In this new collection of reviews and essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum focuses on the political and social dynamics of the contemporary movie scene. Rosenbaum, widely regarded as the most gifted contemporary American commentator on the cinema, explores the many links between film and our ideological identities as individuals and as a society. Readers will find revealing examinations of, for example, racial stereotyping in the debates surrounding Do the Right Thing, key films from Africa, China, Japan, and Taiwan, Hollywood musicals and French serials, and the cultural amnesia accompanying cinematic treatments of the Russian Revolution, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. From Schindler's List, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Piano, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to the maverick careers of Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Nicholas Ray, Chantal Akerman, Todd Haynes, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Rosenbaum offers a polemically pointed survey that makes clear the high stakes involved in every aspect of filmmaking and filmgoing.
Movies as Politics
About the Book
Reviews
"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."—Jean-Luc Godard"Rosenbaum is unusually at home in the worlds of both academic film study and weekly film reviewing. There is great sophisticated intelligence without impenetrable high theory, and there is wonderful accessibility without cheerleading. This voice belongs to a true cosmopolitan, who makes movies matter on aesthetic and political grounds, who attends to major non-American films neglected in this country, and whose growing impatience with the contemporary Hollywood product retains a sense of humor."—Michael Rogin, author of Blackface, White Noise
"Rosenbaum is one of the few film reviewers with a deep understanding of film form, its sources in film history and theory, and even more its place as a twentieth-century art form. He refuses to embrace high-art intellectualism or pop-art fun exclusively and likewise refuses to forgo either. The unique quality of his reviews is their immediacy. He engages and argues with film audiences, filmmakers, and distributors, demanding a response to the standards he sets. It is in this sense that this collection is profoundly political."—Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
How to Live in Air Conditioning
One The Politics of Form
Language, Representation, Narrative
Say the Right Thing (DO THE RIGHT THING)
Interruption as Style: Bufiuel's THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE
Polanski and the American Experiment (BITTER MOON)
Utopian Space and Urban Encounters
Tati's Democracy
His Mistress's Voice: Akerman's NIGHT AND DAY
Seen and Unseen Encounters: Kieslowski's RED
Chance and Control
Altman and the Spirit of Improvisation (CALIFORNIA SPLIT)
Lies of the Mind (TALKING TO STRANGERS)
Classification and Genre: Musical Ghettos
On LATCHO DROM
Four Books on the Hollywood Musical
Two Entertainment as Oppression:
The Hollywood Apparatus
Entertainment as Oppression
Missing the Target
Spielberg's Gentiles (SCHINDLER's LIST)
The Solitary Pleasures of STAR WARS
Jack Reed's Christmas Puppy: Reflections on REDS
A Perversion of the Past (MISSISSIPPI BURNING)
Circle of Pain: The Cinema of Nicholas Ray
Vietnam, the Theme Park (HEARTS OF DARKNESS:
A FILMMAKER'S APOCALYPSE)
Sexual Discourse (THE PIANO)
Hollywood Radical (MALCOLM X)
ACE VENTURA Reconsidered
The World According to Harvey and Bob (SMOKE, THE GLASS SHIELD)
Stupidity as Redemption (FORREST GUMP)
Allusion Profusion (ED WOOD, PULP FICTION)
Three I Issues of Ideology
Alternatives
The Problem with Poetry: Leos Carax
No Stars, a Must-See (THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY)
The Rattle of Armor, the Softness of Flesh: Bresson's LANCELOT DULAC
The Functions of a Disease (SAFE)
England on the Inside: The Films of Mike Leigh
Political Subjects
The Significance of Sniggering: Zwigoff's CRUMB
Jean Eustache's LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN
Film Writing Degree Zero: The Marketplace and the University
Tribal Trouble (Atom Egoyan's CALENDAR)
Us and Them (BLOOD IN THE FACE)
Other Cinemas
Feudal Attraction (JU DOU)
The Vision of the Conquered (Kurosawa's RHAPSODY IN AUGUST)
Searching for Taiwan (THE PUPPET MASTER)
Inner Space (Tarkovsky's SOLARIS)
Tribal Scars (Sembene's BLACK GIRL)
Alternate Histories
The Seven ARKADINS
TIH-MINH, OUT I: On the Nonreception of Two French Serials
His Twentieth Century: Godard's HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA
Pages from the Endfield File
On Second Thoughts (Marker's THE LAST BOLSHEVIK)
Index