Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism [Reprint 2019 ed.] 9780520914957

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The Practice of Film Criticism

Jonathan Rosenbaum

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY / LOS ANGELES / LONDON

"THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE," " T h e I m p o r t a n c e

of Being Perverse," "Alain Resnais and MÉLO," "Bird Watching," "A Bluffer's Guide to Bêla Tair," "Jean Vigo's Secret," "Crass Consciousness," "Love Films," "His Master's Vice," "OTHELLO Goes Hollywood," "Government Lies," and "A Cinema of Uncertainty" were originally published in the Chicago Reader. Copyright © 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993 by the Chicago Reader

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press London, England Copyright © 1995 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Placing movies : the practice of film criticism / Jonathan Rosenbaum. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08632-5 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-520-08633-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures-—Reviews. 2. Film criticism. I. Title. PN1995.R65 1995 791.43'75—dc20 93-42954 CIP Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 ©

Contents

One

Two

Dedication and Acknowledgments

ix

Starting Out in Film Criticism

1

The Critical Apparatus

9

Introduction

11

Theory and Practice: The Criticism of Jean-Luc Godard

18

Film Comment Journals, 1974-1977: Excerpts

25

Edinburgh Encounters: A Consumers/Producers Guide-in-Progress to Four Recent Avant-Garde Films

30

Barthes & Film: 12 Suggestions

45

A Bluffer's Guide to Bêla Tarr

54

They Drive by Night: The Criticism of Manny Farber

59

Touchstones

75

Introduction

77

Ozu's

84

GOOD MORNING

Aspects of

ANATAHAN

87 V

vi

Contents

Gold Diggers of 1953: Howard Hawks's GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES GERTRUD

94

as Nonnarrative: The Desire for the Image

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE OTHELLO

Three

105 117

Goes Holly wood

124

Filmmakers

133

Introduction

135

Work and Play in the House of Fiction: On Jacques Rivette

142

The Tyranny of Sensitivity

153

Love Films: A Cassavetes Retrospective

156

The Death of Hulot Orson Welles's Essay Films and Documentary Fictions: A Two-Part Speculation

163 171

The Importance of Being Perverse: Godard's

184

Alain Resnais and

Four

MELO

190

Provocations

201

Introduction

203

Jerry Lewis's

HARDLY WORKING

DOOMED LOVE:

Five

KING LEAR

The Masterpiece You Missed

210 213

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

218

Mapping the Territory of Raul Ruiz

222

Notes Toward the Devaluation of Woody Allen

238

Crass Consciousness:

248

BARTON FINK

Inside and Outside the Movie Theater

255

Introduction

257

Bird Watching

264

Jean Vigo's Secret:

L'ATALANTE

272

Contents

Guilty by Omission

281

His Master's Vice: Fuller's Government Lies: THE

vii

295

WHITE DOG

PANAMA DECEPTION

and

DEEP COVER

301

A Cinema of Uncertainty: Films by Michelangelo Antonioni

307

Bibliography

315

Index

323

Dedication and Acknowledgments

To my editors, official and unofficial. The list is too long and goes too far back in time to be exhaustive here, but I'd like to cite, in particular, Gilbert Adair, Peter Cole, Richard Combs, Richard Corliss, Edward Dimendberg, Nata£a Duroviôovâ, Bernard Eisenschitz, Pamela Falkenberg, Sandy FlittermanLewis, Noah Forde, Marilyn Goldin, Holly Greenhagen, Penelope Houston, Richard T. Jameson, Kitry Krause, Bill Krohn, Michael Lenehan, Lorenzo Mans, Tom Milne, Laura Molzhan, John Pym, Bérénice Reynaud, Lauren Sedofsky, Jeffrey Skoller, Garrett Stewart, Christine Tamblyn, Alison True, Jeramy Turner, Melinda Ward, and Tracy Young. Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the publications in which these pieces first appeared: Chicago Reader, Cinematograph, Film Comment, Modern Times, Monthly Film Bulletin, Sight and Sound, Soho News, and Tikkun.

