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Moving Places: A Life at the Movies
Moving Places is the brilliant account of a life steeped in and shaped by the movies―part autobiography, part film analysis, part social history. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America's most gifted film critics, began his moviegoing in the 1950s in small-town Alabama, where his family owned and managed a chain of theaters.
Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of "screen memories," making us aware of movies as markers of the past―when and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly of Rear Window , a meditation on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with On Moonlight Bay .
Originally published in 1980, Moving Places is reissued now both as a companion volume to the author's latest book and as a means of introducing a new generation of film buffs to this unique, often humorous exploration of one man's life at the movies.
Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of "screen memories," making us aware of movies as markers of the past―when and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly of Rear Window , a meditation on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with On Moonlight Bay .
Originally published in 1980, Moving Places is reissued now both as a companion volume to the author's latest book and as a means of introducing a new generation of film buffs to this unique, often humorous exploration of one man's life at the movies.
- GenresFilmNonfiction
202 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
153 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 8, 2016
This is a kind of experiment in film criticism, part autobiography (wherein Rosenbaum talks about his life growing up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as the son of the owner of a string of Movie Palaces), and part analysis of an admittedly low-brow film as he watches it repeatedly over the years. By analyzing each different viewing of the film Rosenbaum emphasizes the changing nature of our perceptions and critical faculties, and thereby tries to abolish the notion of detached objective critical standards. One time he viewed it he was tripping on acid! All in all it's a subjective but sharp record of his deep love for and involvement in film.
I give it four stars because at times the book does get egg-heady and annoying as he tries too hard to apply "serious" critical methods to film. In this it reads at times too much like a graduate school thesis.
I give it four stars because at times the book does get egg-heady and annoying as he tries too hard to apply "serious" critical methods to film. In this it reads at times too much like a graduate school thesis.
Read
May 17, 2019The very creative, literary memoir of my favourite film critic. Jonathan Rosenbaum considers his journey from childhood to adulthood, Fifties film fan to Seventies film critic. The text fills in much touching detail on his childhood as a sensitive Jewish boy growing up (in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house!) in Florence, Alabama. His family were well-off movie palace managers, owners of Rosenbaum Theatres; as such, Rosenbaum could spend his youth immersed in movies, inside and out. By the dawn of 1980, when this book was published, Rosenbaum had become an intellectual film critic, moving places (Paris, London, New York) to place movies in writing. This book puzzles at the connection between these two parts of Rosenbaum's life. The result is an at times beautiful, insightful meditation on the interrelationship between the movies we see and the lives we live.
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January 13, 2026“It was a song that poor, orphaned Leslie Caron used to sing with her father, and the puppets (Mel Ferrer) got her to sing it again to cheer her up. You could still hear it after the movie, when you all went into a crowded, clanging cafeteria for supper and, standing in line, you saw a newspaper headline that you asked Daddy about: Rosenbergs Electrocuted . Were they related at all to the Rosenbaums?
And why were they electrocuted?
Daddy explained to you, Alvin, David, and Michael, about the atomic secrets the Rosenbergs had given away, about the electric chair, and about the two little Rosenberg boys. "But that means that they're orphans now," you said, suddenly realizing the fact, and after you all sat down at a table with our trays, the tears started in your eyes as the Lili song played on in your head. You started to eat your chicken à la king, and thought about the poor little boys who didn't do anything wrong and who lost their parents. "Why did they have to be killed?" you asked Daddy, and Mommy said to lower your voice. Daddy lowered his own voice and said, "Yes, I think it really is unfair to those kids. But we shouldn't talk about it here at the table. People can hear us, and maybe they wouldn't like to hear about electric chairs while they're eating." So you and Alvin talked instead about the puppets in the movie, but the sad song about the Rosenberg boys played on, silently, secretly, "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo, Hi-Lo," and it made you sad whenever you thought about it. How funny that was—how happy and sweet it made you feel about being sad, and how that made you feel less alone.”
“I wonder whether those even lines intersected with your anger in such a way that I wanted rebelliously to bend that cumulative line of force, and flexed my body into an expressionist agony of angularity out of, say, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Ivan the Terrible (or East of Eden, the only example of expressionism I'd seen by then), in order to try, however solipsistically, to snap that line of force in two-ripping instead only the fabric of my frustration.”
“What you find in a mirror is pretty close to what I look for, in a page or on a screen. Our aesthetic biases become our objective realities because we like reality better that way, with the right appearances.”
“For many people, the ultimate praise for a movie is that it's realistic, believable, real. In fact, this praise doesn't mean that the movie is realistic/believable/real but that the movie supposedly proves that some aspect of one's life is realistic/believable/real, ostensibly by duplicating it.”
"This man's just had a heart attack!" some woman screamed, to be answered by, "Will you please
shut up and let us watch the picture?" —a classic New York exchange. It reminds me of the loud, plaintive query, aimed at no one in particular, that Calvin Green said he once heard in the balcony of the 42nd Street Apollo, during a pregnant pause in an art film like The Seventh Seal: "He's sahry? He just vomits all over my wife's brand new coat and he says he's sahry? "—one more measly item in a long chain of cinéphiliac legends stretching from here to doomsday.”
