Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Critical Responsibilities:
An Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum
By Jordan Cronk

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader is a unique proposition in today’s risk-adverse publishing landscape, compiling some six decades of writing on cinema, jazz, and literature from across the 81-year-old critic’s storied career. Though primarily known for his film criticism—he was a staff writer at Sight and Sound in the mid-’70s and the film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987–2008—Rosenbaum has maintained a cross-disciplinary view of the arts since his time as an aspiring novelist and amateur jazz pianist growing up in Florence, Alabama, where he simultaneously came of age watching movies at a small chain of theaters owned by his grandfather. As he writes in the introduction to the book: “I often regard movies as literature by another means, and in different ways, movies and music—and music and literature—can also be regarded as alternate versions of one another.”

Indeed, what’s so striking about the book is just how pervasively Rosenbaum has juxtaposed and mixed comparisons between all three practices throughout his career. In a 1973 review of Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, he describes the musicality of Thomas Pynchon’s prose (“with cadenzas like jazz solos based on chord changes by Dickens, a grand rhythmic sweep worthy of Faulkner in his prime”) in a manner not unlike his later characterization of Geraldine Chaplin’s performance in Alan Rudolph’s 1979 Remember My Name (“a virtuoso ‘solo’ that swirls through diverse possibilities while hitting all the octaves”). It’s an open and exploratory approach that sheds new light on all sorts of unexpected subjects: Richard Pryor, Graham Greene, Sonny Rollins, Roland Barthes, Leo McCarey, Norman Mailer, Charles Mingus, John Waters, Radu Jude, Michael Snow—even Peanuts and MAD, both of which the author frames in auteurist terms.

It’s likely that much of the material here, spread across a generous 502 pages, will be new to even the most well-versed Rosenbaum acolyte. None of the pieces have been collected in any of his other dozen-plus books, while even the more recent online articles are given new life (and purpose) in these surroundings. As Rosenbaum notes at the outset, the publicity teams—as opposed to the editors—at two different academic presses rejected his proposal for the book due its concept. This makes In Dreams Begin Responsibilities not only a triumph over conservative market research but also a volume that speaks to Rosenbaum’s relevancy in an era in which adventurous and informed film criticism has been devalued in favor of armchair authorities and aggregate assessments.

During a recent trip to Los Angeles to promote the book, Rosenbaum sat down over dinner to discuss the unforeseen effects of capitalist self-censorship, the dumbing down of culture, and the benefits of writing while stoned.

Photo above of Cronk (left) and Rosenbaum taken at the event An Evening with Jonathan Rosenbaum at Acropolis Cinema on July 23, 2024.

Reverse Shot: A few remarks in the new book got me thinking about it in relation to your first book, Moving Places: A Life in the Movies, including how they share very different but pronounced autobiographical dimensions.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: That’s something I’ve been very conscious of, actually. I’ve tended to think of the new book in a way as a kind of manifesto. Which, I don't know if Moving Places is a manifesto, but I do think that the autobiographical aspect is strong in both cases.

RS: In addition to that, you mention how your idea to include four texts by other authors in Moving Places was ultimately nixed by your editor, while the new book was rejected by the marketing teams at two academic presses because of a similar cross-disciplinary approach. Do you feel the two books are somehow linked because of that, or can work as companion pieces?

Rosenbaum: They are companion pieces, sure. Moving Places is the book of mine that's probably the most important to me of all my books. So, it’s kind of natural that if I were doing a book that’s dealing with some of the same issues, and certain formal things, that there would be similarities. So, I would say that I’m aware of the relationship, yes.

RS: As you note in the book, your writing on cinema, jazz, and literature developed almost concurrently, and you also wrote fiction and poetry growing up. Was there a moment when film criticism became the most viable professional path, or was there a time when you considered pursuing a career in music or literary criticism, or even becoming a poet or novelist?

Rosenbaum: It was a question of opportunities being available to me. I was interested in being a fiction writer up through about halfway through the five years I lived in Paris (1969–74)—because my last attempt at writing a novel was then. A lot of these decisions had to do with what I could write with the hope of getting published, because I wasn't able to publish my early novels. Maybe if I tried harder, I might have been able to. But the minute I found that Film Comment and Sight and Sound were willing to publish me, there was naturally an incentive to write for them more. I tried to do more literary criticism, and I would have been happy to have done so for the Reader, if they'd let me, but they didn’t. They weren't interested in my doing that.

RS: How did you go about compiling and organizing the essays that appear in the book? I’m particularly curious about the continuities that you discovered in your writing which, as you write in the introduction, “certain ingrained forms of capitalist self-censorship had hidden from my awareness.”

