Where Criticism’s Headed: An Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum

By Jonathan Monovich.

Where we’re headed is a nightmare…. our language is so corrupted on so many different levels that we basically can’t even have film criticism now…. The language that we use is largely under the control of the industry.”

—Jonathan Rosenbaum

Born into a family of movie theater owners in Florence, Alabama, Jonathan Rosenbaum was destined to become a film critic. Raised in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Rosenbaum grew up in a work of art. Thus, he has always been engaged in the art life. Possessing an adventurous spirit and a love of the world, Rosenbaum lived in New York, Paris, London, and San Diego before finding his longtime home in Chicago. Regardless of his location, Rosenbaum has always been passionately immersed in the universal language of cinema. He is a man with a story to tell, and his writing proves it. Rosenbaum’s adventures in these cities are chronicled in his new book Travels in the Cities of Cinema—a longform interview with Ehsan Khoshbakht. Published by Sticking Place Books, Travels in the Cities of Cinema is a page turner chronicling film’s most adventurous critc.

Rosenbaum’s ability to make his writing insightful and simultaneously personal is what makes him a standout. In Rosenbaum’s intimate autobiography, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies, he shares that his ambitions were originally those of a novelist and a jazz pianist. Fittingly, Rosenbaum’s recent collection of essays from his prolific career, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader, includes literary and jazz criticism alongside his film criticism. A renaissance man, Rosenbaum has always found ways to weave his many interests into his writing. As literary/music references are commonplace in Rosenbaum’s film criticism, Hat & Beard Press’ In Dreams Begin Responsibilities is a satisfying examination of his thematic preoccupations and stylistic tendencies. If there was ever a critic who was an auteur, it is Jonathan Rosenbaum. Just as Rosenbaum treats film as literature by another means, his writing should be considered the same. Honest and uncompromising, Rosenbaum has always done things his way. Some of the most intriguing essays of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities are those focusing on Gravity’s Rainbow, Ivan the Terrible (1944), The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957), PlayTime (1967), Vagabond (1985), ‘Round Midnight (1986), Walker (1987), Naked Lunch (1991), Robert Altman’s Jazz ’34 (1997), and Charles Mingus: Triumph of the Underdog (1998).

Apart from serving as the Chicago Reader’s head film critic for twenty-one years, Rosenbaum has also written for Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma, Trafic, and Film Comment among other publications. An expert in film history, Rosenbaum offers a wide-range of cinematic comparisons in his criticism. His newest, and one of his more experimental books, Camera Movements That Confound Us, is equally eclectic. An exploration of the camera movements that challenge viewers, also from Sticking Place Books, Camera Movements That Confound Us offers thoughts on cinematography that inspires critical thinking. Highlights include discussion of Sunrise (1927), That Night’s Wife (1930), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), I am Cuba (1964), The Long Goodbye (1973), The Passenger (1975), and Sátántangó (1994). With Camera Movements That Confound Us, Rosenbaum continues to encourage readers to revisit films for reassessment and make new discoveries along the way. Perhaps even more fascinating is Rosenbaum’s analysis of the degradation of televised news. He very clearly explains the radical transformation of TV stations’ adoption of heightened camera movements to devolve news into entertainment. Moving away from an objective still camera, Rosenbaum argues networks now employ the filming techniques of advertisements and the mentality of movie trailers.

Just before he headed to Bologna for Il Cinema Ritrovato, I had the pleasure of speaking with Rosenbaum over Zoom about his newest books, his career, and the future. For an ongoing archive of Rosenbaum’s work, his many decades of writing can be found here.

The title for your newest collection of writing, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, comes from Delmore Schwartz’s short story of the same name.

Well, before that, it came from William Butler Yeats. That’s where Schwartz got the title.

I suppose all great writers have their influences. I was introduced to the Schwartz story from reading your book Moving Places. In the intro to Moving Places, you mentioned that you wanted to reprint Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Thomas Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration,” Elliott Stein’s “My Life with Kong,” and Charles Eckert’s “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” in the book, but the publisher ultimately shot that down.

It’s possible that the Delmore Schwartz estate might not have liked the idea either [laughs]. I never even addressed the issue of whether Thomas Pynchon and the other authors would have let me reprint their stories. It was just an ideal scenario that I had in my head.