ix

StartiDg Out in Film Criticism

This book is intended as a companion and sequel to an autobiographical experiment I carried out in the late 1970s, published in 1980 by Harper & Row as Moving Places: A Life at the Movies. The present volume doesn't require a reading of that earlier book—long out of print, though recently reprinted by the University of California Press so as to reappear alongside this collection; however, since many of this volume's premises are predicated on either extensions or inversions of the premises of its predecessor, a few words about that book and the material it covers are in order. Most of Moving Places is concerned with my childhood in northwestern Alabama, specifically in relation to my family and what was known as the family business from around 1914 to 1960. This business began when my grandfather, Louis Rosenbaum, started operating his first movie theater in Douglas, Wyoming, and it existed until Rosenbaum Theaters, owned by my grandfather and managed by my father, was sold to a larger chain. I was born in 1943, and the family business afforded me a steady diet of free movies through the age of sixteen, when I went away to school in Vermont. As a consequence of this perk, I saw practically every feature that had national distribution between the late 1940s and the autumn of 1959. The focus of Moving Places—written after I had been working professionally as a film critic for several years—included all the circumstantial, personal, historical, and ideological aspects of experiencing movies that criticism generally factors out. The project had personal urgency for me because I wanted to forge links between two mainly disconnected portions of my life— my childhood in Alabama, and my career as a critic in New York, Paris, London, and San Diego. My initial points of entry were movies with no critical standing of any kind—principally BIRD OF PARADISE and ON MOONLIGHT 1

2

Starting Out in Film

Criticism

BAY—that I had not seen since the early 1950s. Seeing them again on television in 1977 and 1978,1 was interested in discovering first what they told me about myself as a child (through Proustian recollections of my initial responses), and then what these findings told me about movies in general. Later, this material was supplemented by detailed and obsessive research— much of it conducted in Florence, my hometown—about the history of what I had seen (and when, and under what circumstances), and, beyond that, the history of the family theater chain. I had written a great deal as a child, but until the late 1960s my writing had basically consisted of fiction and poetry, not criticism. (In fact, I was working on the first of my three unpublished novels when the theaters were sold during my senior year in boarding school, and the other two novels were written over the next decade.) Part of the synthesis I was pursuing in Moving Places had to do with this discontinuity as well: as a writing project it was literary and personal/historical rather than critical in any conventional sense, and I naively hoped at the time that such a book could pave my way out of film criticism and into a literary career. Unfortunately, apart from a few reviews (mainly in newspapers west of the Hudson and film magazines), it was regarded exclusively as a film book—it had no impact at all on the literary world—and not as a kind of film book with any status in relation to sociology, social history, film history, or film exhibition. (To the best of my knowledge, it has never appeared in bibliographies related to any of these subjects— or to "cultural studies," for that matter.) It did achieve some genuine success and longevity as a cult item, but basically among film buffs, and not of the sort that could be parlayed into any sort of career opportunities, journalistic or academic. To make a living—both during and after the writing of the book— I had to return to whatever freelance work I could find, which proved to be journalism, criticism, and teaching. At the same time, I should stress that writing Moving Places permanently altered some of my positions as a film critic, which is another reason why it seems necessary to define that book as a watershed in my evolution. It taught me that subjectivity in critical writing is never something to be avoided—to try to do so is merely to make one's self the passive victim of its complex operations—but always something to be defined and accounted for. It-also taught me, as a corollary to this, that where and when one is viewing a movie has an inextricable relation to what that movie means, and that consequently no meanings should ever be regarded as universal or eternal. To put it more simply, it forced me to recognize that moviegoing—and therefore film criticism—is a social act.