Rosenbaum: The order of the pieces is chronological—or an approximation of what I perceived as such—but the continuities that emerged from this order were sometimes surprising, demonstrating that I've been comparing film, literature, and music to one another throughout my career far more systematically than I'd realized. The publicists at University of California Press and Columbia University Press who overruled the acceptance of the book by editors were actually censors who were carrying out the same cultural suppression that I had unconsciously internalized in the past. We don’t like to think of this practice as censorship because the capitalist bias is that you’re only giving the public what it wants, but this is a lie because no one knows what the public wants, least of all the public. Making a manuscript fit a predetermined market is clearly a form of censorship based on a reactionary notion of how the public is supposed to think—or, in this case, not think—not a reliable observation.

RS: While reading I couldn’t help but think that because movies are no longer the center of culture, that it’s somehow appropriate that the book brings together three art forms that many people might consider old-fashioned.

Rosenbaum: A dumbing-down has been going on. One thing I can say is that I think the publicists who vetoed my book were following this idea of Reagan's, which is an economic policy that’s become very influential, which is the idea that you find a market that already exists and you keep working that market until it’s exhausted. You don’t think about starting a new market. That dictates the way presidential elections are run, too. It seems to me that part of the sickness we’re living through now is that nobody takes responsibility for anything. It’s all based on what the algorithms say, which is a cop-out. I don’t think the algorithms are saying anything. People in Hollywood say, “We can’t distribute films with subtitles because Americans hate subtitles.” Okay, well, how do you know they hate subtitles? Most of them haven't even seen subtitled movies, so how do you know that they hate them? They didn't hate Dances with Wolves (1990), and that has subtitles, and they didn't hate Schindler's List (1993), and that has subtitles. It just seems like there's so much self-serving cover-ups that go on in these things, and the same thing exists throughout culture, including political campaigns.

RS: Do you remember a specific moment as a kid or young adult when you realized that there could be a relationship between, say, the structure of a film and the tempo of a song, or between an author’s prose and the tone or rhythm of a scene, or were these parallels something you began to tease out only when you began writing criticism?

Rosenbaum: It wasn’t a single moment. It was always a result of—you know the phrase by Raymond Durgnat: “Matters arising”? You're looking at this and you're thinking about it and you’re saying, hey, that’s a little bit like the way I thought about such and such. I'm not much of a fan of film theory and taking theoretical positions. For me it’s much more of an act of ongoing investigation of individual works. It’s not like I have a moment of revelation—or if I do have a moment of revelation, and I think I can generalize, chances are I generalize too much and it's a distortion. I think that what occasioned these comparisons were just that I liked both of the things I’m comparing or that they made me feel similar, or here were certain things that the work itself and my own sensibility suggested that I could then use to make connections. But it wasn't like I was trying to arrive at a theoretical position about them. When I put together the book I was trying to look at what I already done and see if there were the traces of at least a position, if not a theoretical position, that informed this tendency.

RS: You seem to be extending some of these same ideas when you say that films can now be treated as “literary and music events due to streaming and DVDs,” and that even something as seemingly incidental as now having the option to watch English-language films with English subtitles works to “combin[e] the pleasure of watching, listening, and reading in one go.”

Rosenbaum: Yes. I’ve been thinking about these things for a while—about following my own practice as a consumer and figuring out, you know, why I like seeing American films with subtitles for the dialogue, when I don't necessarily need them. Of course, it relates to the fact that as a critic, if there’s a line of dialogue that you like, you want to write it down, and it becomes easier to do that if you actually see it written than if you hear it. So, there are all kinds of things that are determining factors. Part of it might even have to do with getting older, and sometimes having trouble understanding a line of dialogue.

We used to wonder when we were first being introduced to the idea of films on video if this new technology was going to teach us something about film that we didn't know before. And the interesting answer to that is, no, I don't think it has. But one thing that I do get preoccupied thinking about is the different ways that movies are treated socially by people now versus what it was like when I was growing up, when people went to the same movie theaters—in other words, it was social in that way, and now it's social in a different way. So, there’s advantages in both.

But I think that there's a tendency—and we always have this problem, always in culture—for one to try to understand something that's current on the basis of, let's say, materials or ideas that apply to earlier parts of one’s life and practice. So, it's like taking things from the past and superimposing them on the present, when in fact we need new words and terms in order to understand them. I get very annoyed with some of my friends who talk about how great and exciting it was in the ’50s when all these great films were coming out by Godard and so on, and they forget that when those films were coming out, they were received very badly for the most part. They would get negative reviews, and they’d close a few days after opening. And somehow that was part of it, too: we were fighting battles about it. Maybe what they miss is actually having those battles. I think part of the problem is that it’s in the interest of the film industry, and business generally, to tell or guide people in what choices they make, under the pretense that they know what people like and they’re giving it to them. But I think what they’re really doing is not trying to find out what people like, because, like I said before, nobody knows what people like—people don’t know what they like! It’s sort of a big mystery, and if the industry knew what people liked, there wouldn’t be any flops.