In the intro to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, you mention that the title is your life motto. You also use the title for your Eyes Wide Shut (1999) essay in your book Essential Cinema and as a subtitle for your Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988-1999) essay in your book Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition. Can you talk about the ongoing importance of both the Schwartz story and its title in your life?

I suppose what was very interesting to me about Schwartz’s story is that it combines movies and psychoanalysis. It’s often pointed out that cinema and psychoanalysis started around the same time. They’re contemporary with each other, so there’s a coexistence between the two. One of my favorite films, Gertrud (1964), explores the early experiments that preceded Freud’s discoveries. There’s an indirect link. There’s also the idea that movies tell you how to live and how not to live. In Schwartz’s story, there’s a trauma going on as the protagonist watches his parents on their first date. He’s having an existential crisis. I don’t know Schwartz’s other prose or poetry very well. I’ve read some of his film reviews, but I wouldn’t say they’re terribly exciting. Schwartz ended up committing suicide. It’s a really tragic story, especially since he was such a bright young star. There’s a Saul Bellow novel, Humboldt’s Gift, that I’ve been reading about his friendship with Schwartz. Bellow annoys the hell out of me, so I probably won’t finish it [laughs].

Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”also reminds me of the short stories you wrote as a teenager, “The Change,” “The Tower,” and “Don’t Look Back,” that you recently posted on your website. They all possess thematic similarities with a focus on the relationship between dreams and navigating one’s life.

That’s right. Those are things that are still important to me. Some of these stories were published in a literary magazine when I was at the Putney School in Vermont. Otherwise, they were not previously published. I haven’t posted a lot of my other fiction, including my novels. There’s only one chapter from my third novel available on my website.

Your original desire was to be a novelist, and Moving Places was originally intended to be your goodbye to film criticism. Do you have a desire to publish your novels now?

I think not. I think I’d probably find too many things wrong with them. This is assuming that somebody would want to publish them, because I did try. I didn’t send them everywhere, but I did send them to a few places. I had an agent for a brief period, but part of the problem was that the good agents didn’t want to represent me. I was considered a commercial liability. That’s a problem that continues to stick with me. I was originally going to publish In Dreams Begin Responsibilities with University of California Press or Columbia University Press, but both wound up rejecting the book.

In the intro to In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, you recognize that publicists have more say than the editors at some of the academic presses today.

It makes me feel like we don’t have a free press. The book was rejected by both academic presses because it was deemed to be noncommercial. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a form of censorship. In other countries, like France, where there is support from the state, you can publish something even if it isn’t expected to make money. You don’t have to be writing a best seller in order to get something financed there. The same goes for films in France. In the United States, it’s really suffocating because there’s such a large focus on making your money back. The whole philosophy of the publicists is that you have to exhaust all markets. By not starting new markets, by definition, they’re against innovation and going in new directions.

You also have a background as a jazz pianist and clarinet player, but you ultimately gave up those ambitions. In a discussion with Ehsan Khoshbakht, from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, you recall that you gave up on the jazz life because it would be too grim. What role does jazz play in your life today?

I haven’t been blocked as a writer, but I feel I was blocked at playing music. One thing I feel bad about is that I have an electric piano here, in the same room, but I don’t use it much. Part of the reason is because it’s been so long since I’ve played a piano. I have to relearn the fingerings. I’ve fallen out of practice, so my playing is very clumsy. I still listen to a lot of jazz, though.

Ehsan Khoshbakht also interviews you for your book Travels in the Cities of Cinema. There, he refers to you as a “bebop critic.” This is a very clever moniker for your style of writing.

As I mention in Travels in the Cities of Cinema, I originally became friends with Ehsan when he would write to me via email, correct typos on my website, and send me better illustrations [laughs]. He’s quite an amazing person. Of course, he’s now one of the main programmers at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. The first year he went was from my convincing him to go. By the second year, he was working for them.

Khoshbakht’s notion of you being a “bebop critic” comes from your writing’s acknowledgment of the collective experience. You’ve always had very interesting experiences, regardless of wherever you were living. In Paris, you were also mutually respected by many filmmakers. How important was the Cinémathèque and its community of French New Wave directors to your life?

