In Freehold, New Jersey, movies were the things that played at the local Loews. A multiplex childhood means memories by mass culture: the first movie I ever saw was The Lion King (1994). I remember its shapes most, behemoth blobs and lion-like impressions. The songs were louder than anything I’d ever heard. My first PG-13 movie was Small Soldiers (1998). I drank a caffeinated soda as big as my face and stayed awake all night. I thought I’d never sleep again. The first time I kissed in a movie theater, a blonde Bond writhed around a map up on the screen. I worked at the Loews by then, but everybody got a kick out of flashing their fresh driver’s license to get into an R; mine: Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (2007). I got my first speeding ticket singing along to a ripped CD of its soundtrack, driving 40 in a 35 zone. “I also suspect you were on your cell phone,” the Freehold cop said, handing me an additional citation for reckless driving, my first real glimpse at law and order in America.
The week I stopped working at the Loews-now-AMC was the week they gutted the old platter projectors and wheeled in the digitals. The last movie I saw on 35mm (without it being a bolded and notable notation in a repertory theater) was The A-Team (2010). We made off with a few of the screws that used to bolt the film projectors to the ground, less over any nascent format-fetishism, more because we were young and underpaid and this was the spirit of growing up. You held things in your hand, tried to see if it was something you needed to keep in your heart. You put it in your pocket and forgot about it until it seemed like a metaphor for something you’d forgotten.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Moving Places starts with a stream of such glitched knowledge construction: “Imagination believes before knowing constructs. Believes longer than remembers, longer than knowing even conjures.” It’s as if the sentence is remembering Faulkner in real time, restaging A Light in August by playing it anew, improvising it to the side. “My favorite novel”, Rosenbaum writes in a 2016 essay called “Selected Moments: Some Recollections of Movie Time”—collected as part of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities—“begins in and periodically reverts to the present tense, the immediacy of movie time.”
I don’t remember when I first read Jonathan Rosenbaum’s writing. I do remember accepting its immediacy and playfulness of form as a given of critical writing, rather than an exception. I still think this can be the case. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, a 2024 volume of Rosenbaum’s writing makes the case over and over again. That a life at the movies is a life committed to observing oneself observing. That music moves us in part because we don’t speak its language and that we should never give up writing to it. That art-making and pleasure-seeking are essential sustenances, not luxuries that capitalism metes out. That dreams prove us to be processes rather than products.
In the weeks before a set of screenings at New York’s Metrograph theater commemorating his new book and his writing life, I spoke with Jonathan over video chat about putting our selves in criticism, the dare of Jerry Lewis and dreams alike, and reclaiming art and pleasure for all people.
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Did you choose Giants and Toys (1958) and WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) for this screening series at Metrograph?
I did choose them. They sort of fit together, they have a grisly side. I didn’t plan to pick two grisly films, but that’s the way it came out. I think what interests me about Masumara is how similar he was to certain American directors of the same period. I was intrigued by the relationship between Giants and Toys and Frank Tashlin. One big difference is Frank Tashlin is a real humanist, who loves people. In fact, there’s never any villains in his films. Whereas in Masumara’s film, everybody is a villain. There’s a bitterness in Giants and Toys, which I don’t find in Tashlin.
Speaking of what is and isn’t humanism: you write about Kelly Reichardt near the end of the book, sort of about critics trying to fit her into certain schools like neorealism or slow cinema. You write that some of these efforts are “in keeping with much auteurist criticism, confusing the personal with the autobiographical.”
Yeah, I hope Jim Hoberman is still going to speak to me—he sometimes gets annoyed when I disagree with him. He’s one of my favorite critics.
Does it seem notable to include the “I” in criticism?
Not at all. It’s just a form of honesty. I think if you don’t include the word “I”, that assumes you’re all-knowing, some kind of god. If you say “I”, you’re actually being one person. I don’t think critics should have the first or last word. I think that they contribute to a discussion that begins before they come along and continues after they leave. It seems to me there’s a lot of mythologies that exist—mythological positions in film criticism—that I’m trying to combat. One of them is that you can say, in some kind of ultimate way, that one film is good or one film is bad. That’s ridiculous. It seems perfectly reasonable that a film that might be good for me might not be good for you. Therefore, if you say “I”, you’re being honest.
Using ‘I” doesn’t mean that what I’m writing about is just myself. It means This is the reaction I have, and it might not be the reaction somebody else has. Maybe I’m breaking with what’s often considered standard practice. Maybe I am self-indulgent. But my first book, Moving Places, originally included two short stories and two essays by other writers. My editor said no. I’m actually working on a book right now called Camera Movements That Confound Us. I include extended quotations from other writers, and the reader’s reports are criticizing this. But this is a political position: sometimes other writers say what I want to say, and they say it better than I could say it. Why not let them say it?
