About This Site
The photograph of me on the right, taken in Buenos Aires, is by Dolores Sánchez.
Apart from Notes (comments on books, films, paintings, music, etc.), which are posted periodically, along with reprints of texts of mine that may not otherwise be readily available, this web site includes Featured Texts which are, most often, long reviews which appeared in the Chicago Reader between 1987 and early 2008 -– and a list of recent publications and upcoming events, updated with some regularity. (An index to all my long reviews in the Reader can be accessed here.)
According to my calculations, based on scrapbook entries, I’ve published over 8,000 items since the late 60s. And according to my former technical adviser and helper Benjamin Coy, over 5,500 of these appeared in the Chicago Reader. Thanks in part to Ben’s diligent work, there are now (as of July 29, 2010) 7,813 separate items or “posts” on this web site (not counting 25 or so items which have been prepared or reformatted but not yet published) , which most likely include virtually all of my articles and capsule reviews from the Reader, approximately 206 Notes (some of which are republished texts), 63 other “featured texts” that haven’t appeared in the Reader, and, I would guess, some other posts that are either unwitting duplications or else mystery texts that haven’t yet been identified (unless that estimate of “over 5,500” was unduly conservative).
In some cases, if one looks up a particular film title, one may even find shorter and longer versions of the same capsule — a reflection of the Reader’s practice in recent years of trimming some of its longer capsules to conserve space. However, most of my published writing apart from my work for the Reader is not on this site. In a few cases, due to some computer glitch, capsule reviews have been transported from the Reader web site in incomplete form. In those cases, I would advise going to the Reader’s own web site for the full version of the capsule, and would appreciate it if readers who encounter this problem could email me about it (at jonathanrosenbaum at earthlink dot net) so that I can restore the full version of the review on my site.
A caveat regarding the dates in the right-hand column: Many of these are correct, but at least a tenth of them and possibly many more than that are not to be trusted. The reason for this is that computers compute and follow some orders but don’t think. Over 700 of my capsule reviews were never dated on the Reader’s database, and then had to be dated arbitrarily in order to be imported; and there are probably some others that were already dated incorrectly on the database for one reason or another. There are most likely other glitches as well. I would welcome information from readers about ones that might be correctable, if they wish to email me (jonathanrosenbaum at earthlink.net), and I’ll correct these if I can.
I can happily report that the traffic on this site has nearly tripled since it was launched a couple of years ago. According to Google Analytics’ Dashboard, checked most recently on July 29, 2010, this site received 32,384 visits from 21,322 people and 54,286 pageviews over the previous month. (It’s gratifying to discover that since my visit to Córdoba last week, the number of Argentinians visiting this site has grown enormously.) These visitors used 80 languages and came from 140 countries/territories, including, among others, 16,802 from the U.S., 2,127 from Canada, 1,806 from the U.K., 1,221 from Germany, 785 from Australia, 684 from Argentina, 672 from India, 653 from France, 634 from Spain, 437 from Brazil, 401 from Italy, 342 from Sweden, 313 from the Netherlands, 279 from Poland, 273 from the Philippines, 261 from Portugal, 256 from Japan, 233 from Russia, 218 from Finland, 210 from Iran, 204 from Romania, 192 from New Zealand, 196 from New Zealand, 195 from Ireland, 191 from Israel, 171 from Mexico, 167 from Turkey, 154 from Austria, 146 from Chile, 145 from Indonesia, 143 from Belgium, 141 from South Korea, 125 from China, 116 from Denmark, 115 from Norway, 108 from Greece, 105 each from the Czech Republic and Peru, 99 from Serbia, 97 from Singapore, 92 from Switzerland, 80 from Thailand, 74 from Hungary, 71 from Egypt, 63 from the Ukraine, 59 from Croatia, 57 each from Pakistan and Hong Kong, 56 from Saudi Arabia, 50 from Colombia, 49 from Malaysia, 41 from United Arab Emirates, 38 from South Africa, 35 each from Bulgaria and Taiwan, 33 each from Georgia and Vietnam, 32 from Puerto Rico, 29 from Slovakia, 26 from Slovenia, 24 from Bosnia and Herzegovina, 23 from Estonia, 21 from Uruguay, 20 from Ecuador, 19 from Tunisia, 17 each from Algeria and Sri Lanka, 16 each from Iceland and Venezuela, 15 from Montenegro, 14 from Qatar, 13 each from Lebanon, Macedonia, and Montenegro, 12 from Latvia, 11 each from the Dominican Republic and Paraguay, 10 each from Costa Rica, Jordan, Kuwait, and Palestinian territories, 9 each from Albania and Armenia, 8 from Belarus, 6 each from Moldova and Nepal, 6 each from Cyprus, Honduras, Iraq, and Kazakhstan, 4 each from Bangladesh, El Salvador, and Jamaica, 3 each from Azerbaijan, Fiji, Libya, Malta, Mauritius, and Rwanda, 2 each from Bahrain, Brunei, Cuba, Luxembourg, Mynanmar, Nicaragua, Oman, Panama, Sudan, Syria, Tanzania, and Trinidad and Tobago, and 1 each from Andorra, Antigua and Baruda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cambodia, Cote d’Ivoire, French Polynesia, Gabon, Ghana, Guam, the Isle of Man, Kenya, Mauritius, Mongolia, Namibia, Netherlands Antilles, New Caldonia, Senegal, Trinidad and Tobago, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
***
The below items list most of my posts to date under “Notes”:
2008:
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (Chicago Reader review, 5/1)
Ernest Borneman (5/16)
Douglas Sirk on DVD (5/18)
Recommended Reading: Naomi Klein (5/20)
Jean Eustache (5/20)
Two late books by William Styron (5/21)
Ahmad Jamal (5/22)
THE LAST HUNT (5/22)
Shklovsky’s LIERATURE AND CINEMATOGRAPHY (5/25)
Alain Resnais/Harry Dickson (5/26)
David Bordwell web site (5/26)
“Zhang Ke Jie, Poetic Prophet” (5/28)
AT THE DEATH HOUSE DOOR (5/29)
Forugh Farrokhzad poems (5/29)
Jean-Pierre Gorin DVD extra about PIERROT LE FOU (6/1)
IN A DARK DARK HOUSE (LaBute play) (6/1)
Barack Obama/TV commentators (6/4)
THE SCOUNDREL (6/5)