It’s funny. I actually have more friends in Paris now than I have in Chicago. When I lived in Paris, I wouldn’t say I had that many friends. I worked for Jacques Tati briefly. I was good friends with Jacques Rivette’s screenwriter, Eduardo de Gregorio, which gave me some access to Rivette. I watched parts of him shooting two films, but I wouldn’t really say it was like a community and that I was a part of it. It’s embarrassing, but part of the reason why I didn’t have that many friends is because I’ve never been fluent in French. I can read French better than I can speak it. I just got back from a conference in Quebec City, where I was the only one who gave a paper that was in English.

I’ve been moving more and more consciously towards niche markets. At the beginning of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities I argue that for better or for worse, I’ve become a cult writer. In a way, I like that because you get more intense engagement from people.”

Regardless, I think you have been instrumental in getting important French films and texts seen in other countries. Without your passionate writing about the importance of translating Serge Daney’s criticism or making Jacques Rivette’s films accessible, I don’t know that films like Out 1 (1971) or books like The Cinema House and the World would be as readily available outside of France.

It’s my understanding that Semiotext(e) will also be translating the rest of Daney’s work. I’m really glad that they’re doing that. There are other important critics that still haven’t even been collected. One in particular, who also wrote for Cahiers du Cinéma, is Jean-André Fieschi. He’s no longer alive, but I’ve heard there might be a project in the works.

That’s exciting to hear. What was your time as a correspondent for Cahiers du Cinéma like?

It was during the end of Serge Daney’s time as the editor. After he left the Cahiers to write for Libération, I didn’t hit it off well with the magazine. I sort of became annoyed. It was almost like they had the expectation you should feel so grateful to write for them that you didn’t worry about getting paid. To work on a special issue that was done in New York City, I had to suspend all the work that was paying my rent. I interviewed Brian De Palma and Alan Pakula with Serge, among other things. In order to do that, I had to stop writing for American Film, a lousy magazine put out by the AFI, which paid well. When I wasn’t earning enough to pay the rent, that led to problems with the Cahiers.

Another key figure in your life was Jean-Luc Godard who obviously respected you very much. While Godard is no longer alive, his presence is still felt in the work of Leos Carax. His latest film, It’s Not Me (2024), is obviously indebted to Histoire(s) du Cinéma. I’m excited for Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague (2025). I’m curious what Godard would have thought of the film knowing his negative response to Godard Mon Amour (2017). How do you think he would have reacted?

I’m looking forward to seeing it too. But Godard hated all his biographies, so who knows? I know some people are kind of wary of it. I tend to like most of Linklater’s films. I have a lot of respect for him. I really liked his film about Orson Welles as a stage director—Me and Orson Welles (2008). The actor who portrayed Welles, Christian McKay, did a really nice job. That film lost a lot of money, which is too bad. I think it’s one of the only films about Welles that didn’t offend me.

Speaking of Welles, in your newest book, Camera Movements that Confound Us, you recall the iconic Citizen Kane (1941) shot through the window that André Bazin famously noted. You’ve written quite a bit about Welles between your own book Discovering Orson Welles, editing This is Orson Welles, and translating Bazin’s Orson Welles: A Critical View. You also worked on The Other Side of the Wind (2018) and the re-edit of Touch of Evil (1958).

I’m very happy with my work on Touch of Evil, but almost none of my suggestions for The Other Side of the Wind were followed. I still disagree with a lot of the decisions that were made. I feel very ambivalent that except for the Polish producer, Filip Jan Rymsza, everyone else that worked on The Other Side of the Wind project were Hollywood people on an anti-Hollywood movie. I do have some very good news to share. Catherine Benamou and I have convinced Oja Kodar to let a Spanish film archive, the one in Madrid, have Welles’ Don Quixote. Oja finally got all the footage back after a lot of lawsuits. I’m glad it will be preserved and am hopeful it will soon become possible to see. The best material, none of which is in the awful Jesús Franco version, tends to be the scenes with Patty McCormack. I haven’t seen everything, but from what I’ve seen, I think it’s a more important film than The Other Side of the Wind. Even though The Other Side of the Wind is quite interesting and obviously Welles’ most experimental film, I don’t think it’s a successful film in its existing form. Oja has never seen the film. She saw a rough cut, but the experience was too traumatic with all the years of problems trying to get it finished and released.