The real issue—and it becomes almost a moral issue—is how much of an active as opposed to passive attitude one has in relationship to one’s own culture, to what extent one has to build one’s own culture, or to what extent one becomes the passive recipient of what somebody is shoveling in your direction. I think that’s really the issue. And I don't think people are willing to look at it that way. They’re always trying to put it in terms that are less challenging to the public. There’s a certain kind of way in which Americans, particularly, are spoiled. They’re treated like prima donnas about their culture. And the products and the advertisements encourage them to be prima donnas and not to look too closely at how much of a role one is playing. If one's not seeing any good movies—to say that’s the fault of the film industry is incredibly arrogant, because that means that you’re saying that you've seen all the films that you could possibly like and decided that they're not any good. But how can anybody in the world make that statement now? There's just too much out there.

People get into the habit of saying things like, this was a bad year for film, or this was a good year for film. Stupid stuff—stuff that's supposed to be based on concepts like supply and demand. But you can’t have meaningful supply and demand when nobody really knows what the demands are. That's part of the problem, too. There are all kinds of ways in which people are dissuaded from looking for things that they might like. I think some of it finally has to do with whether you consider film criticism an art form. In other words, if you consider being a viewer of a film a kind of aesthetic choice that you're making, and also how you're viewing the film and why you're viewing the film, questions like this. If the only purpose of film is just to find something to relax with, then film criticism isn't really that interesting an activity to begin with. But people don't face that. I used to worry in a way, and I still do, when I say that film criticism is an art form, and that I consider myself an artist—a lot of people think, you know, how pretentious can you get? Because there really is not only an anti-intellectual position in American culture, but an anti-art position, which is even more pronounced than anti-intellectualism. You might say that Donald Trump is the only president we've ever had who has no interest in art. But you can't say that because even he has a book called The Art of the Deal. And he uses the word “beautiful” all the time. But what does it usually mean when he says beautiful? What he usually means by beautiful is expensive, or flashy, or something. It just seems to me that the most basic root-level interrogation of these kind of things hasn't even started in terms of our culture. And that's probably what’s most disturbing to me, that it's considered bad protocol to talk too much about these things.

RS: You mention in the book that you take some issue with people who consider watching things at home to be an asocial activity, and also that you’ve been able to flourish in some ways in your post-Reader career through things like your website and social media.

Rosenbaum: One thing I came to recognize because of this book is that I'd rather be a cult writer than a mainstream writer. I didn't know that before I worked on the book. What I’ve noticed is that the kind of responses you get from people if you're a cult writer is much more intense, much more...

RS: Passionate…

Rosenbaum: Passionate, committed, all of these things. But the point is, if you're just reading a review to find out whether you want to go see a movie or not, that's not even criticism exactly, it's something else.

RS: Do you feel that the years you spent at the Reader defining yourself in opposition to other critics—such as Pauline Kael, Gene Siskel, and Vincent Canby, to name just a few mentioned in the book—was a necessary step to help you accept your current role?

Rosenbaum: It might have been. Or it probably was, yeah. But on the other hand, what I'm doing now is not writing for the Reader. I like what I’m doing now more than writing for the Reader, even though I liked writing for them, and I did have very good editors. Critics often talk about why critics can only last at a certain job for so long before they get burned out, and even though my conditions were sympathetic enough that I could do it for twenty years—it’s obviously very different now in the sense that what I wind up writing about is partly the result of people proposing things to me, but I also have so much more control of what I'm doing. It’s not like I’m performing as an ongoing service for people in general, the way I was at the Reader.

RS: Do you find that your writing process changed as your viewing habits and conditions have changed?

Rosenbaum: Sure. It's easier for me now to work on several things at once. But I can mention one thing that I'm doing now that I wouldn't have ever done before: I'm writing this book with the working title Camera Movements That Confound Us, and I've been doing most of the writing while I'm stoned. I find that it affects the kind of book I'm doing and the way I write about things. Of course, I have to go back and reread stuff that I write when I'm stoned and think about what's worth keeping and what's not worth keeping. But the reason why it's useful for me to get stoned for certain things that I write is that we all have self-censoring mechanisms. And part of the advantage of writing when stoned is that you become less self-censoring.

