Jonathan Rosenbaum

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For the paleographer and president of Gratz College, see Jonathan Rosenbaum (scholar).

Jonathan Rosenbaum
Photo of a man with long gray hair and glasses
Rosenbaum in 2013
Born (1943-02-27) February 27, 1943 (age 82)
Florence, Alabama, U.S.
Occupation
  • Film critic
  • essayist
  • author
Alma materBard College
Period1969–present
Website
jonathanrosenbaum.net

Jonathan Rosenbaum (born February 27, 1943) is an American

Cahiers du cinéma and Film Comment
.

Regarding Rosenbaum, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard said, "I think there is a very good film critic in the United States today, a successor of James Agee, and that is Jonathan Rosenbaum. He's one of the best; we don't have writers like him in France today. He's like André Bazin."[3]

Early life

Rosenbaum grew up in Florence, Alabama, where his grandfather had owned a small chain of movie theaters. He lived with his father Stanley (a professor) and mother Mildred in the Rosenbaum House, designed by notable architect Frank Lloyd Wright. He attended The Putney School in Putney, Vermont, where his classmates included actor Wallace Shawn. He graduated from Putney in 1961.

Rosenbaum developed a lifelong interest in jazz as a teenager. He frequently refers to it in his film criticism. He attended Bard College, where he played piano in an amateur jazz ensemble that included future actors Chevy Chase as a drummer and Blythe Danner as a vocalist.[4] He studied literature at Bard with the intention of becoming a writer.

Career

After graduate school, Rosenbaum moved to

Sight & Sound.[4] In 1974, he moved from Paris to London, England, remaining there until March 1977, when he was offered a two-semester teaching position at the University of California, San Diego by Manny Farber
.

In 1987, Rosenbaum was hired to succeed

The Chicago Reader; he retired from that position in 2008.[5]

In addition, he has written many books on film and its criticism, including Film: The Front Line 1983, Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995), Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980; reprint 1995), Movies as Politics (1997), and Essential Cinema (2004). His most popular work is Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See (2002). He wrote an analysis of Jim Jarmusch's film Dead Man (2000); the book includes recorded interviews with Jarmusch.

Rosenbaum edited This Is Orson Welles (1992), by Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, a collection of interviews and other materials relating to Welles. Rosenbaum consulted on both the 1998 re-editing of Welles's Touch of Evil (which was based on a lengthy memo written by Welles to Universal Pictures in the 1950s) and the 2018 posthumous completion of Welles's The Other Side of the Wind, produced by Peter Bogdanovich and Frank Marshall.

In August 2007, Rosenbaum marked the passing of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman with an op-ed piece in The New York Times, titled "Scenes from an Overrated Career".[6]

He was a frequent contributor to the DVDBeaver website prior to the site's repurposing as a DVD producer.,[7] where he offered his alternative lists of genre films. He writes the "Global Discovery Column" in the film journal Cinema Scope, where he reviews international DVD releases of films that are not widely available. He also writes a column called En Movimiento for the Spanish magazine Caimán Cuadernos De Cine.

Rosenbaum was a visiting professor of film at Virginia Commonwealth University's art history department in Richmond, Virginia from 2010 to 2011.

Rosenbaum participated in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll.[8]

Rosenbaum appears in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, where he discusses the film criticism of Manny Farber.

Alternative Top 100

In response to the

second list by the AFI
incorporated five titles from Rosenbaum's list.

In Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004), he appended a more general list of his 1,000 favorite films from all nations; slightly more than half were American. He starred his 100 favorite films on the list, marking both traditionally canonical films such as Greed (silent -) and Citizen Kane, and harder-to-find films such as Michael Snow's La Région Centrale and Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (both from 1971).

Best films of the year

Rosenbaum has compiled "best of the year" movie lists from 1972 to 1976 and 1987 to 2022,[10] helping to provide an overview of his critical preferences.

Bibliography

As author
As editor

References

  1. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan (January 3, 2008). "Something to Talk About". Archived from the original on September 20, 2009. Retrieved September 17, 2010.
  2. ^ "Jonathan Rosenbaum". Archived from the original on June 16, 2006. Retrieved July 1, 2006.
  3. ISBN 9780520206151. Archived
    from the original on May 3, 2008. Retrieved July 3, 2008.
  4. ^ a b Kipp, Jeremiah (October 11, 2006). "'To Understand Movies You Have to Understand the World': An Interview with Film Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum". Slant Magazine. Retrieved March 27, 2025. Archived June 3, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  5. ^ "JonathanRosenbaum.net". Archived from the original on October 11, 2013. Retrieved March 9, 2013.
  6. ^ Rosenbaum, Jonathan (August 4, 2007). "Scenes From an Overrated Career". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 8, 2017. Retrieved February 22, 2017.
  7. ^ "DVDBeaver Film Reviews". Retrieved December 7, 2024.
  8. ^ "Jonathan Rosenbaum | BFI". Archived from the original on August 2, 2020. Retrieved April 27, 2020.
  9. ^ "List-o-Mania. Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love American Movies". June 25, 1998. Archived from the original on March 21, 2009. Retrieved November 10, 2006.
  10. ^ Koza, Roger (December 31, 2022). "La International Cinéfila 2022". Con Los Ojos Abiertos (in Spanish). Retrieved March 17, 2023.
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