THE FURIES (6/6)
BLAST OF SILENCE (6/9)
Mark Rappaport book (in French) (6/11)
“Cassavetes’ Prelude and Postscript” (6/12)
THE TENDER TRAP (6/13)
Fred Camper art (6/13)
RED-HEADED WOMAN (6/19)
Tim Russert/Dennis Kucinich (6/22)
Manoel de Oliveira (6/25)
“A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava” (on CASA DE LAVA) (6/25)
THE LAST FRONTIER (6/26)
IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER (7/6)
A DANDY IN ASPIC/DESPERATE (7/14)
Barack Obama/The New Yorker (7/14)
TEX AVERY: A UNIQUE LEGACY (7/19)
PETE KELLY’S BLUES (7/23)
THE RACK/TIME LIMIT/John McCain (7/25)
MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT/Kim Novak (7/29)
Books on Charles Fort and Mayakovsky (8/5)
OUSMANE SEMBENE: INTERVIEWS (8/6)
KISS ME, STUPID (8/10)
UNFIT FOR PUBLICATION (8/14)
Buñuel & Fuller (photograph) (8/17)
Chris Fujiwara on STRANGER ON HORSEBACK (8/18)
Letter from Patricia Patterson to John Powers (8/27)
Kiarostami’s SHIRIN: A Fiction (8/31)
A Reduced GIANT (9/2)
THE LUCKY ONES (at the Toronto Film Festival) (9/12)
PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE (9/15)
Two Ambitious Web Sites (10/11)
LOVE ME TONIGHT & MULHOLLAND DRIVE (10/13)
God as a Litigant (10/15)
Two Early Long-Take Climaxes (THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS and A STAR IS BORN) (11/1)
CHANGLING (11/2)
Euphoria (Obama’s Election) (11/5)
MY SON JOHN (11/16)
SKIPALONG ROSENBLOOM (11/16)
THE STRUGGLE (11/18)
Among the Missing (Malraux’s L’ESPOIR) (11/27)
American Self-Scrutiny, Writ Large (12/5)
THE ORDER OF MYTHS/MILK (12/7)
DVD Beaver’s New Toolbar (12/11)
Elizabeth Drew on FROST/NIXON (12/17)
THE STRANGER’S RETURN (12/20)
Sadeq Hedayat’s THREE DROPS OF BLOOD (12/24)
On the Web: Cinema Treasures (12/25)
Two Nervy End-of-the-Year Pictures (THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON and GRAN TORINO) (12/26)
***
2009:
Gilbert Adair’s AND THEN THERE WAS NO ONE (1/4)
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (1/12)
Vanity Frame Enlargement (FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER) (1/17)
Leos Carax’s MERDE (1/22)
BIRD OF PARADISE (1/28)
SEDUCED AND ABANDONED Revisited (2/2)
NOT ENOUGH AIR (An Amazing Play) (2/6)
SATANTANGO at 15 (2/7)
NATIVE SON (novel and play) (2/10)
One Observation and Three Figures (2/13)
Barack Obama’s DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE (2/17)
HELSINKI, FOREVER (A City Symphony) (2/20)
FRANKLY, MY DEAR: GONE WITH THE WIND REVISITED (3/3)
Dave Hickey’s THE INVISIBLE DRAGON (3/18)
FLANNERY: A LIFE OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR (3/20)
Fredric Brown, Madness, and CRACK-UP (3/22)
Stanley Rosenbaum Residence: The Dream Version (3/24)
Correction of Previous Post (3/24)
J. Hoberman in French and in English (3/31)
Joe Klein on Why We Should Legalize Pot (4/4)
THE COMEDIAN (1957) (4/11)
FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: THE STORY OF AMERICAN FILM CRITICISM (4/16)
A Piece of Folk Wisdom from Little Rock (4/21)
On WINSTANLY (4/24)
Jarmusch Unlimited: THE LIMITS OF CONTROL (4/24)
On Luc Moullet books and DVD (5/3)
What is Cinema? (and, if you know what that is, what is film study?) (on new translation of Bazin) (5/4)
New Yorker Profile of Jia Zhangke (5/11)
QUO VADIS Revisited (5/14)
A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (5/18)
Thornton Wilder’s HEAVEN’S MY DESTINATION (5/20)
Jerry Lewis Film Series in Los Angeles in June (5/21)
The Online William K. Everson Collection (5/24)
Everybody’s Orson Welles (5/28)
Books by Alfred Leslie (5/30)
STRAUSS AT MIDNIGHT (Theater Oobleck play) (6/19)
Makhmalbaf’s Message (6/19)
Rhetoric About Iran: Americans Learning from Their Mistakes (5/23)
Notes on Two D’Arrast Films (6/25)
Michael Jackson and the Suspension of World History (6/25)
PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN in Bologna (7/3)
Interview with Jia Zhangke by Dudley Andrew (7/5)
The Ayatollahs Have Spoken (Michael Jackson Memorial) (7/11)
On the Denied Politics of THE HURT LOCKER (7/14)
J. Hoberman on IN A LONELY PLACE (7/17)
Tati’s Influence on David Lynch (7/22)
Two 2006 Reader film blogs (& one afterword) (7/27)
“Rediscovering ALI: FEAR EATS THE SOUL” (7/29)
TV News and the Myth of Public Opinion (Kinsley vs. Borneman) (7/31)
“In defense of spoilers” (2006 Reader blog post) (8/4)
Racist Shorthand in the U.S. (8/6)
Cukor and Sensuality (8/10)
My Favorite Films of the 1930s (8/11)
‘Film history that is open to the present” (2006 Reader blog post) (8/14)
Daniel Mendelsohn on the New Tarantino (8/17)
VINCENTE MINNELLI: THE ART OF ENTERTAINMENT (8/19)
Some Afterthoughts about Tarantino (8/27)
On Scalping [+ postscript] (8/29)
Christian Keathley on Otto Preminger (9/1)
Alexis A. Tioseco, R.I.P. (9/2)
“The Origins of Goofus McPherson” (2007 Reader blog post) (9/5)
Masterpiece Alert (UN SOIR, UN TRAIN) (9/14)
Eric Hobsbawm on Americn Empire (9/17)
WILD GRASS (LES HERBES FOLLES) (9/27)
Morris Dickstein’s DANCING IN THE DARK (9/28)
On the Arrest of Roman Polanski [updated, 10/2/09] (9/28)
A dialogue about death by Milan Kundera (10/4)
CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY (10/5)
Recommended Reading: Two Books by and about Lindsay Anderson (10/13)
Jafar Panahi and Early Portabella: On DON”T COUNT ON YOUR FINGERS and CUADECUC, VAMPIR (10/15)
Orson Welles’ Failure vs. David Thomson’s Success (10/23; expanded 10/25)
Two Good Reasons to be Back in the U.K. (and three quotes) (10/28)
BRIGHT STAR (11/09)
A SERIOUS MAN (11/14)
DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN (11/17; written 2/05)
WINTER DREAMS: Cassavetes Meets Frankenheimer (& Sternberg & Cassavetes) (11/26)
A Quote from a Famous General (12/1)
Ten Best Lists, 1972-76 (12/21)
Robin Wood’s Final Top Ten (12/24)
“American Cinema” as Seen From the U.K. (12/26)
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES: half a dozen responses (12/31)
***
2010:
Ten Best Lists, 1980s (1/6)
Ten Best Lists, 1990-1994 (1/8)
Note on the death of Eric Rohmer (see “Master of Reality”) (1/13)
Richard Combs on Michael Haneke (1/15)
CITIZEN KANE and The New York Times (just for the record…) (1/16)
Ten & Twenty Best Lists, 1995-1999 (1/19)
Ten Best Lists, 2000-2004 (1/23)
J.D. Salinger (1919-2010): A Minor Memoir (1/29)
Inroduction to an Index compiled for this site (2/7)
Ten Best Lists (2000-2005) (2/13)
Keith Jarrett, Symphony Center (Chicago) (2/13)
