Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Godard. Fuller. Rivette. Endfield. Tarr. In his celebrated career as a film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum has undertaken wide-ranging dialogues with many of the most daring and important auteurs of our time. Cinematic Encounters collects more than forty years of interviews that embrace Rosenbaum's vision of film criticism as a collaboration involving multiple voices. Rosenbaum accompanies Orson Welles on a journey back to Heart of Darkness , the unmade film meant to be Welles's Hollywood debut. Jacques Tati addresses the primacy of décor and soundtrack in his comedic masterpiece PlayTime , while Jim Jarmusch explains the influence of real and Hollywoodized Native Americans in Dead Man . By arranging the chapters chronologically, Rosenbaum invites readers to pursue thematic threads as if the discussions were dialogues between separate interviews. The result is a rare gathering of filmmakers trading thoughts on art and process, on great works and false starts, and on actors and intimate moments.

Genres: Film

296 pages, Hardcover

Published November 30, 2018

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum established close connections with many figures in the art-cinema world from the early 1970s, when he was based in Paris. This book reprints twenty-five interviews that Rosenberg carried out with various filmmakers and actresses from those early Paris days through later stints in London and New York, up to the first years of the new millennium. Among the directors interviews are Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Sam Fuller, Béla Tarr, and Alain Resnais.

For fans of the directors interviewed (and the various films they were promoting at the time of the interview), this is an entertaining light read. However, I cannot rate it as more than middling, because the reviews rarely go very deep. This is perhaps a limitation of the mass-market periodicals that Rosenbaum was working for at the time. Decades later, most of the artists interviewed here have become the study of biographies and academic monographs that cover their lives and work in much greater details. Still, there was some trivia here that I was previously aware of. Moreover, one does get a sense of how filmmaking was always a difficult hustle for these directors, as they mention multiple projects going on at the time of interview, which often never actually came to fruition.

[e b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Rosenbaum is almost the only film critic whose work is compulsively readable to me, even if the review is of a film I haven't seen, of a kind I have little interest in. This is a collection of 25 interviews conducted by him over the years. The highlight is the interview with Bela Tarr, who disagrees with all of JR's assertions about his work, but confesses at the end that he had a delightful time and JR asked great questions (true). The lowlight is certainly the "interview" with Paul Morrissey, around the time of the Dracula/Frankenstein films, which Rosenbaum only dimly remembers, and he suspects that the piece was heavily rewritten by either the men's magazine who commissioned it or Morrissey himself. It's hard to argue with that, given the facile questions asked and the very un-Rosenbaumian references to other films throughout. Even so, it's a valuable piece just for establishing the distinctiveness of JR's voice and concerns once and for all.

[Julesreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Volume 1 of a two-volume project, Rosenbaum’s Cinematic Encounters is a collection of interviews and “dialogues” which add up to Rosenbaum’s belief that criticism is a constant conversation revealing all possible sides to a film and its impact, lack thereof, and/or potential. Whether from filmmaker or critic—and, of course, audience member—cinema brings forth so many reactions, assumptions, observations. Film is a collaborative art—both in its production and its consumption. Likewise, a critic does not possess the final word of assessment, but is simply there to do the dirty work of thought, research, insight, to enter a conversation already in progress and leave it as it continues (here I paraphrase a key tenet of Rosenbaum’s approach). If Volume 2 of Cinematic Encounters lands the uppercut (it is subtitled: Portraits and Polemics), then this collection may be Rosenbaum’s ultimate theory at work. At any rate, he is always a worthwhile critic, one steeped in grouchiness, astute distrust of the westernized film industry, and appreciation for the value of a strong, informed opinion.