It feels like The Argonauts, the way Maggie Nelson includes ideas from a chorus of writers but the citation appears in the margins, a name in italics. Something exciting happens when the text remains continuous, when its existence contains other voices.
That’s something that was done in certain online magazines. ROUGE, which used to come out of Australia, would have sidenotes instead of footnotes.
Formal fluidity feels especially helpful in memoir.
I got into the habit of using first-person in Moving Places because it was a memoir. A lot of people were annoyed—what was I doing writing a memoir already, in my mid-thirties? I thought that Moving Places was my gateway out of being a film critic. I wanted to be a literary writer. I still consider myself a literary writer. I consider myself an artist, which annoys some people. It’s taken me most of my career to get to the point where I’ll admit that I’ve always carried a desire to be an artist. Including voices and other critics is not just a critical decision, it’s an artistic decision.
There’s a sense of freedom to a lot of the pieces collected in the book, to not only address film or jazz or literature equally, but to do the addressing in methods or approaches different from “standard practice.”
Well, I’ve always considered myself a writer first and a film critic second. I wrote novels and short stories before I became a film critic. I’m still doing that, in some ways. And so I also try to experiment with the form of the pieces, too.
Where do you think that distinction comes from, between criticism and writing, between objectivity and literature? It occurs to me that most of the film professors I got to study with came out of comparative literature, maybe because film studies in American universities is a relatively recent development?
It goes further back. If you go back to the first countries that sort of recognize film as an art form, it’s Hungary and France. And in both cases, the way they regard film, from then until now, is literature by another means. The French magazine I wrote for for many years, Trafic, really was a literary magazine about film. Serge Daney never called it that, but that’s what it was. The literary aspect is so intrinsic to French culture that they don’t even need to point it out. Trafic was significant because it was a magazine that had no illustrations at all, except for one tiny little still on the cover. The word was very dominant.
I think that affects French culture in other ways. They were slower than Americans to pick up on things like marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs in the sixties and seventies. And that’s partly because a lot of people getting stoned was sort of like getting away from language, or even mistrusting language. Language is so central to French life. Of course, they also have a tradition of people like Baudelaire and Rimbaud being connected in people’s minds to drugs. But the fact that French culture is based more on language has to do with a literary attitude.
It seems that one of the distinctions between being a writer and being a film critic, at least in this country, is that we understand ‘film critic’ as a job title.
Yes, that’s right. And in a sense, if people turn to film criticism just for consumer advice, then that’s more ‘reviewing’ than criticism. It seems to me that criticism should have a wider aspiration than that. And that’s why I’ve made so much in the book of the metaphor that Godard used and that I’ve repeated several times: I’d rather be regarded as an airplane than as an airport. If people read me in order to go where they want to go, that means that it isn’t necessarily where I want to go. I want my writing to be open to people for more reasons than just what film they should see tonight. It’s true, I do sort of campaign on behalf of certain films that I think are neglected, but I don’t consider that the main purpose of my writing.
Do you have a sense of a main purpose?
I think it’s the main purpose to be all the purposes, or a lot of the main purposes that writing can have. This includes giving information, stimulating ideas (which are not necessarily the same as my ideas), rethinking certain things about films. I’m trying to expand the options of the reader or the film spectator. That’s what I’m trying to do, if that makes sense?
I think it does. And it sounds a little bit like…I don’t know if purpose is the right word, but it sounds a little bit like what the work of teaching is, too.
No that’s right, it’s closely connected. The funny thing is, it took me many years before I could combine my writing practice with my teaching practice. In a way, that’s connected with my feeling for music too, because when I teach, I’m always better when I improvise. It becomes a bit musical in that sense, too. That’s something I partly learned from Manny Farber, because Manny would give lectures that were like jazz solos, that would be improvised. There was a very performative aspect to them. And it took me a while, but I think now when I teach, I feel like I’m pretty good. But when I first started out—including when I was substituting for Manny in San Diego—I was a failure. Because I wasn’t equipped, and didn’t want to be an imitation of Manny Farber, even though I was impressed by him. I didn’t want to do the same things that he was doing, and so it was hard to find a way. I was really starting from scratch as a teacher.
You worked with Béla Tarr at film.factory, right?
Yes. In fact, that’s the best teaching situation I’ve ever had, where it becomes both very intense and very relaxed. One of the great things about the school was that all the students were handpicked by Béla himself. His instincts are so good, because everyone he picked are making films now, having successful careers. Not in the sense of making money, but in the sense of doing what they want to do.
