So what's eating Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of the anti-Hollywood Movie Wars? And what's his problem with other critics, asks Donald Clarke
JonathanRosenbaum is quite a sight. Superhumanly untidy, he looks as if he was put together from a build-your-own Gertrude Stein set by somebody who lost the assembly instructions. But the voice is calm, cadent and devoid of any southern residues of his Alabama childhood.
Where is the hectoring tone one expected to hear after being pinned to the wall by 220 pages of Movie Wars, his spittle-flecked rant against the iniquities of the film business? Subtitled How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See, the book is an essential purchase for anyone interested in how the ordure stinking-up our multiplexes got to be the way it is. But Movie Wars also reads like a very personal settling of scores. You increasingly feel yourself being forced into the corner of the pub as Rosenbaum rams his finger into your chest and begins another tirade against his enemies: most conspicuously, former New York Times film critic Janet Maslin ("More interested in cinema as business than as art"), former New Yorker writer David Denby ("Hilariously reflects middle-class or upscale blindness to the world that everyone else inhabits") and co-founder of Miramax Films, Harvey Weinstein (of one Miramax offence: "It's the sort of arbitrary exercise of power I associate with Stalinist Russia").
"Some people don't believe me when I say I'm not looking for their jobs," Rosenbaum says of Maslin and Denby. "There was a time when I dreamt of writing for the Times or the New Yorker, but not now. With Miramax, I suppose it may be fair criticism to say other companies are doing the same thing, but I just happen to know more about Miramax."
The gist of Rosenbaum's argument is that many low-budget or foreign pictures never get a fair shot at the US market because Miramax buys them up and then imperiously decides which to promote, which to recut and which to bury. Meanwhile, the critics only deign to write about smaller pictures when those films have the Miramax seal of approval.
Speaking on behalf of film critics everywhere, I point out that we can only review what is being made available to our readers by the distributors.
"Well, if one is serious as a critic, one should be saying: How does this fit in with the history of cinema?" he says. "Of course if you're not aware of the history of cinema, then you can't do that. But, yes, I suppose it's about the difference between reviewing and criticism; I myself can't write reviews in the Chicago Reader about films that aren't on in Chicago. But I think desire is important. I'm very encouraged by people who write to me and want to go and see films they can't see, but they have to know about them before they have that desire." Despite writing for a local Chicago paper with only a modest circulation, Rosenbaum has established a powerful reputation as an informed contrarian.
The child of a family of cinema owners, he developed his voracious appetite for movies early in life and nurtured it while working for the great French director Jacques Tati - "He just used me as an audience" - in the late 1960s and at the British Film Institute in the 1970s.
He has an equivocal view of the glory days of 1960s art house cinema. While he acknowledges the excitement of those times, he pores scorn on contemporaries who periodically announce the death of cinema. I wonder about the apparent paradox which sees him deriding gloomy prognostications by David Thomson, Susan Sontag and, yes, David Denby in a book that itself is so pessimistic about the state of the art today.
"Oh, that's generational nostalgia on their part which I think is an indulgence," he says "Particularly when Denby distorts the past. People were not rushing off to see Godard films, and when they did, they didn't necessarily write good things about them. It's also the mechanism of these things that annoys me. When David Thomson was writing for Esquire, he was alternating Death of the Cinema stories with stories about how wonderful The Truman Show or LA Confidential were." Ah yes, David Thomson. The much-respected author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film occupies almost as prominent a place in the Rosenbaum book of demons as Denby or Maslin.
"I'm trying to figure out why he is so loved by the New York Times," he says. "They phone him up for the latest ruling on the authorship of the Citizen Kane script. We now have definitive proof that Orson Welles worked on the script. But the Times likes the fact that Thomson will say: 'Oh I kind of prefer to think that Welles had nothing to do with it'. It's better for him to say: 'I won't go and see contemporary films from Taiwan or Iran, because cinema's dead. You don't need to worry about that. Just feel happy going to see the films that have multi-million dollar ad campaigns, like I do'."
But, if, as he says, he is not envious of these writers, why does he spend so much of his time fretting about them? "I just get annoyed at the way these people get positioned as gurus," he says.
But Rosenbaum is a guru of sorts himself now, isn't he? "Well, not like that I hope. I like to open topics up, not shut them down." A lot of the animus between Thompson and Rosenbaum derives from their conflicting views of Orson Welles. Rosenbaum supervised the 1998 reissue of Welles's Touch of Evil while Thomson's singular biography of the great man, Rosebud, was published in 1996. Welles is given a chapter to himself in Movie Wars, wherein the author treats his career as a challenge to a series of critical orthodoxies.
Elsewhere, Rosenbaum takes potshots at a number of other topics: the manner in which movie exhibitors flout anti-trust legislation, the dilution of US cinema by globalisation, corrupt practices at press junkets. Mischievously, in one chapter he gets stuck into post-structuralist critics and their derision of the notion of the artistic canon, while in the next he rubbishes the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest American Movies list.
But again and again he returns to the evils of Miramax. He seems to believe there is a constituency that still regards the Disney-owned studio that brought us such middle-brow pabulum as The Shipping News and Chocolat as some kind of funky independent. Similarly, he appears to think that Robert Redford's bloated Sundance festival is still regarded by some as the place the huddled masses speak. Surely nobody buys this any more.
"Maybe this view has changed somewhat since the book was written [Movie Wars was published in the US two years ago and some of the material appeared in other publications even earlier]. "But Sundance is still regarded as a Mecca of independent cinema and Quentin Tarantino is regarded as a leading figurehead of independent cinema, even though he doesn't have final cut."
By whom? Who thinks this? "A lot of people. Because they are being told it by the US press. I know a lot of people get shocked when I say that Sundance is not a great supporter of independent cinema."
Much of Rosenbaum's antagonism towards Miramax seems to spring from its treatment of a particular few films. He refers at several points to the company's half-hearted distribution of Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees and its shabby promotion of rereleases of Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort and Tati's Jour de Fête. Despite his dishevelled appearance and gentle tone, it is clear that you would do well not to make an enemy of him. Like an ink-stained Inspector Javert from Les Miserables, he will hound Weinstein's Jean Valjean to the grave.
But, to be fair, that ardour is also employed in support of those films he admires. Sometimes his enthusiasms can be surprising: "My favourite commercial film of the last few years is a film most people despise: AI. I don't think it has been correctly understood." He also writes warmly of Joe Dante's Small Soldiers and - with a degree of irony - Paul Verhoeven's loud actioner, Starship Troopers.
But Rosenbaum devotes most of his attentions to the avant garde and the independent sector. We meet in Dublin's IFC as he is preparing to introduce a screening of John Cassavetes's 1976 classic, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. He explains to me how Cassavetes's resolutely individual career could not happen today: "If people are really determined, they can make low-budget films; in fact it's easier now with digital video. Maybe Cassavetes could have made his films now, but we would never get to see them. Who would show them?" Maybe, Harvey. On second thoughts, perhaps we'd better not go there.
So can a humble critic change any of this? What does he see as his function? He dabs ineffectually at his poultry-stained cheeks with a napkin: "Like I said, I suppose I like to start discussions, not end them. I think that that's what critics should be doing. I like to quote Jean-Luc Godard on this: 'I'd rather be used as an airplane than an airport'. If I can suggest other avenues that might be taken, then I'm happy."
Movie Wars is published by Wallflower, £12.99