RS: Can you talk about using certain films or new releases as excuses to discuss different topics during your time at the Reader? Two of my favorite pieces in the book are your reviews of Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, which doubles as a takedown of The Deer Hunter (1978) and Woody Allen, and the piece on the Truman Capote adaptation Other Voices, Other Rooms (1997), in which you talk about filmic adaptations more broadly, while also making room for thoughts on Adrian Lyne’s Lolita (1997) and Aleksandr Sokurov’s Oriental Elegy (1996).

Rosenbaum: It was all circumstantial—what I happen to see or even read that week. But by doing that and by dropping things into that piece like Oriental Elegy, it allowed me to see that the Sokurov video is closer to the experience and what’s good about Truman Capote's novel than this film. One thing that I've had to grapple with throughout my career since Moving Places is that just because you’re talking about your own experience and putting it in first person doesn't mean that what you're writing about is just yourself.

A big mistake that's being made in criticism now is declaring that this film is good and this film is bad, without saying good for whom and good for what. It's quite possible that a film that I think is great might be bad for somebody else—and legitimately bad. In other words, it's not something that would do them any good. It might do them harm. Why do we have to make one form that fits everybody? It makes no sense, unless you're dealing with a mass market. And if you're dealing with a mass market then we're back to talking about algorithms and not about the works. It’s not something that a lot of people want to believe, but it also has to do with people going to movies in order to learn how to live. Most people would consider that almost outrageous: “Why go to movies to learn how to live?” In other words, wanting to make art important enough to enhance your life, not just simply to escape from life in order to do something else. An awful lot of it finally reverts to philosophical propositions about why we value art, why we value certain attitudes towards art versus other attitudes. There's a lot of issues involved. It's not simply about film. It’s about art in general. It’s about leisure time and how we spend it and why we spend it the way we do and so on.

RS: To pivot to literature for a moment: Light in August is a recurring subject in the book. What initially drew you to Faulkner’s novel, and why do you think it continues to resonate so strongly with you?

Rosenbaum: I’ve had conversations with Claire Denis about it. She’s a big fan. She says it's the best novel ever written about racism. And I think that that's probably true, and which clarified part of why I like it. But I got very much involved in it because when I was a graduate student in literature, I used my MA thesis to take the first chapter of this great work of literary criticism called Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach, which is about Homer and the Old Testament and what he considered the main properties of Old Testament style and Homeric style, and apply that to the characters of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas in Light in August.

What’s also fascinated me is that Light in August, which I read for the first time when I was in high school—similar to John Updike’s Rabbit Run, a book that impressed me a lot at the around the same time—is that it unfolds in the present tense. And that makes it like a movie. Most people consider Faulkner as being not a film buff. But I've read accounts that he was very impressed, for example, by Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). And I also think it's really interesting that in Wild Palms there's a reference to Eisenstein. So, it's like he wasn't a total dimwit when it came to film. He learned a lot from film, even if not consciously. So, a lot of my interest in the book has to do with that.

One thing that’s almost a little embarrassing about my book is that most of the fiction that I write about is by Southern writers. In other words it reflects back on my growing up in Alabama. Why isn’t there more stuff that isn’t like that? I don’t know the answer to that. But there’s an element of Faulkner that was always impressive to me: that he was consistently trying to do the impossible. He criticized Hemingway for finding early on that there was something he knew how to do and just went on doing that. To him that was less interesting than trying to do the impossible. But the funny thing is, as much as I worship Faulkner, there are many novels of his that I've never been able to read. I’ve tried and tried and tried and I've never been able to get through them all.

RS: For what reasons?

Rosenbaum: He's a very difficult writer. I just can't keep up the thread. I don't get what he's doing. I don't know if that's enough of an explanation; all I can say is that I start reading and I get bogged down and I stop at a certain point. I wouldn't say Light in August ever gave me a lot of trouble, but there's a way in which he writes a sentence that's more experimental than most writers, and that's one of the things I really like about Faulkner. He's almost like a painter or something, who’s saying, “What if we put this color next to this color?” and not knowing what's going to happen when you do it. There’s a sense of adventure in his work that I find really exciting.

RS: People might be surprised to learn that the book also includes pieces on MAD and Peanuts. Have you written about comics on other occasions?

Rosenbaum: Not a whole lot. The only reason why I wrote about Peanuts is that I was asked to write an introduction to that collection. I wound up comparing Peanuts to Ozu…

RS: Right. You take an auteurist approach to both of them.

Rosenbaum: MAD was very important to me when I was young. I felt like my introduction to the avant-garde as a kid was Spike Jones, and MAD was another example of that. It was really avant-garde—so avant-garde that if I'd go to the newsstand to find out if the new issue was out, I’d have to go looking for it because the cover was always different and you wouldn't know what it would look like. It was quite extraordinary in that way.