Preface to the Argentinian edition of MOVIE MUTATIONS (2002) (2/20)
Index of long reviews from the Chicago Reader (2/25)
The Apotheosis of Donald Phelps (and David Wayne) (3/6)
The Most Alarming News of the New Millennium (3/19)
Recommended Viewing: MURDER BY CONTRACT (3/21)
“Make No Mistake: The Day the Towers Fell” (previously unpublished) (3/22)
An Unidentified Subject (Egoyan’s CHLOE) (3/29)
Esoterica (4/6)
Two Films at the French Film Festival (4/17)
The New York Times Celebrates and Cheerfully Perpetuates Neanderthal Thinking (4/19)
A Forthcoming Novel by Robin Wood (4/20)
Theatrical Invention (THE FARNSWORTH INVENTION) (4/22)
Early Silents in Oberhausen (5/10) (upgraded, 5/23)
Recommended Viewing: THE GHOST SONATA at the Oracle (5/14)
FILM SOCIALISME, etc., 40 Years Ago and Now (5/25)
Farewell to Dennis Hopper, R.I. P. (1936-2010) (5/30)
Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD Awards 2010 (7/2)
Two French Godard Books: Informational Obstacles (and Teasers) (7/7)
PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN on DVD and the Irretrievable Past (7/8)
A Little More on Truffaut (7/11)
***********************************************************************************************
Below is a list of all my earlier texts posted to this site preceding my work at the Chicago Reader – most of which can now also be found by checking the dates prior to 1987 in the right-hand column. I’ve also included some non-Reader texts published since August 1987 that have been posted here. The main purpose behind this second list, which is very far from exhaustive, is to provide texts that weren’t written specifically for this site (found in the above list) or for the Reader.
Here are some abbreviations for the publications in which some of the pieces below appeared: AF: American Film, BO: Bard Observer, CDCE: Cahiers du Cinéma España, CO: Camera Obscura, FC: Film Comment, FQ: Film Quarterly, MSF: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, MFB: Monthly Film Bulletin, R: Rouge, S: Slate, S&S: Sight and Sound, SN: Soho News, SS: Stop Smiling, TO: Take One, VT: Video Times, VV: The Village Voice.
“Now and Then” (MSF, Nov. 1957)
Review of THE CRYING OF LOT 49 (BO, May 1966)
“Moviegoing at Cannes: Classics without labels” (VV, June 1971)
Paris Journal (Demy, Pollet, Franju, Tati, Rivette) (FC, Sept. 1971)
Paris Journal (Paris moviegoing, MODERN TIMES) (FC, April 1972)
“Surprises at Cannes: Huston redeemed, Tashlin reincarnated” (VV, June 1972)
PARK ROW (FC, Summer 1972)
Paris Journal (Ozu) (FC, July 1972)
Paris Journal (ENTHUSIASM, TOUT VA BIEN, THE ENCHANTED DESNA) (FC, Oct. 1972)
“Home movie of homelessness” (REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA) (VV, Nov. 2, 1972)
Review of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (VV, March 1973)
“Tati’s Democracy: An Interview & Introduction” (FC, May 1973)
“Cannes Journal” (FC, September-October 1973)
“Second Thoughts on Stroheim” (FC, May 1974)
AMARCORD (MFB, Sept. 1974)
BLACKMAIL (MFB, Oct. 1974)
JUGGERNAUT (MFB, Oct. 1974)
TONI (MFB, October 1974)
Review of Gore Vidal’s MYRON (VV, Nov. 1974)
BADLANDS (MFB, Nov. 1974)
Review of Noel Burch’s THEORY OF FILM PRACTICE (S&S, Winter 1974/75
THE LIFE OF OHARU (MFB, March 1975)
Review of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW (VV, March 1975)
NIGHT MOVES (MFB, May 1975)
LA SIGNORA SENZA CAMELIE (MFB, May 1975)
LETTER TO JANE (MFB, July 1975)
MURDER (MFB, July 1975)
NUMBER SEVENTEEN (MFB, August 1975)
SOME CALL IT LOVING (S&S, Autumn 1975)
MOANA (MFB, December 1975)
WINSTANLEY (FC, January-February 1976)
NOT RECONCILED (MFB, March 1976)
THE HOMECOMING/THE MAIDS (MFB, March 1976)
WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY? (MFB, March 1976)
HOT TIMES (MFB, April 1976)
RENDEZVOUS AT BRAY (MFB, April 1976)
LITTLE RURAL RIDING HOOD (MFB, May 1976)
Tex Avery entry (Cinema: A Critical Dictionary) (May 1976)
SCREWBALL SQUIRREL (MFB, May 1976)
FATS WALLER (MFB, July 1976)
THE RING (MFB, July 1976)
BLACK AND TAN (MFB, July 1976)
FAMILY PLOT (S&S, July 1976)
“DUELLE: Notes on a First Viewing” (FC, September 1976)
OBSESSION (MFB, October 1976)
“Truffaut & Me & Bazin (a memoir, a review, and three letters)” (November 1976)
DIE MARQUISE VON O… (MFB, December 1976)
“Regrouping: Reflections on the Edinburgh Festival 1976″ (S&S, January 1977)
“A la Recherche de Luc Moullet” (FC, November 1977)
“Aspects of Anatahan” (FC, January-February 1978)
“Obscure Objects of Desire: A Jam Session on Non-Narrative” (with Raymond Durgnat & David Ehrenstein) (FC, July 1978)
“Take Two: THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T.” (AF, October, 1978)
REMEMBER MY NAME (FQ, April 1979)
“The True Auteur: RICHARD PRYOR LIVE IN CONCERT” (TO, May 1979)
“Glum is Beautiful: LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA” (TO, July 19790
Review of Graham Greene’s DR. FISCHER OF GENEVA (SN, May 1980)
“May the Force Leave Us Alone” [on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK] (SN, May 1980)
“Dr. Percy to the Rescue” [on Walker Percy’s THE SECOND COMING] (SN, July 1980]
“Sam Fuller Spills His Guts” [on THE BIG RED ONE, including interview] (SN, July 1980)
“A Fine Madness” [The Legacy of Mad Comics] (SN, July 1980)
“Reactionary Humor and Southern Comfort” [Review of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES] (SN, August 1980)
“Sirk’s Works” (SN, August 1980)
“Barthes of My Heart” [review of Roland Barthes’ NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS] (SN, September 1980)
“Catching Up with Godard” (interview) (SN, September 1980)
“Hollywood or Bust” (SN, October 1980)
“Under the Sign of Sontag” [review of UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN] (SN, November 1980)
“Mudpie Modernism” [review of PERFUMED NIGHTMARE] (SN, November 1980)
“The Awkward Agee” [review of AGEE] (SN, November 1980)
“Cliff Notes from Mt. Olympus” [review of Nabokov’s LECTURES ON LITERATURE] (SN, November 1980)
“Powell & Pressburger: English to the Core” (SN, December 1980)
“McCarthy’s Law” [review of IDEAS AND THE NOVEL] (SN, February 1981)
“Ad Hominem” [review of DIXIANA MOON] (SN, March 1981)
“The `PRESENTS’ of Michael Snow” (FC, May-June 1981)
Review of MOVING PLACES by “Nancy Rothstein” (FC, May-June 1981)
“Ivan the Bearable” [interview with Ivan Passer on CUTTER’S WAY] (SN, July 1981)