Circling back to your time in France, can you speak about your time on Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)?

I don’t consider Four Nights of a Dreamer to be a major Bresson film, but the bateau-mouche sequence is amazing. I don’t have anything against the film, but I think it’s less ambitious compared to his other work. One of the strangest things about it was that most of the people in Bresson’s crew didn’t even seem to know who he was. Bresson was conveying instructions to Mylène Van der Mersch, his wife and assistant director, and she was sort of telling the extras what to do. A lot of the extras thought Mylène was the director. It was peculiar and sad in a way. Even in France, there’s an awful lot of alienated labor and people don’t appreciate the importance of the people they’re working with sometimes. There was an Indian woman on set, who did know who Bresson was. She became a friend of mine, and I am still loosely in contact with her.

On the topic of Bresson, in your Midnight Movies book you mentioned that Bresson’s The Devil, Probably (1977)is a film that you would like to see have the midnight treatment. Naturally, punk musicians like Richard Hell embraced The Devil Probably.

The Devil Probably reminds me of Sam Fuller in certain ways. I got to know Sam very well. He was almost like a member of my family and was such a wonderful person. I ended my four year stint at UC Santa Barbara by hiring Sam to be the guest of honor at our summer school, and that’s actually how I got to know him.

You were also keen to recognize in Midnight Movies that The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Eraserhead (1977) were successful from the passion and endurance associated with the films. I think this is key for future filmmakers. Cinema is becoming more like a midnight movie experience in that it is becoming more niche. Would you agree?

I’ve been moving more and more consciously towards niche markets. At the beginning of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities I argue that for better or for worse, I’ve become a cult writer. In a way, I like that because you get more intense engagement from people. It’s interesting that most of the people who read me now are in their 20s and 30s, rather than people that are my own age. I feel like I’m a beneficiary of the internet. My website still gets on somewhere near 1,000 people a day from all over the world, which is really exciting.

You mentioned Jacques Tati in passing earlier. I’d like to ask you about your involvement with his film, Confusion, that was ultimately never made. What was it like working with Tati?

It was just me and Tati in his office. He would get up and try out gags, so my job was to be his audience. He was bankrupt at the time, although he did pay me a salary. That was really nice of him. The film went through different phases, and it took a while before I even got to see a treatment. My involvement was very casual and not really creative. It grew out of the fact that I’d had this long interview with Tati, and we hit it off pretty well. I became friends with his assistant, Marie-France Pisier, and did work for her. It was partly through her that I got to work with Tati.

Another French director that you write about in your book, Camera Movements That Confound Us, is Alan Resnais.

In a lot of ways, I think Resnais was as important and maybe even more daring than Godard. I interviewed him twice. He was excessively polite in a way that made me feel like he really would rather be somewhere else. I didn’t feel like I could break through the ice with him. Even though I don’t like all of his films, I think he really was an amazing figure. His shorts are in some ways as impressive as his features. It’s strange how his career progressed. He went from being the most international French director to being the most French director. One thing I’ve never been able to figure out is Smoking/No Smoking (1993). To me, watching it is almost like hearing chalk squeak on a blackboard. It’s completely a view of the English that makes sense to the French people but no one else [laughs]. The camerawork for A House is not a Home: Wright or Wrong, Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa’s documentary about the Frank Loyd Wright house I grew up in, was influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961). We also applied Godard’s Breathless (1960) tactic of shooting from a wheelchair.

We continue to see a lot of the same problems that you wrote about in your Movie Wars book over twenty years ago. Studios continue to be more irresponsible than ever with their massive advertising campaigns and overreliance on test marketing for decision-making. What would you say about the current state of the industry?

