Jonathan Rosenbaum | |
---|---|
Born | Florence, Alabama, U.S. | February 27, 1943
Occupation |
|
Alma mater | Bard College |
Period | 1969–present |
Website | |
jonathanrosenbaum |
Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American film critic and author. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for The Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008, when he retired. [1] He has published and edited numerous books about cinema [2] and has contributed to such notable film publications as Cahiers du cinéma and Film Comment .
Regarding Rosenbaum, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard said, "I think there is a very good film critic in the United States today, a successor of James Agee, and that is Jonathan Rosenbaum. He's one of the best; we don't have writers like him in France today. He's like André Bazin." [3]
Rosenbaum grew up in Florence, Alabama, where his grandfather had owned a small chain of movie theaters. He lived with his father Stanley (a professor) and mother Mildred in the Rosenbaum House, designed by notable architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the only building by Wright in Alabama. As a teenager, he attended The Putney School in Putney, Vermont, where his classmates included actor Wallace Shawn. [4] He graduated from Putney in 1961.
Rosenbaum developed a lifelong interest in jazz as a teenager. He frequently refers to it in his film criticism. He attended Bard College, where he played piano in an amateur jazz ensemble that included future actors Chevy Chase as a drummer and Blythe Danner as a vocalist. [5] He studied literature at Bard with the intention of becoming a writer. Among his professors was German philosopher Heinrich Blücher, whose teaching had a strong effect on Rosenbaum. [6]
After graduate school, he moved to New York and was hired to edit a collection of film criticism, which marked his first foray into the field.
Rosenbaum moved to Paris in 1969, working briefly as an assistant to director Jacques Tati and appearing as an extra in Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer . While living there, he began writing film and literary criticism for The Village Voice , based in Greenwich Village in New York City, Film Comment , and Sight & Sound . [5] In 1974, he moved from Paris to London, where he remained until March 1977, when he was offered a two-semester teaching position at the University of California, San Diego by Manny Farber. [7] Farber had a major influence on Rosenbaum's criticism, but the two men had never met until the latter arrived in San Diego.
Rosenbaum was chosen to succeed Dave Kehr as the main film critic for The Chicago Reader ; he served in that position until 2008. [8]
In addition, he has written many books on film and its criticism, including Film: The Front Line 1983 (1983), Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995), Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980; reprint 1995), Movies as Politics (1997), and Essential Cinema (2004).
His most popular work is Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (2002). He has written the best-known analysis of Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man ; the book includes recorded interviews with Jarmusch. The book places the film in the acid western subgenre.[ citation needed ]
He edited This Is Orson Welles (1992), by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, a collection of interviews and other materials relating to Welles. Rosenbaum consulted on both the 1998 re-editing of Welles's Touch of Evil (which was based on a lengthy memo written by Welles to Universal Pictures in the 1950s) and the 2018 completion of Welles's The Other Side of the Wind .
In August 2007, Rosenbaum marked the passing of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman with an op-ed piece in The New York Times , titled "Scenes from an Overrated Career." [9]
He is a frequent contributor to the DVD Beaver website, where he offers his alternative lists of genre films. He also writes the Global Discovery Column in the film journal Cinema Scope, where he reviews international DVD releases of films that are not widely available. He also writes a column called En Movimiento for the Spanish magazine Caimán Cuadernos De Cine .
Rosenbaum was a visiting professor of film at Virginia Commonwealth University's art history department in Richmond, Virginia from 2010 to 2011. From 2013 to 2015, he taught four times as a visiting lecturer at Béla Tarr's Film Factory in Sarajevo, Bosnia.
Rosenbaum participated in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll; he responded with these films as the ten best ever made: Vampir-Cuadecuc , Greed , Histoire(s) du cinéma , I Was Born, But... , Ivan , Rear Window , Sátántangó , Spione , The Wind Will Carry Us , and The World . [10] He chose films other than those he had previously chosen for earlier Sight and Sound top ten lists. [11]
Rosenbaum appears in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism , where he discusses the film criticism of Manny Farber.