“And what is politics, really, but the application of art to a nonabstract realm?”
“The political issue is basic: Are commercial movies today public forums and community meeting-places, or private sites of narcissistic pleasure, figurative or literal porn images to masturbate to? (A tasty bit of aggressive agit-prop like The China Syndrome falls neatly between these categories.) There's no question that Pryor belongs to the first camp, because his comedy is a matter of recognition, not confirmation. He lets it all hang out, including how he works. When he falls to the floor in his heart-attack routine, or impersonates his grandmother beating himself as a child-one word per stroke as he sculpts a staccato, crablike chain of blows given and received across the stage, oppressor and victim maniacally encased inside the same voice and body—it seems to be his body thinking, remembering, and speaking as much as his mind. But of course, as Yvonne Rainer reminds us, the mind is a muscle—a lesson demonstrated constantly by Pryor, along with Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis (in contrast to, say, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen).[*]”
“cinema of Cimino, Coppola and Spielberg-a cinema that can confidently write its own reviews (and reviewers) if it wants to, working with the foreknowledge of a guaranteed media-saturation coverage that will automatically recruit and program most of its audience, and which dictates a central part of its meaning in advance. (An imposed consensus is perhaps needed now in order to enlist passive audiences into ambitious myths.)”
And why were they electrocuted?
Daddy explained to you, Alvin, David, and Michael, about the atomic secrets the Rosenbergs had given away, about the electric chair, and about the two little Rosenberg boys. "But that means that they're orphans now," you said, suddenly realizing the fact, and after you all sat down at a table with our trays, the tears started in your eyes as the Lili song played on in your head. You started to eat your chicken à la king, and thought about the poor little boys who didn't do anything wrong and who lost their parents. "Why did they have to be killed?" you asked Daddy, and Mommy said to lower your voice. Daddy lowered his own voice and said, "Yes, I think it really is unfair to those kids. But we shouldn't talk about it here at the table. People can hear us, and maybe they wouldn't like to hear about electric chairs while they're eating." So you and Alvin talked instead about the puppets in the movie, but the sad song about the Rosenberg boys played on, silently, secretly, "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo, Hi-Lo," and it made you sad whenever you thought about it. How funny that was—how happy and sweet it made you feel about being sad, and how that made you feel less alone.”
“I wonder whether those even lines intersected with your anger in such a way that I wanted rebelliously to bend that cumulative line of force, and flexed my body into an expressionist agony of angularity out of, say, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Ivan the Terrible (or East of Eden, the only example of expressionism I'd seen by then), in order to try, however solipsistically, to snap that line of force in two-ripping instead only the fabric of my frustration.”
“What you find in a mirror is pretty close to what I look for, in a page or on a screen. Our aesthetic biases become our objective realities because we like reality better that way, with the right appearances.”
“For many people, the ultimate praise for a movie is that it's realistic, believable, real. In fact, this praise doesn't mean that the movie is realistic/believable/real but that the movie supposedly proves that some aspect of one's life is realistic/believable/real, ostensibly by duplicating it.”
"This man's just had a heart attack!" some woman screamed, to be answered by, "Will you please
shut up and let us watch the picture?" —a classic New York exchange. It reminds me of the loud, plaintive query, aimed at no one in particular, that Calvin Green said he once heard in the balcony of the 42nd Street Apollo, during a pregnant pause in an art film like The Seventh Seal: "He's sahry? He just vomits all over my wife's brand new coat and he says he's sahry? "—one more measly item in a long chain of cinéphiliac legends stretching from here to doomsday.”
“And what is politics, really, but the application of art to a nonabstract realm?”
“The political issue is basic: Are commercial movies today public forums and community meeting-places, or private sites of narcissistic pleasure, figurative or literal porn images to masturbate to? (A tasty bit of aggressive agit-prop like The China Syndrome falls neatly between these categories.) There's no question that Pryor belongs to the first camp, because his comedy is a matter of recognition, not confirmation. He lets it all hang out, including how he works. When he falls to the floor in his heart-attack routine, or impersonates his grandmother beating himself as a child-one word per stroke as he sculpts a staccato, crablike chain of blows given and received across the stage, oppressor and victim maniacally encased inside the same voice and body—it seems to be his body thinking, remembering, and speaking as much as his mind. But of course, as Yvonne Rainer reminds us, the mind is a muscle—a lesson demonstrated constantly by Pryor, along with Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis (in contrast to, say, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen).[*]”
“cinema of Cimino, Coppola and Spielberg-a cinema that can confidently write its own reviews (and reviewers) if it wants to, working with the foreknowledge of a guaranteed media-saturation coverage that will automatically recruit and program most of its audience, and which dictates a central part of its meaning in advance. (An imposed consensus is perhaps needed now in order to enlist passive audiences into ambitious myths.)”