Review of Vito Russo’s THE CELLULOID CLOSET (SN, August 1981)
“Reading about Looking and Looking at Reading” [review of CAMERA LUCIDA and IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER] (SN, August 18, 1981)
“Excremental Visionary” [review of John Waters’ SHOCK VALUE] (SN, September 1981)
“Take That Corn and Shuck It” (SN, Septemner 1981)
“Nick’s Kicks” (SN, November 1981)
“Czar Babies” [Review of Nabokov’s LECTURES ON RUSSIAN LITERATURE] (SN, November 1981)
Bordwell on Dreyer (a book review) (FC, November-December 1981)
“LONESOME” (The Movie no. 117, 1982)
“THE SAVAGE EYE and SHADOWS” (The American New Wave, 1958-1967, 1982)
“Barthes & Film: 12 Suggestions” (S&S, Winter 1982/83)
“Snowbound: A Dialogue with a Dialogue” [interview with Michael Snow] (Afterimage, Winter 1982/83)
Manuel De Landa (from Film: The Front Line 1983) (April 1983)
“THE GOLD DIGGERS: A Preview” (CO, July 1984)
“Gee, Dad, It’s a Wurlitzer” [Review of SLOW FADE] (Los Angeles Reader, December 1984)
“Gertrud as Nonnarrative: The Desire for the Image” (S&S, January 1985)
1984 (VT, June 1985)
GREMLINS (VT, December 1985)
“Myths of the New Narrative (and a Few Counter-Suggestions” (catalogue essay), Independent America: New Film 1978-1988, 1988
“Then and Now: The San Sebastian International Film Festival ” (The Independent: Film & Video Monthly), April 1989
“Putting Back the Ritz” (Seeing in the Dark: A Compendium of Cinemagoing, 1990; originally written in the early 1980s)
“The Wild One” (review of Richard Schickel’s Brando biography), Newsday, July 1991
“Talking Back to the Screen” (Toronto 1992) (FC, November-December 1992)
“They Drive By Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber” (Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism, 1995; written in 1993)
Review of THE EARLY FILM CRITICISM OF FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT (Cineaste, Spring 1993)
Review of James Naremore’s THE FILMS OF VINCENTE MINNELLI (Cineaste, Fall 1995)
Review of Michel Chion’s AUDIO-VISION: SOUND ON SCREEN (Cineaste, Winter 1995)
Orson Welles’ OTHELLO (Voyager/Criterion laser disc liner notes, 1995)
“SAFE and Sorry” (Artforum, December 1995)
Review of MASON & DIXON (In These Times, July 1997)
“The Mysterious Elaine May: Hiding in Plain Sight” (Written By, August 1997)
“My Filmgoing in 1968: An Exploration” (That Magic Moment: 1968 Und Das Kino Eine Filmschau, spring 1998)
“THE NUTTY PROFESSOR” (American Movie Classic program guide, 1999)
“Resnais as Regionalist” (?, written March 2000)
“BEFORE THE REVOLUTION” (1964) (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“LES BONNES FEMMES” (1960) (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“CHRONIQUE D’UN ÉTÉ” (CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER) (1961) (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“DAISIES” (1966) (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“RED PSALM” (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER” (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“TEOREMA” (Film: The Critics’ Choice, 2001)
“Life and Nothing More: Abbas Kiarostami’s African Musical” (FC, September-October 2001)
“The American Cinema Revisited” (Cinema Scope, Winter 2001)
“What Dope Does to Movies” (Grass: The Paged Experience, 2001)
“American Hunger” [on Eric Saks] (FC, July-August 2001)
“Falling Down, Walking, Destroying, Thinking: A Conversation with Béla Tarr” (Cinema Scope, Fall 2001)
Paradjanov on DVD (Cineaste, circa 2002)
Preface to the Argentinian edition of MOVIE MUTATIONS (February 2002)
“Masumura’s Madness” + sidebar (”Among the Missing: 10 Key Masumura Features”) (written for FC, August 2002)
“Before He Was Famous” (Kiarostami’s Early Shorts) (Guardian, September 2002)
“Memories of 1974″ (Positif, 2002)
2 Oxford Companion entries (Albert Brooks and découpage; previously unpublished, written circa early 2003)
“Letter from Chicago” (Trafic, 2003)
“Metaphysical” [on C’EST VRAI!/ONE HOUR] (Robert Frank catalogue, 2003)
“Watch with Mother” [on Carl Dreyer] (Guardian, May 2003)
Review of Peter Wollen’s PARIS HOLLYWOOD (Cineaste, Fall 2003)
“BENILDE, OR THE VIRGIN MOTHER” (Chicago International Film Festival catalogue, 2003)
“ELEPHANT” (de Filmkrant, January 2004)
“Jean Renoir’s Trilogy of Spectacle” (Criterion DVD liner notes, 2004)
“‘New Hollywood’ and the 60s Melting Pot” (The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema of the 1970s, 2004; originally written in the mid-1990s)
Review of Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision (previously unpublished; written for the Guardian in June 2004)
Review of Colin MacCabe’s Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (Cineaste, Summer 2004)
“Jarmusch in the American Weeds” (Guardian, August 2004)
“The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause”: John Ford’s THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT (Viennale, 2004)
“Medieval Foreword” (The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy, 2004)
“Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia” (Trafic, 2004)
“On the New Renaissance” (Philippe Grandrieux) (La Vie nouvelle/nouvelle vision: à propos d’un film de Philippe Grandrieux; Éditions Léo Scheer, 2005)
“Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in The House is Black” (Facets Video DVD liner notes, 2005)
“Kim Novak as Midwestern Independent” (SS, 2006)
“Reasons for Kicking and Screaming” (Criterion DVD liner notes, March 2006)
“Five Letters from Godard Apropos of INSIDE/OUT” (Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, 2006)
“Kid Stuff: A Glimpse at Movie Wonder” (1000 Films to Change Your Life, 2006)
Review of Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (SS, 2006)
“David Holzman’s Diary/My Girlfriend’s Wedding: Historical Artifacts of the Past and Present” (Second Run DVD liner notes, 2006)
“Voluptuous Defeat: Philippe Garrel’s LES AMANTS REGULIERS” (S&S, August 2004)
“The Dance of PLAYTIME” (Criterion DVD liner notes, 2006)
“Figuring Out DAY OF WRATH” (Madman DVD liner notes, 2007)
“Mise en Scène as Miracle in Dreyer’s ORDET” (Madman DVD liner notes, 2007)
“The Guarded Intimacy of SANS SOLEIL” (written for Criterion DVD, 2007)
“Ritwik Ghatak: Reinventing the Cinema” (R, 2007; written in 2006)
“Cinema of Tomorrow” (CDCE, May 2007)
“Oberhausen” (CDCE, July-August 2007)
“Ingmar Bergman Today” (written for the New York Times in late July, 2007)