One of the big differences between film culture now and when I was growing up is that the studios used to be run by people who were film buffs. The studio execs used to really like movies. The people who run the business now couldn’t care less. They’re just interested in money and don’t know about movies. I only worked with one studio, Universal, and it was insane how little they knew. In order to get ahold of the full memo that the Touch of Evil work was based on, I had to do it myself. I told Universal I had contacted Charlton Heston and that he still had a copy of it. They didn’t even want to go to him directly. They eventually got ahold of it and were worried about showing it to me, which was crazy because I obviously needed it to do the work. They said we’ll only send you a copy on the condition that you sign an agreement that I would not reveal the existence of the memo. Of course, this was in total ignorance of the fact that I had already published two thirds of the memo in Film Quarterly and in French at Trafic. It was insane. Something similar happened at Netflix when I tried to send a work print of The Other Side of the Wind to Oja Kodar in Croatia. They were so upset that they monitored the removal of the film from my laptop. It was ridiculous that they objected because Oja was a lead actress in the film and a coauthor. Of course, by the time they said something, I had already put it on a disc [laughs].

In Travels in the Cities of Cinema, you mentioned that you’ve gotten rid of your large DVD/Blu-ray collection. Do you have any regrets about that?

Well, it’s not like I have none left. There are a few that I kept, particularly ones that I contributed to. I’m very grateful that Criterion and Second Run still send me all of their new releases. I have a small collection now, but it’s growing.

Do you have any interest in doing more DVD/Blu-ray commentary tracks in the future?

I would love to do more commentary tracks in the future. I really enjoy doing them, and it’s just a question of being invited to do them. I don’t go knocking on people’s doors. Usually, I wait for them to come to me, so sometimes it’s a long wait. It’s been a while since I’ve done any work for Criterion, but I would love to do more. I don’t like to do the commentary singlehandedly, though. I’ve only done one by myself and that was The Turin Horse (2011). All the Welles films I discussed were with Jim Naremore and all the Abbas Kiarostami films I discussed were with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa. Jim is my favorite academic film critic in the U.S. He’s a good friend.

Are there any new films or books that you are looking forward to?

Shiguéhiko Hasumi’s book, Directed by Yasujirō Ozu, has just been translated into English. I would say he’s the most important living film critic in the world. Recently, I just turned in a review of my friend Ross Lipman’s book, The Archival Impermanence Project, to Sight and Sound. It’s a huge collection of his writing. I also just saw Eugénie Grandval’s documentary about Bulle Ogier, Bulle Ogier, portrait d’une étoile cachée (2024), which excited me.

I’m also looking forward to Jim Jarmusch’s new film—Father, Mother, Sister, Brother (2025). I’m curious about Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another (2025), even though I didn’t really like his adaptation of Inherent Vice (2014). I don’t think Vineland is a great novel, but it’s a good novel. It has more possibilities. I don’t think Pynchon is as ambitious now as he once was, and it seems he’s now interested in writing these detective novels. They’re still fun to read, though. When I last spoke with Hat & Beard Press, the publisher of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, they confirmed that Pynchon actually has a second completed novel in addition to the one that will arrive in October—Shadow Ticket.

Where do you think we are headed with film criticism and filmmaking?

Where we’re headed is a nightmare. I was just at a conference in French Canada where I gave a very polemical keynote address, discussing how our language is so corrupted on so many different levels that we basically can’t even have film criticism now. When it becomes a common expression to say “greatest movies of all time,” it’s absurd. If you took it literally, you would take it to mean Socrates was a cinephile. The language that we use is largely under the control of the industry. They determine when we can see films and if we borrow them when we need to return them. All film criticism, including my own, is partly corrupted by the studios who control all sorts of things. It’s problematic because there’s so much wrong with our language to begin with as we don’t have a language where we can tell the truth in some cases. We have to deal with thinking about how to reach other people and purify our language. Those two things also tend to be contradictory. In order to be read, it’s almost like you have to speak Oscar talk. At the conference that I was describing, I argued that we can’t make our own social connections. It’s almost like the way film culture is being set up is to subdivide the audience. The industry intentionally targets multiple audiences, but they don’t want them to mix. There are all kinds of social controls tied to film advertising, promotion, distribution, and so on. The best possibility is new alliances being brought about directly by the people.

Jonathan Monovich is a Chicago-based writer and a regular contributor for Film International. His writing has also been featured in Film Matters, Bright Lights Film Journal, and PopMatters.