The other book I’ve been working on—in its final stages now—is a book-length interview for a new series devoted to interviews with film critics. I was asked what new filmmakers are the most interesting to me, and one of the people I said is one of my own students, a Japanese woman named Oda Kaori. She’s an experimental filmmaker, and the film that knocked me out most is her first full-length, called Aragane (2015), a film about a coal mine and shot mainly in darkness.
Is that available to view at all?
I don’t know. She’s well-known in Japan. Shiguéhiko Hasumi, probably my favorite living critic, also mentioned her in a list of new filmmakers.
I don’t mean to be snobbish about this, but sometimes, America is the last stop. Maybe it’s because the people who control the business aren’t film buffs. They’re in it for the money, not aesthetic pleasure. So films that give aesthetic pleasure take longer to get to the United States than they do to get to France or certain other countries. There’s a bias against art in the US, and I don’t know of any other country where it exists in quite the way it exists here, where people have confused it with being rich. Ask Woody Allen: it’s all about drinking cappuccino and eating brie. It’s a class position. The fact that he’s not working class anymore is what makes him an artist.
I’ve often said this, and I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much, but America may be the only country that hates art. Money is the only thing that’s considered a healthy habit. Art is considered neurotic, or it just shows that you have problems, whereas having money is somehow seen as totally healthy, even if you don’t know what you want to get money for, or how to spend it. I mean, I would accept Trump much more readily if he spent all of his wealth on beautiful things, you know, creating them, owning them. My grandfather, who ran a chain of movie theaters, was a very good businessman. But he felt so guilty for what he had to do in order to make money, he became a philanthropist and was much beloved in this small town in Alabama because of all the things he would give money to. For him, being a good businessman created a lot of guilt.
It seems like one of the works a critic can do—that we maybe don’t talk about often—is to return the dignity of art and artmaking to the people.
That’s one of the major things I’m trying to do. And to see art as something we go to for pleasure. One reason I lived in France for five years is there’s this conviction that the French know how to enjoy themselves better than Americans do. I discovered American cinema in artistic terms in France; if it weren’t for French culture, we wouldn’t take Hitchcock or Hawks seriously.
Jerry Lewis.
Actually most people don’t seem to know this, but Woody Allen is much more popular in France now than Jerry Lewis. Lewis is taken seriously, but he’s not as popular with audiences. In other words, when people say, Oh, the French love Jerry Lewis, they’re in denial that Jerry Lewis was bigger in the United States than he ever was in France in the fifties. The French would have never heard of him if it weren’t for the fact that Jerry Lewis was such a hit in America that he was releasing three movies a year when he was with Dean Martin. To me, there’s an American kind of denial that they’d ever loved Jerry Lewis. It was a craze. He was as big or bigger than Elvis when he first came out. And his movies were making more money than the movies that were getting Oscars. I think Sailor Beware (1955) made more money at the box office than The African Queen (1951) or Singin’ in the Rain (1952). And you can go down the list.
An interesting thing, by the way: a recent documentary [From Darkness to Light (2024)] about The Day the Clown Cried really reveals, I think, a satisfying reason why we haven’t been able to see that film up to now: he correctly perceived that it wasn’t good, that he didn’t have the equipment to make it the way he wanted to. Of course there are other technical and legal reasons, but what we see from the film confirms his own critique of it. I don’t think it’s very good. What’s funny is that the clown he plays in the film is not funny at all, not even remotely. You have all these little kids laughing, but you’re not. Whereas if Jerry Lewis were playing Jerry Lewis for little kids, he’d be hysterically funny. So there’s kind of an interesting dilemma that he created for himself in trying to make that movie.
I always thought that he was like Orson Welles, better at critiquing himself than his critics were. I think the real part of why he’s disliked, distrusted, or even hated now, because people all over the world see Jerry Lewis as the quintessential American. I tend to see him that way, too. If you were trying to think of what America’s role in the world is, it’s like Jerry Lewis’s role in society, you know? In Which Way to the Front? (1970), which most people consider an awful movie, he plays a character named Byers, ‘B-Y-E-R-S.’ As Serge Daney pointed out, it sounds like
‘B-U-Y-E-R-S.’ And he plays somebody who gets rejected by the army, so he buys his own army because he’s wealthy and goes to war on his own. I mean, whether you think this is conscious or not, it doesn’t matter—it’s really a portrait of America. I think it exposes too much about us that it makes us uncomfortable. It makes us squirm. If you go to the movies to be comfortable and relaxed, to not be challenged, then you have to stay away from Jerry Lewis
I like comparing him to Welles as a kind of ‘critic-artist.’ Making space for artists as critics opens up a route for critics to be understood as artists. Which, in turn, suggests that ‘being an artist’ is far more accessible than not.