I offer this account to set the stage for this volume, which presents an autobiographical placement of my film criticism, designed for both serious

Starting Out in Film Criticism

3

moviegoers and for those people among that group who are considering serious film criticism as a profession. The critical pieces I've selected are thus intended to serve double duty, functioning both as essays and reviews in their own right and as particular cases (or case histories) that point to some of their sources, circumstances, and functions. One part of my aim coincides with the project of Moving Places almost identically—to objectify my own positions in the autobiographical segments that follow rather than set myself up as some sort of hero or role model. Although I have obvious biases as a critic which will become increasingly clear as the book develops—and do my utmost to argue on their behalf, though I also try to contextualize and place these positions so that readers will know as much as possible where they're coming from—it is not my intention to advise or instruct potential critics in how to duplicate my own tastes and procedures. As in Moving Places, I can best be regarded as a test case, and with this in mind, I have done my best to draw attention to some of my own critical shortcomings—insofar as I'm aware of them—and encourage readers to draw their own conclusions about them. Although a central part of my concern is to provide a guided tour through film criticism as a profession—one intersecting and interacting with editors, readers, publicists, fans, and filmmakers alike—I think it would be more useful for readers to regard me as a vehicle in this enterprise than for them to regard me as a definitive tour guide, much less as an ultimate destination. (As Godard usefully put it in an interview I once had with him, "I'd like to regard myself as an airplane, not an airport.")

• One of the consequences that writing Moving Places had on some of my earliest film memories was to paralyze and then evacuate them—which means that if I want to trace certain facts or strands relating to my prehistory as a film critic, I'm often better off referring to the book than to my own recollections. This book tells me, among other things, that two of my first pieces of sustained film criticism were written during my teens—at the ages of fourteen and nineteen, respectively. Together, they form a dialectic of sorts which defines what film criticism has personally meant for me ever since. The first piece was a guest column written for the Florence Times, "reviewing" the major releases that Rosenbaum Theaters were showing that week. Every other week, this column was written by my father, and my frequent criticisms of his efforts led to him inviting me to take over the job on a one-shot basis. Like him in most cases, I hadn't seen most of the movies, but the fact that I'd already seen the Disney cartoon accompanying FANTASIA out of town a few months earlier—an Oscar-winning CinemaScope effort called TOOT, WHISTLE, PLUNK AND BOOM—gave my plug the status of a genuine testimonial. ("Frankly, it's the best cartoon I've ever seen.") I'm sure that if

4

Starting Out in Film Criticism

anyone had asked me at the time, I would have considered such a statement of in-house promotion film criticism, and a sincere form of it at that. My second opus, never published, was a brief essay arguing on behalf of the moral and aesthetic superiority of FOLLOW THAT DREAM, a flaky and somewhat pro-anarchist Elvis Presley comedy, over SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, a Richard Brooks desecration of a Tennessee Williams play I had previously seen on stage and loved in that form. The piece was written about a year and a half after Rosenbaum Theaters had been sold, shortly after I had gone to see the movie with my grandfather at the largest of the theaters he had built. The fact that he had howled with pleasure at some of the movie's crudest jokes goaded me into some sort of rebellious self-definition, which was undoubtedly a major source of the piece. Two years after that came one of my first serious published efforts—an extended, troubled review of Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE for the Bard Observer, my college newspaper, that attempted to square the film's virulent misanthropy with its comedy. The piece concluded: "Basically, I believe that the movie is hateful as far as it is successful, and unsuccessful insofar as it is likeable; for its success depends on the strength of its vision and its ability to convince us, and I doubt seriously whether any of us [is] un-man enough to take it. As an experience, however, none of us is likely to forget it." The review prompted an unsolicited favorable comment from the best teacher I ever had—Heinrich Bluecher, the husband of Hannah Arendt and Bard's presiding philosophical guru—and, come to think of it, its dialectical play undoubtedly bore the mark of his Hegelian influence. But another reason why I'm recalling this early review is to point to a concrete example of how the cast of a particular period can inflect and even determine a movie's meaning. A week or so before, when I'd gone to see the movie near Times Square with some of my best friends, one of them—Kathy Stein, who sixteen years later became my editor at Omni—emerged from the shock of that experience devastated and in tears. For her, seeing the end of the world as comic was not only frightening but morally hateful, and her passionate response made a permanent impression on me. The unlikelihood of anyone of college age having that sort of reaction to DR. STRANGELOVE today tells us something important, I suspect, about what's happened to our sensibilities since then—not only in relation to the idea of nuclear holocaust, but also in relation to comedy. I think it's possible that we've lost something.

• Although I had achieved a modicum of literary success during my early teens—one poem won first prize in a national contest, and I sold a vignette to Anthony Boucher's The Magazine of Fantasy