Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia Other Books by Jonathan Rosenbaum Rivette: Texts and Interviews (editor, 1977) Orson Welles: A Critical View, by André Bazin (editor and translator, 1978) Moving Places: A Life in the Movies (1980) Film: The Front Line 1983 (1983) Midnight Movies (with J. Hoberman, 1983) Greed (1991) This Is Orson Welles, by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich (editor, 1992) Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995) Movies as Politics (1997) Another Kind of Independence: Joe Dante and the Roger Corman Class of 1970 (coedited with Bill Krohn, 1999) Dead Man (2000) Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000) Abbas Kiarostami (with Mehrmax Saeed-Vafa, 2003) Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (coedited with Adrian Martin, 2003) Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004) Discovering Orson Welles (2007) The Unquiet American: Trangressive Comedies from the U.S. (2009) Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia Film Culture in Transition Jonathan Rosenbaum the university of chicago press | chicago and london Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote for many periodicals (including the Village Voice, Sight and Sound, Film Quarterly, and Film Comment) before becoming principal fi lm critic for the Chicago Reader in 1987. Since his retirement from that position in March 2008, he has maintained his own Web site and continued to write for both print and online publications. His many books include four major collections of essays: Placing Movies (California 1995), Movies as Politics (California 1997), Movie Wars (a cappella 2000), and Essential Cinema (Johns Hopkins 2004). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-72664-9 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-72665-6 (paper) isbn-10: 0-226-72664-9 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-72665-7 (paper) The following essays were originally published in the Chicago Reader: “The World as a Circus” (December 1, 1989); “Movie Heaven” (April 5, 1991);”Wrinkles in Time” (February 18, 2000); “Unsatisfi ed Men” (May 26, 2000); “Art of Darkness” (December 5, 2003); “Prisoners of War” (June 18, 2004); “L.A. Existential” (October 1, 2004); “Marilyn Monroe’s Brains” (December 2, 2005); “Introducing Pere Portabella” (November 10, 2006); “When Fable and Fact Interact” (August 31, 2007); and “Cinema of the Future” (November 15, 2007). Copyright © 1989, 1991, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 by Chicago Reader, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Goodbye cinema, hello cinephilia : fi lm culture in transition / Jonathan Rosenbaum. p. cm. Includes index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-72664-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-72665-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-72664-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-72665-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—Reviews. 3. Motion picture producers and directors. 4. Motion picture actors and actresses. I. Title. pn1994 .r577 2010 791.4309—dc22 2010000440 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992. To the memory of nika bohinc (1979–2009) and alexis tioseco (1981–2009) Contents Introduction ix I Position Papers Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia 3 In Defense of Spoilers 10 Potential Perils of the Director’s Cut 12 Southern Movies, Actual and Fanciful: A Personal Survey 25 À la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions 31 Bushwhacked Cinema 44 What Dope Does to Movies 51 Fever Dreams in Bologna: Il Cinema Ritrovato 58 From Playtime to The World: The Expansion and Depletion of Space within Global Economies 62 II Actors, Actors-Writers-Directors, Filmmakers Kim Novak as Midwestern Independent 71 Marilyn Monroe’s Brains 75 A Free Man: White Hunter, Black Heart 78 Bit Actors 82 Rediscovering Charlie Chaplin 86 Second Thoughts on Stroheim 97 Sweet and Sour: Lubitsch and Wilder in Old Hollywood 114 Ritwik Ghatak: Reinventing the Cinema 123 Introducing Pere Portabella 127 Portabella and Continuity 131 Two Neglected Filmmakers: Eduardo de Gregorio and Sara Driver 136 Vietnam in Fragments: William Klein in 1967–68: A Radical Reevaluation 141 Movie Heaven: Defending Your Life 146 The World as a Circus: Tati’s Parade 152 The Sun Also Sets: The Films of Nagisa Oshima 160 III Films Inside the Vault [on Spione] 169 Family Plot 177 “The Doddering Relics of a Lost Cause”: John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright 181 Prisoners of War: Bitter Victory 192 Art of Darkenss: Wichita 199 Cinema of the Future: Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa 