[D66] Cinematic Encounters

[A.OUT]

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/01/06/rose-j06.html
https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/83yxw5fw9780252042553.html

An interview with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum: “I’m trying to do 
something aesthetic through criticism”
By David Walsh
6 January 2020

I recently spoke to Jonathan Rosenbaum, the longtime and widely 
respected film critic for the Chicago Reader and author of numerous 
books on filmmaking. He has been writing about cinema and cultural life 
since the 1960s. His latest effort is a two-volume work, with the 
overall title of Cinematic Encounters, published by the University of 
Illinois Press. The first volume (November 2018) is subtitled Interviews 
and Dialogues, the second (June 2019) Portraits and Polemics. The books 
consist of essays, interviews and reviews covering several decades.

Rosenbaum was born in Florence, Alabama in 1943. His grandfather owned 
and operated a small chain of movie theaters in the South, including one 
in Florence. Remarkably, Rosenbaum was raised in a house designed for 
his parents by the illustrious architect Frank Lloyd Wright. In a 
memoir, the critic describes himself during his youth as “an Alabama 
moviegoer who largely grew up in my family’s movie theaters.”

The convulsions produced by the civil rights movement and other social 
struggles clearly influenced Rosenbaum, as they did many members of his 
generation. He participated in one of the famed Selma to Montgomery 
[Alabama] protest marches led by Martin Luther King, Jr. in March 1965. 
He describes it here.

Rosenbaum lived in Paris and London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, 
where he began writing movie and literary criticism and befriended 
numerous filmmakers. In the late 1970s he taught film criticism at 
University of California, San Diego, taking over classes taught by 
well-known critic Manny Farber.

Rosenbaum has contributed to many leading film publications. His books 
include Moving Places: A Life in the Movies (1980/1995); Film: The Front 
Line 1983 (1983); Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995); 
Movies as Politics (1997); Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit 
What Films You See (2000); Discovering Orson Welles (2007) and Goodbye 
Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (2010).

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