He has said that his three favorite narrative films are Day of Wrath , Ordet and Gertrud , all directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, the order depending, "almost entirely on which one I’ve seen most recently". [12]
In response to the AFI list of 100 greatest American movies published in 1998, Rosenbaum published his own list, focusing on less well-established, more diverse films. [13] It also includes works by important independent American directors (such as John Cassavetes and Jim Jarmusch) who were absent from the AFI list. A second list by the AFI incorporated five titles from Rosenbaum's list.
In Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004), he appended a more general list of his 1,000 favorite films from all nations; slightly more than half were American. He starred his 100 favorite films on the list, marking both traditionally canonical films such as Greed (silent -) and Citizen Kane , and harder-to-find films such as Michael Snow's La Région Centrale and Jacques Rivette's Out 1 .
Rosenbaum has compiled "best of the year" movie lists from 1972 to 1976, [14] and from 1987 to 2022, [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] thereby helping provide an overview of his critical preferences.
His top choices were:
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay. The picture was Welles's first feature film.
Touch of Evil is a 1958 American film noir written and directed by Orson Welles, who also stars in the film. The screenplay was loosely based on the contemporary Whit Masterson novel Badge of Evil (1956). The cast included Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Marlene Dietrich.
The Third Man is a 1949 film noir directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard, set in post-war Vienna. The film centres on an American, Holly Martins (Cotten), who arrives in the city to accept a job with his friend Harry Lime (Welles), only to learn that Lime has died. Martins decides to stay in Vienna and investigate his death.
Greed is a 1924 American silent psychological drama film written and directed by Erich von Stroheim and based on the 1899 Frank Norris novel McTeague. It stars Gibson Gowland as Dr. John McTeague; ZaSu Pitts as Trina Sieppe, his wife; and Jean Hersholt as McTeague's friend and eventual enemy Marcus Schouler. The film tells the story of McTeague, a San Francisco dentist, who marries his best friend Schouler's girlfriend Trina.
Dead Man is a 1995 American acid Western film written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. It stars Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, John Hurt, Michael Wincott, Lance Henriksen, Gabriel Byrne, Mili Avital, and Robert Mitchum in his final film performance. The movie, set in the late 19th century, follows William Blake, a meek accountant on the run after murdering a man. He has a chance encounter with enigmatic Native American spirit-guide "Nobody", who believes Blake is the reincarnation of the visionary English poet William Blake.
Stranger Than Paradise is a 1984 American black-and-white absurdist deadpan comedy film directed, co-written and co-edited by Jim Jarmusch, and starring jazz musician John Lurie, former Sonic Youth drummer-turned-actor Richard Edson, and Hungarian-born actress and violinist Eszter Balint. It features a minimalist plot in which the main character, Willie, is visited by Eva, his cousin from Hungary. Eva stays with him for ten days before going to Cleveland. Willie and his friend Eddie go to Cleveland to visit her, and the three then take a trip to Florida. The film is shot entirely in single long takes with no standard coverage.
Macbeth is a 1948 American historical drama directed by Orson Welles. A film adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name, it tells the story of the Scottish general who becomes the King of Scotland through treachery and murder. The film stars Welles in the lead role and Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth.
Emanuel Farber was an American painter, film critic and writer. Often described as "iconoclastic", Farber developed a distinctive prose style and set of theoretical stances which have had a large influence on later generations of film critics and influence on underground culture. Susan Sontag considered him to be "the liveliest, smartest, most original film critic this country has ever produced."
Raymond Durgnat was a British film critic, who was born in London to Swiss parents. During his life he wrote for virtually every major English language film publication. In 1965 he published the first major critical essay on Michael Powell, who had hitherto been "fashionably dismissed by critics as a 'technician's director'", as Durgnat put it.
