Jonathan Rosenbaum

Conversations reveal Welles's feelings about films, theater, the radio and television industries, and various other directors and stars

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.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, longtime contributor to such publications as Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and The Village Voice, is arguably the most eloquent, insightful film critic writing in America today. Placing Movies, the first collection of his work, gathers together thirty of his most distinctive and illuminating pieces. Written over a span of twenty-one years, these essays cover an extraordinarily broad range of films--from Hollywood blockbusters to foreign art movies to experimental cinema. They include not just reviews but perceptive commentary on directors, actors, and trends; and thoughtful analysis of the practice of film criticism. It is this last element--Rosenbaum's reflections on the art of film criticism--that sets this collection apart from other volumes of film writing. Both in the essays themselves and in the section introductions, Rosenbaum provides a rare insider's view of his profession: the backstage politics, the formulation of critical judgments, the function of film commentary. Taken together, these pieces serve as a guided tour of the profession of film criticism. They also serve as representative samples of Rosenbaum's unique brand of film writing. Among the highlights are memoirs of director Jacques Tati and maverick critic Manny Farber, celebrations of classics such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Manchurian Candidate, and considered reevaluations of Orson Welles and Woody Allen.

"Moving Places" is the brilliant account of a life steeped in and shaped by the movies - part autobiography, part film analysis, and part social history. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America's most gifted film critics, began his moviegoing in the 1950s in small-town Alabama, where his family owned and managed a chain of theaters. Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of "screen memories", making us aware of movies as markers of the past - when and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly of "Rear Window", a meditation on "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with "On Moonlight Bay". Originally published in 1980, "Moving Places" is reissued now both as a companion volume to the author's latest book and as a means of introducing a new generation of film buffs to this unique, often humorous exploration of one man's life at the movies.

Greed was to have been Erich von Stroheim's masterwork, but his immense plans were his undoing. This volume, reconstructs the history of the film. Each volume in the BFI Film Classics series contains a personal commentary on the film, a brief production history and a detailed filmography.