July 5, 2018
Film at the crossroads of memory and history, beginning with one specific showing of one movie in one theatre and spiralling outwards. Even a mostly forgotten piece of cinematic detritus like On Moonlight Bay can carry tremendous significance. A very personal and insightful work from a great critic (although, important to know going in, and something Rosenbaum makes clear in his 1994 introduction, this isn't a book of criticism per se). Available to read for free on Rosenbaum's website, starting here.
March 6, 2021
Finally got around to reading this after it has been sitting on my shelves for probably a decade. Full of Rosenbaum's tics; even moreso than typical given that it's a memoir. There's a good bit where he chides himself for name-dropping Orson Welles and reveals that he tried to discuss the content of this book with Welles only for Welles to curtly indicate that he was not at all interested. The book made me sad and nostalgic for moviegoing; it's a good book to read a year into the covid pandemic. I could have done with a little less play by play detail in On Moonlight Bay's narrative. But Rosenbaum knows it's not an interesting plot but that it's full of rich resonance for him regardless; that's kind of the book's whole deal.
January 9, 2017
This one was a mixed bag. I’ve always been passionate about movies and film criticism, so this seemed like it would be right up my alley—ultimately, I ended up liking it instead of loving it. While I don’t agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on everything, I’ve always found him to be a very smart and insightful writer; in Moving Pictures, though, he sort of stumbles with some long, dull sections that weigh things down.
This book was written before home video became an invaluable resource (he describes the emerging VHS format as “ghosts of movies I once knew, or as snapshots of friends I’ll hopefully meet again”), and much of this book is Rosenbaum describing the plots to films based on audio recordings he made from TV showings. While some of this book is very good (I’ll delve into this in a bit), much of it is these really tedious blow-by-blow retellings of movies; I must confess that at a certain point, I started to skim-read.
When he steps away from these plot synopses and starts to really delve into his ideas about film, the book starts to shine. He offers a rather harsh and interesting critique of The Deer Hunter (describing it as “oscar-winning racism” that “was articulated, enjoyed, and rewarded several years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam”), and a rather cynical take on how moviegoing has changed over the years (he describes the death of old-school theaters, claiming that people are now “generally watching worse movies for more money”).
One of the emerging trends during the era when the book was written was small movie theaters closing down and new ones opening in shopping malls. In a rather brilliant section of the book, Rosenbaum comments that movies themselves are becoming more and more like shopping malls, instruments of capitalism that use lights and music to manipulate consumers and encourage a certain degree of passivity (he laments films that “offer themselves like self-contained planets, not tools to assist us anywhere else in the universe”). Whether you agree with his criticisms of film becoming more commercial or not, they are thought-provoking, and they do remain relevant.
Ultimately, Rosenbaum is a little too pretentious for my more populist, Ebert-loving ways. I would be curious to read more of his books, and I did enjoy parts of this book very much, but I don’t quite share his objection to overtly commercial filmmaking (small indies can be great, but who doesn’t love films like The Empire Strikes Back?) and some of his opinions are a little out there (like calling Alien “a movie that tries to persuade an audience to get sexually excited by its own nausea”), but I see the role of a film critic not as someone who's right about everything but as someone who provides food for thought, and though it can be a little self-indulgent at times, Moving Pictures does have enough interesting ideas to be worth reading.
This book was written before home video became an invaluable resource (he describes the emerging VHS format as “ghosts of movies I once knew, or as snapshots of friends I’ll hopefully meet again”), and much of this book is Rosenbaum describing the plots to films based on audio recordings he made from TV showings. While some of this book is very good (I’ll delve into this in a bit), much of it is these really tedious blow-by-blow retellings of movies; I must confess that at a certain point, I started to skim-read.
When he steps away from these plot synopses and starts to really delve into his ideas about film, the book starts to shine. He offers a rather harsh and interesting critique of The Deer Hunter (describing it as “oscar-winning racism” that “was articulated, enjoyed, and rewarded several years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam”), and a rather cynical take on how moviegoing has changed over the years (he describes the death of old-school theaters, claiming that people are now “generally watching worse movies for more money”).
One of the emerging trends during the era when the book was written was small movie theaters closing down and new ones opening in shopping malls. In a rather brilliant section of the book, Rosenbaum comments that movies themselves are becoming more and more like shopping malls, instruments of capitalism that use lights and music to manipulate consumers and encourage a certain degree of passivity (he laments films that “offer themselves like self-contained planets, not tools to assist us anywhere else in the universe”). Whether you agree with his criticisms of film becoming more commercial or not, they are thought-provoking, and they do remain relevant.
Ultimately, Rosenbaum is a little too pretentious for my more populist, Ebert-loving ways. I would be curious to read more of his books, and I did enjoy parts of this book very much, but I don’t quite share his objection to overtly commercial filmmaking (small indies can be great, but who doesn’t love films like The Empire Strikes Back?) and some of his opinions are a little out there (like calling Alien “a movie that tries to persuade an audience to get sexually excited by its own nausea”), but I see the role of a film critic not as someone who's right about everything but as someone who provides food for thought, and though it can be a little self-indulgent at times, Moving Pictures does have enough interesting ideas to be worth reading.
June 22, 2023
My guy.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews