Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism by Jonathan Rosenbaum

By Jonathan Rosenbaum

Jonathan Rosenbaum, longtime contributor to such courses as movie Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and The Village Voice, is arguably the main eloquent, insightful movie critic writing in the US this present day. putting video clips, the 1st choice of his paintings, gathers jointly thirty of his so much special and illuminating items. Written over a span of twenty-one years, those essays conceal an awfully large diversity of films—from Hollywood blockbusters to overseas paintings videos to experimental cinema. They contain not only stories yet perceptive observation on administrators, actors, and tendencies; and considerate research of the perform of movie criticism.
It is that this final element—Rosenbaum's reflections at the paintings of movie criticism—that units this assortment except different volumes of movie writing. either within the essays themselves and within the part introductions, Rosenbaum offers a unprecedented insider's view of his career: the behind the scenes politics, the formula of serious judgments, the functionality of movie remark. Taken jointly, those items function a guided travel of the career of movie criticism.
They additionally function consultant samples of Rosenbaum's certain model of movie writing. one of the highlights are memoirs of director Jacques Tati and maverick critic Manny Farber, celebrations of classics akin to gents want Blondes and The Manchurian Candidate, and regarded reevaluations of Orson Welles and Woody Allen.

Show description

Read Online or Download Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism PDF

Similar film books

Cinema and Spectatorship (Sightlines)

Cinema and Spectatorship is the 1st e-book to concentration completely at the heritage and position of the spectator in modern movie experiences. whereas Seventies movie thought insisted on a contrast betweeen the cinematic topic and film-goers, Judith Mayne means that a truly actual friction among "subjects" and "viewers" is in reality principal to the learn of spectatorship.

Bride of Frankenstein (Movie Monsters Series)

Whereas the wounded and apprehensive Monster he created spreads terror in the course of the kingdom facet, Dr. Frankenstein is persuaded via a colleague to create a girl to be the Monster's bride.

Leonard Maltin's Family Movie Guide

Famous as one of many major experts on American movie, Leonard Maltin can also be a dad or mum who's conscious of the variations among a child's and critic's point of view on motion pictures. every one movie indexed comprises its MPAA ranking, an evidence of that ranking, class, and the author's personal ranking method of even if a movie is nice, undesirable, or ok for either older and more youthful kids.

Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema

Knockout: The Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema is the 1st book-length research of the Hollywood boxing movie, a well-liked motion picture leisure because the Thirties, that incorporates such classics as "Million greenback Baby," "Rocky," and "Raging Bull. " The boxer stands along the cowboy, the gangster, and the detective as a personality that formed America's principles of manhood.

Additional info for Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism

Sample text

Apparently death, sex, and money aren't as significant as New York or Watergate unless they're seen through a stained glass, darkly. Three separate friends have complained that the sequence with Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern in the brakeless car is "embarrassing": I'm not sure whether this means corny or old-fashioned or something else, although this clearly wasn't the experience of the three audiences I saw it with during the first eight days of its run. If by "embarrassing" they mean that it makes its own strategies evident and obvious, I can only concur.

Here we see the singers performing live and, along with them, hear the offscreen prerecorded orchestra (facts I heard about before the screening), and in no way do the pans or cuts or actors' movements contrive to interpret the music (although they do interpret the libretto). Furthermore, natural sounds of footsteps, breathing, and other movements are so beautifully captured along with the music that I know in advance that Gielen's separate recording of the opera will always sound somewhat incomplete, at least as a soundtrack score.

16, a delightful bit, juxtaposes the rearrangement by hand of numerous objects on a desk (including a copy of Rameau's Nephew in Penguin) with a voice describing these actions: again, like 4, a dance of variations as the one gradually strays behind or ahead of the other. 19, wordless, shows Joyce Wieland (Snow's wife) at the window of a cabin. A loud noise sounding (to me) rather like a wheelbarrow pushed over gravel starts up, and one becomes aware of a sheet of glass in front of the window that is now becoming streaked and obscured by raindrops.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.73 of 5 – based on 25 votes