No, I think it’s true. And one thing that proves the fact that everybody is an artist is the fact that the dreams we have every night are artistic creations. Involuntary artistic creations, but those are maybe the most authentic and most valuable. Often, I find what I do as an artist is not what I intend to do, but what I wind up doing in spite of my intentions. But that’s because I consider art a normal and healthy activity, not something sick the way a lot of my compatriots consider it.
Do you think much about your own dreams?
I always think about my dreams, sure. I mean, often I’m baffled by them. But sometimes I can learn from them.
It occurs to me that since we all have dreams, every day we wake up and do a little film criticism, revisiting the images as we can, trying to piece together meaning as the day goes on.
Yeah. In other words, when they’re watching a film, everybody goes through a process of making sense. They’re being a critic because it’s really interesting that even though we’re not watching real people in motion the way we do in life, it’s a series of frames that has the illusion of life and movement. But it’s not the same thing as life and movement. I think there’s a lot of confusion in people’s minds about this.
Dreams send us back to that idea of self-portraits, and having to look at them.
I think a lot of what’s hated in American culture is self-portraits that people are made uncomfortable by. I think that’s true of Welles, by the way. I do think The Other Side of the Wind (2018) might be considered an artistic failure, but I think the fact that it’s been basically rejected historically is because it gets into very dangerous territory, as most Welles films do.
One piece of good news, by the way, is that steps are finally being taken to get Don Quixote into a Spanish film archive and eventually have it in some form that can be presentable, even though it’s not complete. It’s unfinished, like The Other Side of the Wind, but I feel like it’s the greater film, and people haven’t seen much of the best material in it. I think it’ll be possible to see, once it winds up at an archive.
What material is that?
The best material from Don Quixote is with Patty McCormack, but Welles didn’t have enough money to shoot everything he wanted with her. He planned to discard all that material and reshoot with his daughter, Beatrice, but he never did. So it’s an unfinished film, but the best material happens to be what exists. I saw all of that footage screened on video at a Welles conference in Rome. That’s the only way to see it, and I haven’t seen all of it, so I’m just making surmises. But I think there are really incredible things in it. To me, Akim Tamiroff’s greatest performance is as Sancho Panza. One thing that I actually contributed to Youtube that anybody can access is what I think is the greatest sequence from the film. It’s one he never added sound to, set at a movie theater. It was shown on Italian TV and I managed to get a hold of it.
It’s another case of literature and film coming together. To me, one of the most interesting critical statements any critic has ever made about anything is Harold Bloom on Cervantes’ novel. I’m paraphrasing, but he said that Don Quixote himself may be a pathetic character, and so is Sancho Panza, but together, they know more than we do. The greatness of Don Quixote rests in that fact.
There’s a generousness there to the collective, a reorienting away from the individual. Which feels a little like Welles’s own treatment of ensembles.
And Don Quixote is Welles’s most improvised film. I mean, there was a skeletal script, but what exists of the film was improvised over and over in different countries, different situations and so on. He basically thought he was following in the traditions of Mack Sennett and silent slapstick. The interesting thing is, all of Welles’s favorite projects were comedies, but he never got to make a pure comedy, except for his TV pilot, The Fountain of Youth (1958), which is impossible to see in any decent form now. The only version that’s available is on Youtube, which is a crummy copy. It’s crazy: the materials exist to bring it out properly, it’s just that nobody wants to do it.
And we’re back to who’s in charge of movies coming out in America, those anti-art currents.
I suppose we are. There’s such contempt for the audience. I’m nostalgic about movies from my childhood because there was this idea (or illusion) that movies were made for everybody. And then there was a period where movies were really only made for 10 year-old boys. And now the assumption—the way these big budget movies are really designed—is that everybody has the mentality of a 10 year-old boy. All the sequels and remakes, it has almost nothing to do with giving people pleasure.
One of the main problems with In Dreams Begin Responsibilities was that two separate university presses—University of California and Columbia—both had editors who wanted the book. And they rejected it because the publicists had veto power. Academic presses are supposed to have ethics above Hollywood, but it seems to me that they’re just money grubbers, you know? They’re not interested in truth, they’re interested in profit. That’s a harsh thing to say, but there’s this level of callousness. You find it elsewhere—it seems to be that it’s considered a virtue, particularly with our new president. I guess people consider Trump a good sitcom character. What they want for president is somebody they can have fun watching on TV.
