altyazi, a monthly Turkish film magazine that Gözde helps to put out and writes for.
Prior to Oberhausen, on April 22, I was supposed to give one of the two opening lectures at a three-day conference held in Berlin, “Post-cinema: The Dissolution of Limits in Film,” organized by Gertrud Koch, Kolker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöhler, but alas, volcanic ash from Iceland obliged me and Victor Burgin to both cancel these opening lectures. Simon is currently hoping to reschedule both of these talks in the fall.
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For my month-long series at the Austrian Film Museum last fall, “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 I 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.
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.
When I was still working at the Chicago Reader, I was interviewed for Citizen 3.0, a feature-length documentary about “copyright, creativity, and contemporary culture” by Leigh and Jason Moorfoot that can be accessed here.
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.
