Jonathan Rosenbaum was part of the path-laying generation of films scholars who emerged in the late 1960s. At that time, the history of cinema had not been written, only sketched out in rough drafts. Hollywood history was conducted on the fly by watching the “Late, Late Show” even as contemporary Hollywood—shrinking in the face of TV—was challenged to get smarter by European and Japanese art house cinema.
Rosenbaum’s latest book, Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues (University of Illinois Press), looks back across his career. Cinematic Encounters gathers material Rosenbaum contributed to various publications from the 1970s through the 2000s derived from interviews and encounters with various filmmakers. Rosenbaum promotes cinema as a challenge to audiences, not a soporific or an escape hatch. With this perspective in mind, it’s little wonder than most of the directors featured in Cinematic Encounters will be unfamiliar to the average Netflix subscriber. Scroll deeper and you might find Bela Tarr or Raul Ruiz.
Rosenbaum is dogmatically frank about his encounters. He recalls that the 1982 article on John Carpenter was based on a one-hour jaunt to the set of The Thing and a phone call with the director days later. And yet, Rosenbaum was a pro and turned in an interesting piece based on Carpenter’s quotes. His longer 1996 interview with Jim Jarmusch is revealing for exploring the ill-defined boundary between indie and Hollywood. Unlike most of the wannabe careerists of the film festival circuit, Jarmusch has maintained creative autonomy and developed a distinctive body of work. Sundance star Kevin Smith and other wunderkinder of ‘90s indie appear shallow by contrast, as do the ill-informed film reviews bamboozled by fake alternatives to the mainstream.
As Rosenbaum writes, the violence of Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), unlike Quentin Tarantino’s post-Reservoir Dogs shenanigans and Hollywood violence in general, is disturbing for being messy and unheroic—as it usually is in the real world as opposed to the screen world.