RS: I’m curious about your approach to the pieces you wrote for Omni, a publication you say you used “to introduce experimental work to a mainstream audience.” What can you tell me about Omni, and do you find there to be less accessible writing about experimental cinema today than in years past?

Rosenbaum: I don’t know. It was a very special instance in which I was able to do these things. There was one thing I wanted to write for Omni because they had well known science-fiction authors like Isaac Asimov writing for them. These were people with a kind of right-wing position. And I wanted to write about Olaf Stapledon, whom I have a piece on in the book. Omni said they would only want an article about Olaf Stapledon if I talked about what he predicted about the future that was accurate. And I thought how that’s almost the opposite of what I care about. I couldn't care less whether he was prophesying the future or not. He was just an imaginative writer and a philosophical writer. And so, I didn’t write that article. In a way I'm not entirely happy with the piece I did end up doing for High Times on Stapledon, because the editors, when cutting the article due to its length, ended up cutting the part I really cared about. That’s why I took my name off it. Olaf Stapledon was a communist, too, so that could be another reason they didn’t want him written about.

As for experimental cinema, one debate I used to have with a lot of people, particularly around the time I did this book called Film: The Front Line, 1983—which was part of a series that ended up only including two books, the other being by David Ehrenstein—was about my definition of the avant-garde. In my book I had a chapter on Rivette, and because people who make avant-garde films tend to feel so neglected, they become hypersensitive. I had lots of debates with people saying, “How dare you include something about Jacque Rivette. He shoots film in 35mm, the same as a Hollywood director. How could you call him avant-garde?” But on the other hand, the same people wouldn't have any trouble praising Douglas Sirk. It was all very picky in terms of the positions they had.

One of the advantages of writing for Omni was that it was the opposite of preaching to the choir. I was preaching to people who knew nothing about these films. And so, I wouldn't have to appeal to the same kind of notion of shared biases that you usually do when you write about these kinds of films. As much as I admired Jonas Mekas, I used to get so annoyed when I was living in New York and they would have screenings of experimental films and I would show up to them, and I’d get a look from people like, “Why weren't you in church last Sunday? What are you doing here now when you didn’t come last night?” It was almost like this kind of religious calling, and it didn't give you much freedom as a viewer, to choose these things or to find your own paths.

RS: Your introduction to Dave Kehr’s book When Movies Mattered got me thinking about a couple different subjects. One being auteurist criticism. Do you think auteurist criticism is still relevant in an age where identity politics and certain academically derived film theories are primary influences on notions of criticism and curation?

Rosenbaum: Auteurism is a part of my own background, and it’s still an important part of me. But I also have to realize that sometimes the actor can be an auteur. There are different people who can be auteurs for different reasons. I think one has to be flexible with it. It has different ways that can be useful or it can stand in a way of certain things, too.

RS: You seem more optimistic about the state of criticism than a lot of your contemporaries, and more than even a lot of us among young generations. How do you square these feelings with the fate of publications like Cinema Scope, Trafic, Film Comment, etc.

Rosenbaum: All I can say is that new publications start when people feel that there's a burning desire for them. And I don't have any evidence that this is not going to happen anymore. I encounter in my travels and through correspondence interesting and exciting people who are young. I think that there are an awful lot of people with interesting ideas, and they're very passionate about things. It's a pity about certain outlets disappearing, but that doesn't mean there aren't going to be others.

RS: You’ve seen many publications fold over the span of your career.

Rosenbaum: Or just change. There was a long period when it was almost impossible to get anything out of reading Cahiers du cinéma, for example. It’s like how I felt sometimes with the Chicago Reader: it had almost outlived its usefulness. They're so stuck following a certain tradition that they're turning away from something that might be fresh. All of us have limited ranges of experience that suggests different things, but what I encounter is encouraging to me. Maybe because I find that my audience among younger people is growing.

I mentioned this in another interview, but A.S. Hamrah said in an otherwise favorable review of one of my more recent books that I really don't deal sufficiently with the fact that it’s no longer possible to make a living being a film critic, or that it's much harder nowadays. And I really think that that’s good rather than bad because it means that the people who do it, do it because they love it, not because they're trying to make a career out of it. I mean, I like getting paid sometimes for what I do, but it’s not always obligatory. If I care enough about something, I won’t demand payment. Film criticism has always been in a state of evolution and mutation. And so in a way it’s not reasonable to be either optimistic or pessimistic because we don’t know what's coming. I think we have our own situation, which we can either like or not like.