The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1942 American period drama written, produced, and directed by Orson Welles. Welles adapted Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel about the declining fortunes of a wealthy Midwestern family and the social changes brought by the automobile age. The film stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead and Ray Collins, with Welles providing the narration.
James Lewis Hoberman is an American film critic, journalist, author and academic. He began working at The Village Voice in the 1970s, became a full-time staff writer in 1983, and was the newspaper's senior film critic from 1988 to 2012. In 1981, he coined the term "vulgar modernism" to describe the "looney" fringes of American popular culture.
Sara Miller Driver is an American independent filmmaker and actress from Westfield, New Jersey. A participant in the independent film scene that flourished in lower Manhattan from the late 1970s through the 1990s, she gained initial recognition as producer of two early films by Jim Jarmusch, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Driver has directed two feature films, Sleepwalk (1986) and When Pigs Fly (1993), as well as a notable short film, You Are Not I (1981), and a documentary, Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2017), on the young artist's pre-fame life in the burgeoning downtown New York arts scene before the city's massive changes through the 1980s. She served on the juries of various film festivals throughout the 2000s.
The Battle Over Citizen Kane is a 1996 American documentary film directed and produced by Thomas Lennon and Michael Epstein, from a screenplay by Lennon and Richard Ben Cramer, who also narrates. It chronicles the clash between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over the production and release of Welles's 1941 film Citizen Kane, which has been considered the greatest film ever made.
Acid Western is a subgenre of the Western film that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s that combines the metaphorical ambitions of critically acclaimed Westerns, such as Shane and The Searchers, with the excesses of the Spaghetti Westerns and the outlook of the counterculture of the 1960s, as well as the increase in illicit drug taking of, for example, cannabis and LSD. Acid Westerns subvert many of the conventions of earlier Westerns to "conjure up a crazed version of autodestructive white America at its most solipsistic, hankering after its own lost origins".
This is Orson Welles is a 1992 book by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich that comprises conversations between the two filmmakers recorded over several years, beginning in 1969. The wide-ranging volume encompasses Welles's life and his own stage, radio, and film work as well as his insights on the work of others. The book was edited after Welles's death, at the request of Welles's longtime companion and professional collaborator, Oja Kodar. Jonathan Rosenbaum drew from several incomplete drafts of the manuscript and many reel-to-reel tapes, most of which had already been transcribed. Much of the dialogue, however, had been rewritten by Welles, often in several drafts.
Bigger Than Life is a 1956 American drama film directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Mason, Barbara Rush, and Walter Matthau. Its plot follows an ailing school teacher and family man whose life spins out of control when he misuses cortisone. It is based on a 1955 article by medical writer Berton Roueché in The New Yorker, titled "Ten Feet Tall". In addition to starring in the film, Mason produced it.
This is a bibliography of books by or about the director and actor Orson Welles.
"Raising Kane" is a 1971 book-length essay by American film critic Pauline Kael, in which she revived controversy over the authorship of the screenplay for the 1941 film Citizen Kane. Kael celebrated screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, first-credited co-author of the screenplay, and questioned the contributions of Orson Welles, who co-wrote, produced and directed the film, and performed the lead role. The 50,000-word essay was written for The Citizen Kane Book (1971), as an extended introduction to the shooting script by Mankiewicz and Welles. It first appeared in February 1971 in two consecutive issues of The New Yorker magazine. In the ensuing controversy, Welles was defended by colleagues, critics, biographers and scholars, but his reputation was damaged by its charges. The essay and Kael's assertions were later questioned after Welles's contributions to the screenplay were documented.
It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles is a 1993 documentary film about Orson Welles's ill-fated Pan-American anthology film It's All True, shot in 1941–42 but never completed. Written and directed by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel, the film is narrated by Miguel Ferrer. It was named the year's Best Non-Fiction Film by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and its filmmakers received a special citation from the National Society of Film Critics.
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film directed by, produced by, and starring Orson Welles. Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz wrote the screenplay. Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made.