“Cassavetes’ Prelude and Postscript” (Torino Film Festival, 2007)
“Three Sequences from DEFINING MOMENTS IN MOVIES [WILL SUCCESS SPOIL ROCK HUNTER?, PISTOL OPERA, & THE WORLD]” (Defining Moments in Movies, 2007)
“Three Key Moments from Three Alain Resnais Films” (Defining Moments in Movies, 2007)
“Two Key Moments from DEFINING MOMENTS IN MOVIES [from FULL METAL JACKET & THE NEON BIBLE]” (Defining Moments in Movies, 2007)
“Anna Biller in Torino” (a 2007 Chicago Reader Movies blog post)
“The Attractions and Perils of Internationalism” (CDCE, December 2007)
“Portabella in the U.S.” (Vanguardia, 2008; written in 2007)
“The Example of KATZELMACHER” (Madman DVD liner notes, 2008)
“National Stereotypes and Expatriates” (CDCE, February 2008)
“Mise en Scène as Power Struggle: THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT” (Madman DVD liner notes, 2008)
“Rediscovering ALI: FEAR EASTS THE SOUL” (Madman DVD liner notes, 2008)
“MARTHA: Fassbinder’s Uneasy Testament” (Madman DVD liner notes, 2008)
“Keith Jarrett, Cross-Referencer” (SS, February 2008)
“Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut” (Le Mythe du Director’s cut, 2008; written in 2007)
“Bushwhacked” (Time Out Film Guide, 17th edition, 2008)
“Cinema versus TV News” (CDCE, September 2008)
“Historical Meditations in Two Films by John Gianvito” (FQ, Winter 2008/2009)
“Revisiting THE GODFATHER” (de Filmkrant, 2009; written in 2008)
“SATANTANGO at 15″ (Hungarian newspaper, January 2009)
‘The End-of-Film-Criticism Industry” (CDCE, January 2009)
On DON’T COUNT ON YOUR FINGERS and CUADECUC, VAMPIR (Jeonju International Film Festival, 2009)
“Addressing the Present” (CDCE, March 2009)
“One Key Event & Two Key Scenes” (Cinema: 1000 Momenti Fondamentali, 2009)
“Death of a Thousand Director’s Cuts” (S, June 2009)
“Introduction to the Chinese Edition of More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts” ( June 2009)
“The Undermining of Intimacy: HOME and EVERYONE ELSE” (previously unpublished; written for FIPRESCI web site, June 15, 2009)
On A GENTLEMAN OF PARIS and LAUGHTER (Il Cinema Ritrovato, June 2009)
“Business as Usual at Cannes”(CDCE, July-August 2009)
Review of INHERENT VICE (S, August 2009)
“A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava” (cem mil cigarros: os filmes de Pedro Costa, 2009; written in 2008)
A Dialogue with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa about Kiarostami’s SHIRIN (Chicago Reader, October 2009) (10/28)
“Roman Polanski and the Catastrophe of Public Discourse” (commissioned by Der Standard and written in October 2009)
“Can a “Complete History of American Film Criticism” Exist? (CDCE, March 2010)
Ten Best Lists, 2005-2009
This is the last of my lists of ten-best lists, in a series of six. — J.R.
Chicago Reader, 2005:
The World (Jia Zhang-ke)
Not on the Lips (Alain Resnais)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
Ten Skies (James Benning)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki) & Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton)
Yes (Sally Potter) & Capote (Bennett Miller)
Michelangelo Eye to Eye (Michelangelo Antonioni) & Saraband (Ingmar Bergman)
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch) & Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July)
The Girl from Monday (Hal Hartley) & 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
Chicago Reader, 2006:
Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien) & Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville) & Statues Also Die (1953, Resnais/Marker/Cloquet)
The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton) & Iraq in Fragments (James Longley)
Cuadecuc-Vampir (1970, Pere Portabelle) & Warsaw Bridge (1990, Portabella)
Find Me Guilty (Sidney Lumet) & Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck)
Citadel (Atom Egoyan) & The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones) & The Illusionist (Neil Burger)
Ask the Dust (Robert Towne) & Hollywoodland (Allen Coulter)
Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Godard) & My Dad Is 100 Years Old (Maddin)
Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater) & Bobby (Emilio Estevez)
DVD Beaver, 2006:
1. 6 Films de Luc Moullet (Luc Moullet, 2006), Blaq Out; multizone NTSC
2. Stephen Dwoskin: 14 Films (Stephen Dwoskin, 2006), RenardFilms; code free PAL
3. Onde Jaz O Teu Sorrioso? (Pedro Costa, 2006), Assirio & Alvim; region 2 PAL
4. A Canterbury Tale (Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger, 2006), Criterion; region 1 NTSC
5. Martin Arnold: The Cineseizure (Martin Arnold, 2006), Index; code free PAL
6. The Red and the White (Miklos Jansco), Second Run; PAL region unidentified
7. Entuziazm (Dziga Vertov, 2006), Edition Filmmuseum; code free PAK
8. Michel Brault: Oeuvres 1958-1974 (Michel Brault, 2005); National Film Board of Canada; NTSC region unidentified
9. Paris Nous Appartient (Jacques Rivette, 2006); BFI; PAL region 2
10. The Oyster Princess + I Don’t Want To Be a Man (Ernst Lubitsch, 2006); Kino Video; NTSC region 1
Chicago Reader, 2007:
Casa de Lava & Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? & Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa)
India Matri Buhmi (Roberto Rossellini)
Out 1 & Out 1: Spectre (Jacques Rivette)
Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
The Silence Before Bach (Pere Portabella)
Black Book (Verhoeven) & Ratatouille (Bird/Pinkava) & Honeydripper (Sayles) & Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Scott) & I’m Not There (Haynes) & In the Valley of Elah (Haggis) & The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Dominik) & The Dead Girl (Moncrieff) & Inland Empire (Lynch) & Letters From Iwo Jima (Eastwood) & Margot at the Wedding (Baumbach) & Starting Out in the Evening (Wagner)
Away from Her (Sarah Polley)
My Brother’s Wedding (Charles Burnett)
Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais)
Offside (Jafar Panahi)
Film Comment, 2007 (ranked):
Black Book
Bamako
Colossal Youth
Away from Her
My Brother’s Wedding
Private Fears in Public Places
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Offside
In the Valley of Elah
I’m Not There
Film Comment, 2008 (alphabetical order):
24 CITY (JIA ZHANG-KE)
MOMMA’S MAN (AZAZEL JACOBS)
MY WINNIPEG (GUY MADDIN) OF TIME AND THE CITY (TERENCE DAVIES)
THE ORDER OF MYTHS (MARGARET BROWN)
LES PLAGES D’AGNES (AGNES VARDA)
PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND (JOHN GIANVITO)
RR (JAMES BENNING)
THE SILENCE BEFORE BACH (PERE PORTABELLA)
TROUBLE THE WATER (TIA LESSIN & CARL DEAL)
DVD Beaver, 2008 (best DVDs or box sets):
1. Intégrale Jacques Demy (box set); Arte Video, region 2
2. The Long Day Closes (Davies, 1992); BFI, region 2
3. Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema (1896-1913); Flicker Alley, region 1
4. Satantango (Tarr, 1994); Facets Video, region 1
5. L’argent (L’Herbier, 1928); Gaumont Columbia Tristar, region 2
6. Mélo (Resnais, 1986); Kino Video, region 1
7. White Dog (Fuller, 1982); Criterion, region 1
8. Judex (Franju, 1963); Masters of Cinema, region 2
9. The Horse Thief (Tian, 1985); Chinese Follow Me, region 1
10. The Delirious Fictions of William Klein (box set); Criterion, region 1
Miradas de Cine, 2008 (15 favorite 40s films):
Christmas in July
The Shop Around the Corner
The Thief of Bagdad
Citizen Kane
Cat People
The Magnificent Ambersons
Day of Wrath
Heaven Can Wait
The Seventh Victim
Ivan the Terrible
The Best Years of Our Lives
Monsieur Verdoux
The Shanghai Gesture
Spring in a Small City
Late Spring
overrated:
His Girl Friday
Casablanca
Shadow of a Doubt
It’s a Wonderful Life
On the Town
5 best westerns, Kevyn Knox, The Cinematheque, 2008 (in chronological order):
The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953)
Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
Wichita (Jacques Tourneur, 1955)
Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
DVD Beaver, 2009:
1. Fritz Lang, The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Box Set (Masters of Cinema), region 2/PAL
2. various, Gaumont Treasures, 1897-1913 (Kino Video), region 1/NTSC
3. Vera Chytilova, Daisies (Second Run), region 2/PAL
4. John Huston, Wise Blood (Criterion), region 1/NTSC
5. Kent Mackenzie, The Exiles (Milestone), region 1/NTSC
6. Hiroshi Shimizu, Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu (Eclipse), region 1/NTSC
7. Guy Maddin, Careful (Remastered ahd Repressed) (Zeitgeist Films), region 1/NTSC
8. Don Weis, I Love Melvin (Warners Archive Collection), region 1/NTSC
9. John Ford, Wagon Master (Warner Home Video), region 1/NTSC
10. Terence Davies, Terence Davies Collection (BFI), region 2/PAL
Film Comment, 2009 (ranked):
24 City
Wild Grass
Helsinki, Forever (Peter von Bagh )
The Beaches of Agnes
Of Time and the City
Me and Orson Welles
Lowlands (Peter Thompson )
The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus
The Sun
The Hurt Locker
Cahiers du Cinéma (2009, best of the decade, ranked):
Yi Yi, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, The Circle, Waking Life, The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, Où gît votre sourire enfoui?, *Corpus Callosum, Pas sur la bouche, Howl’s Moving Castle, Pistol Opera, Los Angeles Plays Itself, The World, Michelangelo Eye to Eye, Bamako, The Silence Before Bach, Black Book, Of Time and the City, RR, Les Plages d’Agnès, Helsinki, Forever
On the Denied Politics of THE HURT LOCKER
I’m really tired of hearing from American reviewers that Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker “isn’t political”. This specious and even insulting claim is clearly part of their effort to convince people to see the movie, and I’m at least sympathetic to that part, since the film is far and away the best new American commercial feature I’ve seen in months — the best constructed and the most thoughtful and entertaining. It’s also the best commercial American film about the so-called “war in” (I prefer “occupation of”) Iraq, at least since In the Valley of Elah, on which writer Mark Boal also furnished much of the material.
First of all, the notion that any American film made today with an Iraqi setting could possibly be apolitical in any shape or form strikes me as being extremely naïve and myopic. Secondly, I can’t imagine what could make the notion of an apolitical film on this subject sound even remotely attractive. Are we really that helpless and hopeless? And are we so blinkered in our perceptions of what politics consists of that we think it’s limited to how we vote in elections? (Spoiler ahead, so if you haven’t yet seen the film, you might want to stop reading here.)
This is a film whose most courageous character is shown to be myopic to the point of insanity when it comes to perceiving Iraqi people in his midst — or at least one Iraqi kid in particular whom he supposedly knows and has some fondness for. He’s so convinced that this kid has been killed by a terrorist that he can’t even see the kid greeting him. This kind of blindness surely implies something about American perceptions of the Iraqi people, the ones whom American soldiers have allegedly been fighting for. It even, I would argue, implies something political. But it would appear that any red-blooded American who thinks The Hurt Locker has anything political to say on the subject will want to skip this movie and watch more Michael Jackson TV specials instead. [7/14/09]
Postscript: Kent Jones has pointed out to me that Bigelow herself can partially be credited with encouraging this denial in one of her recent interviews:
Did you want to make sure that the film didn’t divulge into choosing a political stance?
Kathryn Bigelow: I think that was important. There is that saying, “There is no politics in the trenches,” and I think it was important to look at the heroism of these men.
I don’t think this invalidates my point at all, but it does help to show some of the industry thinking at its roots. [7/15/09]
A Depth in the Family
A History of Violence
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Written by Josh Olson
With Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, Ashton Holmes, William Hurt, and Heidi Hayes
Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) is a happy family man running a diner in idyllic small-town Indiana, with a lawyer wife (Maria Bello), a teenage son (Ashton Holmes), and a little girl (Heidi Hayes). One night he responds so deftly and definitively to the violent threats of two killers that he becomes a local hero. A Philadelphia mobster named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) hears of the story and soon arrives in town claiming that Tom has another name and background–that he was once a gangster himself who mutilated one of Fogarty’s eyes with barbed wire.
