Jonathan Rosenbaum
"What is cinema?" is the famous question that begins Jonathan Rosenbaum's new collection of film writings, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinemania. That allusion is to the title of the collection of Andre Bazin's collected writings, a cornerstone of film criticism. In his book, Rosenbaum is asking a new question: Where does cinema go when the Internet and DVDs have become the most popular way to experience film?
Rosenbaum, along with colleague Jim Hoberman of The Village Voice, is one of the bellwether critics in film reviewing, reminding others of the tradition of serious cinema and keeping abreast of new movements. Since Rosenbaum left his job reviewing movies for the alternative weekly The Chicago Reader, in 2008, he spends more time writing about DVDs (he has a column in the Canadian magazine, Cinema Scope) and maintaining a film blog.
The current collection of writings, his fourth since the mid-nineties, begins with the writer mulling over an apparent paradox: One group of his friends and colleagues feels that cinema and film criticism is coming to the end, while others, typically younger, see both cinema and criticism enjoying a renaissance, thanks to DVDs and the Internet.
The question of changing models of cinephilia has been a popular critical topic since the late Susan Sontag's 1996 essay in the New York Times magazine, The Decay of Cinema. Sontag lamented the loss of a "very special love that the cinema inspired" from the late fifties through the seventies. She described cinema love in bodice-ripping terms. The cinephile wanted to "surrender to, to be transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie."
Rosenbaum doesn't pay much attention to the surrender and kidnapping discussion; instead, he serves as an example of how cinephilia is practised. This is about personal movies, both for the filmmaker and the audience (we learn a lot about his life story). Cinephilia is also about upholding the tradition of veteran masters, and raising up the worthy but obscure. There's a sense of defeatism - the word "lamentably" comes up a lot - but hope that the new technology can heal old wounds. Sometimes, the lamentably overlooked filmmakers - like French critic and filmmaker Luc Moullet or Spain's Pere Portabella - eventually are validated when a DVD box set of their work is released.
A cinema lover such as Rosenbaum also likes to discover unexpected juxtapositions through cinema (Jacques Tati's Playtime and Jia Zhangke's The World, for example). A cinephile tends to be interested in films from distant decades and distant places, but if the subject is a mainstream film, an against-the-grain reading is expected. If you thought Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe really were not very good actresses, Family Plot was minor Hitchcock and the Godfather movies represent the top of American cinema, Rosenbaum offers arguments to make you to think again.
The book begins with nine "Position Papers," connected as articles on cinema created for different kinds of audiences. There's an amusing defence of spoilers (did Shakespeare give The Taming of the Shrew a spoiler title?), a piece on how pot influenced the look of movies, cinema seen through a political lens in Bushwhacked, in which Rosenbaum tries to find a connection between the White House sanctioning torture and the boffo box office of The Passion of the Christ.
The second section of the book focuses on personalities, actors and writers, the third on films, and the final last short section on criticism, including insightful personal appreciations of friends and mentoring critics Andrew Sarris, Susan Sontag and Manny Farber.
The relationship to the book's title, and the shifting paradigms of theatre, is difficult to divine. Taken on their own, the pieces on Jacques Tourneur's Wichita or John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright are exemplary combinations of formal analysis, historical background and personal reaction. As rich and useful as much of the material here is, Rosenbaum is the kind of auteur who could benefit from more intrusive editing.
The book's opening chapter, an article "originally addressed to a French cinephile audience," includes this mouthful: "If we start to think of cinephilia less as a specialized interest than as a certain kind of necessity - an activity making possible things that would otherwise be impossible - then it starts to become possible to conceive of a new kind of cinephilia in which cinema in the old sense doesn't exactly disappear but becomes reconfigured (something that, after all, has been happening with a certain constant through the so-called history of 'cinema')."
I think I get it, but there are too many "possibles" and "certains" for it to be possible to be certain.
In the same chapter, we get this strange leftover: "Of course it's far too early to know if we have a chance of getting Bush voted out of office next November …"
Major spoiler alert ahead.
Liam Lacey is a film critic for The Globe and Mail.
Liam Lacey