204 A Few Eruptions in the House of Lava 207 Unsatisfi ed Men: Beau travail 213 Viridiana on DVD 219 Doing the California Split 224 Mise en Scène as Miracle in Dreyer’s Ordet 229 David Holzman’s Diary/My Girlfriend’s Wedding: Historical Artifacts of the Past and Present 240 Two Early Long-Take Climaxes: The Magnifi cent Ambersons and A Star Is Born 245 Wrinkles in Time: Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy 246 Martha: Fassbinder’s Uneasy Testament 251 India Matri Buhmi 256 Radical Humanism and the Coexistence of Film and Poetry in The House Is Black 260 WR, Sex, and the Art of Radical Juxtaposition 266 Revisiting The Godfather 271 IV Criticism Film Writing on the Web: Some Personal Refl ections 277 Goodbye, Susan, Goodbye: Sontag and Movies 285 Daney in English: A Letter to Trafi c 292 Trailer for Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma 305 Moullet retrouvé (2006/2009) 320 The Farber Mystery 325 The American Cinema Revisited 331 Raymond Durgnat 337 Surviving the Sixties 351 L.A. Existential 361 Index 369 Introduction t’s a strange paradox that about half of my friends and colleagues think that Iwe’re currently approaching the end of cinema as an art form and the end of fi lm criticism as a serious activity, while the other half believe that we’re enjoying some form of exciting resurgence and renaissance in both areas. How can one account for this discrepancy? One clue is that many of the naysayers tend to be people around my own age (sixty- six) or older, whereas many of the optimistic ones are a good deal younger, most of them under thirty.1 I tend to feel closer to the younger cinephiles on this issue, but I can sympa- thize with certain aspects of the other perspective as well. And both positions are entwined with attitudes about other technological and social changes that are far too complex and varied to be simply endorsed or condemned, especially insofar as we’re still in the process of trying to fi gure out their full implications. Our terminology is developing at a far slower rate than our society, producing time lags that wind up confusing everyone. Both of these positions as well as my proximity to each can be neatly il- lustrated with a brilliant, hilarious three- and- a- half- minute short, At the Sui- cide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema of the World, by David Cronenberg—who was born about two weeks after me and who stars in the title role, in a grizzled one-take close-up, preparing to shoot himself inside a men’s room in the world’s last cinema while two airheaded TV newscasters, male and female, offer a continuous and inanely cheerful offscreen commen- tary about him. This fi lm was made for the sixtieth edition of the Cannes fi lm festival, in 2007, along with thirty- two other shorts of the same length by other famous directors, issued on a French DVD with English subtitles, Chacun son cinéma, that I was able to order fairly cheaply (it currently sells on French Amazon for about ten euros, plus postage) on the fi nal day of the festival so that I could watch it in Chicago on a multiregional player just a few days later. So in a way I qualify both as Cronenberg’s Last Jew and as one of those dopey newscasters, equally untroubled by the loss of the last cinema because I can view this particular sketch feature at home. Clearly the degree to which technology affects virtually every aspect of ix our culture—from the fax machine during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 to the mobile phone during the postelection protests in Iran twenty years later—has been equally applicable to fi lm history, inside and outside the movie theaters. And my life and career have both been largely shaped by these changes, as a good many pieces in this collection show. t’s hard for me to specify too precisely when my fi rst encounter with cinema Iwas, because from circa 1915 to 1960, fi lm exhibition qualifi ed as my fam- ily’s business. My paternal grandfather, Louis Rosenbaum, opened his fi rst movie theater, the Princess, in Douglas, Wyoming, around the same time that D. W. Griffi th was shooting The Birth of a Nation in southern California. (The Princess’s fi rst program included A Fool There Was, with Theda Bara.) Later the same year, my grandfather built another movie theater called the Princess in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where he moved with his wife and four- year- old son, and four years after that he moved with them still again to Florence, Alabama, where he built his third, largest, and fi nal movie theater to be called the Princess—this one also an opera house presenting an average of twenty- fi ve stage shows a year, as well as fi lms.