Is A History of Violence a popular genre movie, soliciting visceral, unthinking responses to its violence while evoking westerns and noirs? Or is it an art film, reflecting on the meaning, implications, and effects of its violence, and getting us to do the same? David Cronenberg’s genius here is the way he makes it impossible to settle this question.
You can’t logically claim that it’s both kinds of movie at once–the devices and intentions of one interfere with those of the other. Yet Cronenberg is so adept at tinkering with our thoughts about violence that he comes very close to pulling off this feat. He provokes confused emotional responses–laughter at serious moments and spontaneous applause at some of the violent ones–that might embarrass us, but Cronenberg isn’t engaging in parody or irony. Nor is he nihilistically pandering to our worst impulses: the filmmaking is too measured and too intelligent. He implicitly respects us and our responses, even when those responses are silly or disturbing.
There’s hardly a shot, setting, character, line of dialogue, or piece of action in A History of Violence that can’t be seen as some sort of cliche. Its fantasies about how American small towns are paradise and big cities are hell are genre standbys that Cronenberg milks at every turn. But none of this plays like cliche; Cronenberg is such an uncommon master of tone that we’re in a state of denial about our familiarity with the material–a kind of willed innocence that resembles Tom Stall’s own disavowals. (Warning: what follows is full of spoilers.)
Cronenberg keeps his camera too close to Stall’s violence to let us feel detached from it. He also takes care to show the immediate consequences of violence–such as what a shotgun can do to someone’s face–without rubbing our noses in it. But our proximity never allows for any simple identification with Stall–or if it does, we eventually feel penalized because we don’t really know who he is. (His elected surname surely isn’t irrelevant.) There’s a similar ambiguity in that Cronenberg has spent most of his life and career in Toronto; you might call him a next-door neighbor to the American dream, which includes the cherished idea that we can start our lives over again with a clean slate. We seem to believe and doubt that idea with equal conviction, and the uneasy laughs the film draws out reflect this familiar brand of doublethink.
So do the two remarkable sex scenes between Tom and his wife before and after she learns about his violent past (reportedly Cronenberg’s main contributions to Josh Olson’s script). In the first, she starts out dominant, playfully dressed as a cheerleader (”because we never got to be teenagers together”), though he winds up on top; the second is spurred by his rough aggression, and she’s turned on even though she no longer wants to share the same bed with him. Both scenes testify to the uncommon skills of Mortensen and Bello: they expose more layers of personality than we can possibly keep up with.
At Cannes last May Alexander Horwath–director of the Austrian Film Museum and one of Europe’s best film critics–caused a minor scandal by loudly berating his colleagues for laughing during a screening of the film. It’s easy to feel superior to this behavior, especially since Cronenberg himself has said he doesn’t regard laughter as an inappropriate response to certain scenes. But I think Horwath’s anger is in some ways a sensitive response. Cronenberg isn’t a posthumanist cynic like Lars von Trier, whose nihilism we honor by jeering along with him. Cronenberg is a troubled moralist who doesn’t succumb to political correctness about violence, and the meaning of our laughter, however “appropriate,” is part of what bothers him.
I’ve seen the film twice, with very different audiences–at a gala in Toronto with the filmmakers and cast present and at a local preview with a mainly younger crowd–and it was uncanny to hear both the laughter and spontaneous applause occur at precisely the same places. The most memorable instances followed two scenes in which Tom’s teenage son, Jack, is taunted, insulted, and provoked at school by a classmate.
The first time, in a locker room, Jack defuses the tension, lightly mocking the insults by accepting and even embroidering them. The second time, in a hallway, he again tries to remain cool, but when that doesn’t work he beats both the bully and his friend to a bloody pulp. The audience all but cheered–boorishness won out. Even after we learn that both boys have landed in the hospital, their families might sue, Jack has been suspended from school, and Tom is furious, Jack’s stupidity and momentary loss of control are still being celebrated. (A moment later, a similar point gets made when Tom says to Jack, “In this family, we don’t solve problems by hitting people.” Jack snaps back, “No, we shoot them,” and Tom slaps him in response, immediately disproving his point. This time no one applauded, at either screening.)
Jack’s comebacks in the locker room got some laughs, but certainly not applause. I’d wager this has to do with our programmed responses to genre; thoughtful responses (which you might call “art-house” responses) are likely to come later and more slowly. But in either case Cronenberg sets up our reactions, both simple and complex, with equal care. Combined with the visceral responses he creates, our thoughts become more than theoretical–we wind up experiencing them in our gut.
Declarations of Independents: The Past Recycled
This appeared in The Soho News on March 11, 1981. A month earlier, I had launched a kind of weekly column there called “Declarations of Independents” that was in diary form — a bit like some of my Paris Journals and London Journals for Film Comment during the 70s –- and this was the third of these. — J.R.
February 24: Why go all the way to the Thalia tonight to see five Screen Directors Playhouse episodes, all half-hour TV shows from the mid-50s? Two professional reasons spring to mind, both essentially recycling operations. As often happens in such cases, I feel myself split between the two -– processes that honor my asocial aesthetics on the one hand, my social politics on the other.
Auteurist Retrieval Technology (we’ll call it ART for short) –- cultivated by me and a lot of other film freaks in the late 60s –- is predicated on the pleasure of recognizing the telltale signs of favorite directors in all sorts of unlikely material. And what better excuse to put ART to work than patriarchal episodes by John Ford, Leo McCarey, Frank Borzage, Tay Garnett, and William Seiter? Indeed, to narrow the focus down to the evening’s main event, what better specimen could one hope to find but a crisp 35mm print of Ford’s Rookie of the Year, made immediately before his masterpiece The Searchers, with the same scriptwriter (Frank Nugent) and no less than four of the same actors -– John Wayne, Pat Wayne, Vera Miles, and Ward Bond -– playing central roles?
Professional reason No. 2 has more to do with my relationship to the period when these shows were made (all of them at the Hal Roach Studio, sponsored by Eastman Kodak –- “with all the scope and realism that only motion picture techniques make possible,” and with each week’s preview offering a glimpse of next week’s director at work in a canvas chair bearing his name). The process here, based on personal and historical research — which in my case evolves directly out of work in the late 70s on a book called Moving Places (Harper & Row/Colophon) — might be called Identity/Ideology Retrieval Systems, or IRS for short. By and large, it regards the cinephilia of ART therapeutically, as a disease to be cured, and chiefly addresses itself to the world outside cinema. In other words, ART, like most ordinary moviegoing, aims at obliterating or at least concealing one’s own identity and that of the world outside the theater; IRS aims at constructing and/or restoring them both.
