Towards the end of his most recent book, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See (2000), Jonathan Rosenbaum writes:
One of my basic points is that distinguishing between the priorities of distributors and exhibitors and those of the critics and the media in general is almost impossible. And rather than ascribe this to any conspiracy I'd blame it on laziness and inertia.
That may sound like backpedaling a bit from the roar of the title, but think about it. It isn't. Another way of putting this might be to say that there's an all but airtight feedback loop at work here, an incestuous circle of corporate interests working in tandem: The movie industry dictates which films are important and the press not only never bothers to question the menu, it actively hypes it.
Rosenbaum gives audiences, on the other hand, quite a lot of credit for discerning and rewarding quality when and if it ever gets a chance to see it. Two years after Movie Wars first appeared, I was curious as to whether Rosenbaum felt that new technologies were helping audiences out any with their discerning and rewarding. Is there, in other words, more reason now for optimism?
GreenCine: In the beginning of Moving Places [Rosenbaum's autobiographical account of growing up with the movies], you touch on the sudden availability of whole cinematic libraries on video, the disadvantage of which was that some movies lost their magic as "the unattainable text." Do DVDs, especially in combination with wider TV screens, improved sound systems, etc., have less of that "ghost of a film" quality you ascribe to video?
Jonathan Rosenbaum: For me they do -- in large part because of the sound quality, but also because of the better visual definition, especially on the tristandard setup I use, which more closely approximates a theatrical experience (albeit without the audience in most cases). I also love the way that DVDs enable one to pick up and replay favorite passages in films, something quite analogous to what books on the shelf can do for and with literary pleasure.
For whatever it's worth, I find that the kind of DVDs I gravitate towards the most are the ones I associate with the same period covered by most of Moving Places -- i.e., the 50s: musicals and films in CinemaScope. So the capacity of movies on DVD to function like Proustian madeleine cookies dipped in tea is for me unmistakable.
GreenCine: Will the DVD format, with all its commentaries and extras, especially when honest effort is put into them by, say, a company like Criterion, now that it's clearly caught on with movie enthusiasts, prod studios, maybe even foundations and the like, to make more titles available?
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Studios have already been prodded a little, but I'm less optimistic when it comes to foundations, since film history tends to be the lowest of low priorities for most to them. (I've just looked at the list of Guggenheim Fellowship Recipients for 2002, and I'm sorry to say that, as usual, only one film critic or film historian is recognized -- in contrast to the several filmmakers a year who get fellowships.)
Another issue this brings up is how impossible DVD "extras" make it to establish definitive texts of anything, especially when the term "restoration" is misused to the point where it's become meaningless. (In many cases, putting back something that a filmmaker deliberately omitted is now called "restoration".)
At the same time, I believe I already went on record that I considered the audiovisual essays of Yuri Tsivian and Joan Neuberger on Ivan the Terrible on the Criterion DVDs to be the most impressive acts of film criticism and film scholarship that I encountered last year -- and Tsivian's commentary on and rediscovery of the original music accompaniment for The Man with The Movie Camera, also done for DVD, isn't far behind.
GreenCine: Do you see the Net improving awareness of films that don't get coverage otherwise? For example, I, here in Berlin, have seen a review of yours discussed on the Well, an online community based in San Francisco, and with a click, I was able to read about a movie I didn't know anything about before in the Chicago Review, a publication certainly unavailable to me otherwise.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: Yes, by all means. I'd like to think that John Gianvito's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, a very important film for me -- an American independent feature about the Gulf war -- has benefited greatly from this sort of attention and grapevine. The last I heard, the film still lacks a distributor, yet by now it's been shown all over the world, and has had substantial write-ups in places like Sight and Sound; even a characteristically hostile (and factually inaccurate) review in the New York Times seems to add to its legend. Much of the film's reputation, I suspect, can be traced back to things on the Web. (Ray Privett's interview with Gianvito in the online Senses of Cinema is particularly worth checking out.)
GreenCine: You've had quite a lot to say about Miramax and, minus the sheer power, much of your criticism could be applied to other "independent" distributors. With "Indiewood" now more or less a subsidiary of Hollywood, and with DV lowering production costs (if that's the route a filmmaker chooses), do you think there's now more "room at the bottom" for new filmmakers?
Jonathan Rosenbaum: There's always room at the bottom. What would require a revolution is getting the mainstream to acknowledge the existence and value of this work. Declaring that the "American independent film" is dead while ignoring people like Gianvito is strictly standard procedure nowadays, because media editors and producers basically aren't interested in what's out there or even in what's for sale -- only in what's already being crammed down our throats and is designed to make the richest people richer.
GreenCine: The contrast between Moving Places and Movie Wars, with over 20 years and several books between them, is, to me, remarkable. Reading them back to back, and even while keeping in mind that the concepts behind the two books are intentionally and consciously very different, I'm reminded of the remark you made at the end of last year in the Slate "Movie Club" -- that you were a "Paulinista" [David Edelstein's coinage] in your teens and early 20s, "learning about the dynamics of passionate and personal critical prose," but that, for reasons that seem to amount to her having misinterpreted a few spirited salvos, you set out in other directions, leaving that camp behind.
I wonder if you could elaborate on those other directions. Probably more intriguing than leaving the Kael camp is your nod to Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text as an influence on Moving Places. Would you say that in your later criticism visceral, intuitive reactions to films have taken slightly more of a back seat than they used to, while the social and political context of a film has grown more important for you over the years?
Jonathan Rosenbaum: I was never entirely a Paulinista; I liked her writing but not, by and large, her taste. [Andrew] Sarris and [Noël] Burch had much bigger effects on my taste, including who and what I should be interested in.
I initially read Le plaisir du texte in French, slowly, and not always with full comprehension, while living in Paris, and the effect it had on me related to both the passion, wit, and precision of the writing and to Barthes' taste (though not especially his taste in film, despite that hip reference to Murnau's City Girl). Among the many things I learned in France was the perception that "visceral, intuitive reactions" (to film, to art in general, to life in general) and "political and social contexts" didn't have to be in opposition to one another -- that one doesn't necessarily have to choose between them. Thanks to that perception, I hope I'm just as intuitive and visceral in my responses and just as political as I was then. If I seem more political, that may only be because I have more to say about certain aspects of politics now.
For me, Moving Places isn't a less political book than Movie Wars. It may also stem from my desire to write about more than just films as a subject cut off from everything else -- which came more naturally when I was writing almost exclusively for film magazines, as I was in the 70s. Writing today for a somewhat wider and less specialized readership most of the time, I hope I can travel to more places with them.
In 1998, the American Film Institute drew up a list of the top 100 American movies based on its polling of 1500 filmmakers, writers and famous fans. The choices were so discouraging to Jonathan Rosenbaum, he created a list of his own Alternate 100.
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