But isn’t that connected to what you’re suggesting about art and our relationship to pleasure? I think for the TV Trump and this politics of trolling that makes up a contemporary American right-wing identity, pleasure is only possible at the expense of other people’s pain.
And that’s disgusting to me. It’s not defensible. It’s only defensible in the case of sadists and masochists who admit to being sadists and masochists. I was friends with a real sadist who was an incredibly nice person, Elliot Stein. But his sadism was exerted against consenting adults. That’s not Trump’s version at all. People talk about Trump having an enormous ego, but people don’t act the way he acts unless they hate themselves. This is a boring topic, let’s go to something else.
Maybe better to funnel that anxiety through frustrations with the American movie business.
The business has changed, but at the same time, one of the new movies I like is a movie that hearkens back to what movies were when I was a kid, The Brutalist (2024). It’s in VistaVision, but it’s really about how art does or doesn’t survive in a certain capitalist culture. And the culture of immigrants, to what extent capitalism permits or rejects absorption.
Commerce colors criticism too—I wonder if there’s even a way to engage with mass (American) culture in good faith, the way and length to which it has (d)evolved in recent years? Do you think we’re wasting our time checking in on so many of the movies that find themselves at the multiplex or worse, on streaming services?
It depends on what you’re doing, what you’re writing about. I mean, the big difference in my movie-going now is that during the twenty years I was at the Chicago Reader, I felt I had to see every movie to end. And most of the movies I went to see were not movies I would have chosen to go to. Whereas now I can be completely selective, and if I don’t like something, I can turn it off and not go back. It seems to me that people can be interested in writing about things because of what they reveal about the culture. The worst thing about AFI’s 100 Greatest American Films list was that it was front page news in the New York Times. The minute that questions about JFK’s assassination became front page news was the moment Oliver Stone made a bad movie about it.
I think we have to use the term ‘capitalist censorship.’ I think it’s all around us in every way. 95% of written or visual language we encounter is advertising. I mean, we’re constantly bombarded with it. So it’s little surprise that people don’t trust the media anymore. They don’t trust journalism, because most advertising is lies. We talk about being the freest nation, but we can only do that if we ignore capitalist censorship, which says that if it’s not making money, you can’t say or do it. We have a vocabulary that’s designed to protect us from the truth. We talk about the ‘war in Iraq’, not the ‘military occupation in Iraq.’ We’re talking about talking about film, but I think all of these things are connected. It’s more important where you take the airplane to, not what airport you leave from.
Which gets us back to writing about film by writing “I”, or about jazz and literature. We need to go to other places.
The thing that motivated my first book, Moving Places, which is still one of my favorites, is that I grew up the grandson and son of movie exhibitors and that fact was totally disconnected from the fact that I later became a film critic. I wrote Moving Places to try and connect those two things. Everything that we experience in our culture is connected to everything else in some way. But a lot of culture keeps the knowledge of those connections from us, unfortunately. Movies are supposed to be very important when they come out, and then they’re forgotten when they’re no longer making money. It forces criticism to be a form of lying, because you’re supposed to say, This is really important this week because it’s opening in theaters but next week it won’t be important because other things that are just as important will be coming along to replace it. And that’s about the market. That’s not about human desire or human needs. Film criticism is an offshoot of advertising. It always has been, and it always will be. And that’s one of the complicated things about it.
It almost feels like you need to be able to de-time your writing, or disconnect it from the clock of the market.
Most Hollywood films are designed to be all-enveloping and then forgotten as soon as they’re over, you know? That’s what culture encourages too. But sometimes things keep bugging you. For instance, one of my favorite contemporary miniseries is Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. And there’s a song from it that keeps playing in my head when I wake up in the morning. Now, I don’t decide that it should do that. But it still gives me pleasure. There are all sorts of ways in which art that’s supposed to be disposed of isn’t. Writing Moving Places was trying to determine what makes certain things stick and other things fade away.
I love the piece you wrote about Ace Ventura (1994), “Why is This Movie a Hit?”
Yeah, that was funny. That was a piece of mine that Roger Ebert liked a lot.
I like it because it’s writing on a film you don’t like, but in a way to figure out something in the culture. And there’s this sense that if we allow ourselves to have a sort of new relationship to something, we’re always attending and processing. And we’re also always writing—it takes writing to be a fact of life.
Sure, I think that’s it. What was most valuable about this book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was that I didn’t realize how interrelated film and literature and music were in my writing until I put this together. I didn’t realize I’d been making these comparisons throughout my whole life. So in a way, there was a rediscovery of myself in terms of certain impulses I wasn’t aware of. I think there are ways in which connecting the seemingly disconnected parts of our life teaches us something. I discovered that again, putting this book together.