Reasons No. 1 and No. 2 are a quarrelsome marriage of convenience, to say the least, especially when they decide to attend a movie together. In support of ART is a useful, mimeographed “weekly guide to the writers and directors of TV movies and episodes” that I find in Thalia lobby, available from Barry Gilliam, 4283 Katonah Av., Bronx 10470 ($5 for 15 weeks, $15 for a year) –- a nifty little newsletter that can allow you to waste oodles of time engaged in supposedly Scholarly Pursuits (see Feb. 25), while investing the mundane with vast amounts of potential stylistic significance.
In support of IRS are the motley, fascinating trailers that are nowadays a Thalia specialty, many of them quite functional and revealing as time machines. Among tonight’s highlights are previews for Sepia Cinderella, La Dolce Vita, High Noon, The Rainmaker, and Harold and Maude — the latter less than 10 years old yet substantially more dated than the rest, because the color deterioration is so pronounced that everything on the screen has become a different shade of blue.
ART could probably devote a day or so to tracing all the Fordian internal and cross-references in Rookie of the Year, e.g., John Wayne’s son Pat in both films used in filial relation to Ward Bond as well as his own dad, or the deliberate suppression of a news story which sets history straight, anticipating The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by seven years. But this pedantic formalism invariably misses the perverse sexual undertones in the myths involved — a factor that IRS could help to supply.
Rookie of the Year (1955) tells the tale of Mike (John Wayne), a small-town sports reporter who flies to the World Series so he can get a good look at Lyn Goodhue (Pat Wayne), a rookie who’s just appeared on the cover of Time. Noticing that Lyn plays just like Buck Garrison (Ward Bond) — a rookie kicked out of baseball for taking a bribe 20 years ago — Mike proceeds to the kid’s hometown. There he substantiates his hunch that Lyn is Buck’s son — a fact that Ruth (Vera Miles), who’s in love with Lyn, persuades him to suppress.
All in all, it’s a plot about as convincing as that of Eyewitness (featuring William Hurt as a janitor who owns a Betamax). What gives it a particular life of its own the powerful, flirtatious erotic tension between Mike and Lyn in a locker room, when the latter remarks, “For a man your age, you look okay.” It’s every bit as intense as the explicitly incestuous undercurrents in Wayne’s relationships to Jeffrey Hunter and Natalie Wood in The Searchers — which the prudish, conservative ART critics shy away from, ignoring even the suggestions that both these characters are the hero’s illegitimate offspring. It has all the eroticism missing from the scenes with Vera Miles in the two films, where she invariably gets wedged in between the men (the Duke and Bond in Rookie, the Duke and Hunter in Searchers) and then ignored, like a soft whoopie cushion that periodically emits comic punctuation when squeezed.
***
Feb. 25: Delayed over half an hour by a basketball game, Robert Altman’s made-for-TV thriller Nightmare in Chicago (1964), at once efficient and interminable — expanded with outtakes from a Kraft Suspense Theater episode, according to Gilliam’s informative guide — finally gets started on Channel 9. Apart from offering more routine ART fodder, like a protracted nightclub striptease that could easily be cross-indexed with Gwen Welles’ in Nashville, the only striking directorial touches that I notice in this formula killer-manhunt story are subjective renderings of the lunatic’s mind: his mother’s whispered admonishments to him as a tot and the painfully piercing brightness of lights, both magnified in a neoexpressionist manner.
It’s just one more example of Altman’s free-floating cleverness before he was unlucky enough to be turned into an auteur by overeager ART enthusiasts, yielding such tin-plated testimonials to middle-brow seriousness as Images, Three Women, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians. As someone who regards Altman’s mature work as a reflection of teamwork and certain utopian hopes about collectivity during the 70s, from the ramshackle frontier town of First Presbyterian Church in McCabe and Mrs. Miller to the comparably makeshift and jerrybuilt port town of Sweethaven in Popeye — hopes that were born, took shape, became problematic, and then either died or redefined themselves in order to survive — I can only lament the crass process in American criticism that foisted the role of lone independent Thinker and Arthouse Sage on Altman and then penalized him for not living up to it. (Where are these fairweather friends now, when he can’t even get his latest film Health released?)
***
Feb. 26: At the Art to see a stereo print of Guys and Dolls (1955), near the end of their poorly attended Sam Goldwyn season, I fortuitously get to see the trailer of Northern Lights, which automatically puts some dramatic IRS into effect. This is because First Run Features has just finished showing me Northern Lights in its entirety in their office screening room less than an hour ago, on a much smaller screen, and the differences in meaning and impact brought about by a different size and context are truly startling.
Partially because I’m also seeing a trailer, the same pictorial black-and-white shots of North Dakota farmers organizing in the winter of 1915-16 have become less naked and more Hollywoodish, bolder and less ambiguous, all dressed up with some place to go. This drives straight into the heart of the contradiction of this film and the 3 1/2-month season of American Independent Films it spearheads — that it doesn’t want to go Hollywood, yet given the present media setup (which ultimate stipulates only one game in town, win or lose), it essentially has to in order to get anywhere at all.
Guys and Dolls, on the other hand, which I last saw on BBC-TV in London five years ago, doesn’t really gain much by filling up a sizable screen — despite a city-as-set conceit that might have worked (but doesn’t) as a primitive Manhattan forerunner to the Paris of Playtime. The problem is, Joseph Mankiewicz can’t shoot a musical, gets confused on issues of time and space — accounting for the all-around antipathy of most critics for this cramped, overlong Runyon and Loesser revue.
But Guys and Dolls has something else going for it. Part of the time, this is a fiercely disassociated competition between Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra (mostly) in separate parts of the movie that recalls Jazz at Massey Hall, a concert album in which Dizzy and Bird studiously and disinterestedly try to nail each other to the wall. Yet as soon as Brando and Jean Simmons share the screen, the heavy calisthenics stop, the movie starts, and something much more interesting takes shape — a sexy rapport between two consummate pros (as actors) and amateurs (as singers), worming their way into privileged pockets of the movie, crooning perfectly balanced duets that melt my socks off. (This is their second movie together, by the way; they became chums while doing Desiree in ‘54.)
To hell with those boring Joe Palooka (and Palookaville) erotics that dictate that the best Brando performances are always the most violent ones, the Streetcar Waterfront One-Eyed Tango struts that have already encouraged a generation of slobs to become louts, too. the sheer delicacy of the Big B’s two tours de force in 1955 are scoffed at as sissy work, yet his extraordinary Japanese choral figure in Teahouse of the August Moon (revisted at the Regency about a month ago, and more recently visible on TV) and his Damon Runyon dandy here are often wonders to behold — especially here, when he has Simmons’ sinuous rhythms to play against. Chemistry? Yeah, chemistry.
–The Soho News, March 11, 1981 (slightly tweaked, February 7, 2010)
