The following is a transcript of a public discussion I had with Jonathan Rosenbaum about his new collection, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader (Hat & Beard Press, 2024), held at UC Berkeley on December 11, 2024. Before our talk, Mr. Rosenbaum read one of the essays included in the book, “Selected Moments: Some Recollections on Movie Time.”
One of the first things Mr. Rosenbaum said to me when we began planning this event was to propose some sort of interactive activity with the audience. “I always prefer dialogue to monologue,” he wrote to me, a sentiment that comes across both in his preferences in art – his admiration for filmmakers as varied as Jacques Tati, Michael Snow, and Kira Muratova, all of whom suggest different models of “interactivity” – as well as the form of his own writing, frequently in dialogue with other critics. This interest in collaboration, born in part from the democratic spirit of the ‘60s Rosenbaum’s writing chronicles and carries forward, is paired with the heterodoxy of his critical practice, confident and courageous enough to offer an informed rebuttal to the facile, corporate-friendly consensus that defines much of American film criticism.
In a tribute essay to the jazz critic and composer André Hodeir written exclusively for this collection, Rosenbaum quotes Jonas Mekas’ argument that critics are “essentially limited by and to the generations to which they belong.” What record of his generation does Rosenbaum offer in In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, which spans six full decades from end to end? The first essay, on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), was published a few months before the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley kickstarted the New Left in America; the final essays were all published during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. These dates offer some orientation by which to appreciate the view expressed through Rosenbaum’s writings: one that witnessed firsthand the dreams of building a new world; that traced the expression of this dream through the cultural work – films, literature, and music – that reflected it; and that refused to capitulate to the half-century of right-wing reaction against it. Reading Rosenbaum offers a certain way to engage with movies from the perspective of the generation most shaped by them, and whose dreams perhaps depended on them more deeply.
Our discussion was followed by a Q&A with the audience. Space constraints did not allow us to include it in this transcript. However, it is worth salvaging one comment: asked what advice he would give to a young person beginning to write about film, he replied, “Follow your own desires as irresponsibly as possible.”
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Jonathan Mackris: Part of why I asked you to read that piece is that it’s a nice montage of all kinds of different writing throughout your career.
Jonathan Rosenbaum: It’s kind of like a scrapbook, in a way.
JM: It also speaks to one of the particularly unique aspects to your writing that I wanted to ask you about, which is the role of autobiography. Your first book, Moving Places (1980), is a kind of autobiography. When I think of the critics I’ve read over the years – André Bazin, James Agee, Pauline Kael, etc. – I don’t know very much about them as people. But I feel like through your writing, I know a lot about your life.
JR: Jim Naremore very perceptively pointed out that the fact that I grew up in a family of exhibitors and that, much later, I became a film critic were disconnected parts of my life. And, in a way, Moving Places was written in an attempt to create a kind of coherence between these two things. At the time I thought, very naively, that this was going to be my farewell to the movies, or to being a sort of a movie nut, at least. My ambitions then, and to this day, were to be a literary writer, not to be a film critic. But unfortunately, when the book came out, the original editor at Harper and Row who wanted to publish it had left. By the time the book came out, there wasn't anybody at Harper and Row who supported or even liked the book, as far as I know. And consequently, they not only wouldn't advertise it, they wouldn't allow me to place ads for it, even at my own expense. And when the book came out, it wasn't exhibited in bookstores in the front of the store, but in the back of the store, in the film book section. So consequently, the only way I could make a living after I did this book was by becoming, or maybe going back to being a film critic, since I had already been writing film criticism in Paris and London before I came back to the States. In fact, when I discovered that Moving Places was going to be published, I was in Berkeley at the time.
Anyway, I stuck to that style because I realized that by being autobiographical, I was basically explaining where my ideas and my biases came from. And so it became, for me, a form of honesty. But oddly enough, a lot of people who didn't like the book thought it was very self-indulgent, which I'm sure it is and was. But at the same time, I wanted to include four separate pieces in the book that were not by me – entire texts, two short stories and two essays by other people. Partly because I thought that what I wanted to say, they had already said, and also because I wanted to dramatize the fact that the book was not just about me, but about certain processes. So that's really how I got into the whole thing about using autobiography. I've done it ever since. And again, people who don't like it can say it's because I'm self-indulgent. The people who like it might be more inclined to think it's because I wanted to sort of show where my ideas were coming from.
JM: I think it can be used to beautiful effect. It’s not in this collection, but I’m thinking of your essay on The Sun Shines Bright [1953], the John Ford film, which opens with a really amazing narration of your life growing up in Alabama in a family of movie theater owners. It adds a nice dramatic effect to the piece.
JR: Being from that kind of family was sort of like being inside and outside the film experience at the same time, to a certain extent. In that way, being a film critic was almost built into my biography.
JM: I remember hearing you speak once about how you found your way into writing about film through editing a collection of film criticism.
JR: That’s right. I was in graduate school – I never got a PhD, it was really draft dodging – but by the time I dropped out, I was hired by somebody to edit a collection of film criticism. I was enough of a movie buff: in college, I ran the Friday night film series, and so on. Editing this anthology, which for various complicated reasons never came out, kind of turned me into a film critic, or at least introduced me to that whole world where I got to know film critics, people who were going to be represented in the book. And there were going to be a lot of translations of French critics – not just Cahiers du cinéma critics, but other French critics as well. So that's really what got me more involved.
JM: I have a couple questions about the title of this collection. First, I wanted to ask you just about the actual title, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. But I'm also curious about the choice of subtitle, “A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader”, as a way of contextualizing the book.
JR: I decided early on that I was going to include pieces that had not appeared in any of my other books about film, and also literature and jazz. None of those pieces had been collected before, and I was going to arrange it all chronologically. What I discovered was that, throughout my entire career, I've been comparing film to literature and both to music. In other words, it had been a preoccupation for my entire career, and I didn't realize how much it had been until I started putting the book together. And also that, by including the pieces in this book, I was changing the resonance of some of the pieces, because it became much more about the relationship of different art forms to one another.
As far as “in dreams begin responsibilities,” that's always been a favorite, almost like a motto for me. Most people seem to think it originated from Delmore Schwartz. But Schwartz got it from William Butler Yeats: one of his early books is called Responsibilities [1914], and on the title page, just the sentence, “In dreams begin responsibilities.” In a way, that kind of double vision I'm talking about, of being inside and outside the experience of film, is relevant to that, because being “inside” is the dream and the responsibilities involve being “outside” in a certain kind of way, in terms of the objectifying view that one has of the experience. So I suppose that's a way it technically applies to the approach I have to the things I'm writing about.
JM: We've already mentioned your website, jonathanrosebaum.net, which is a treasure trove of your writing over the years. How is it editing a collection like this, when you're choosing pieces to emphasize? What’s the process for selecting what ends up going into a hard-copy, printed release?
JR: Well, I wanted it to be “a reader” and not “the reader.” In other words, it's one way of reading my work. And it comes back to the idea, which was also one of the things that drew me to France and to other countries, where film is seen as “literature by other means.” That's something that is almost like another kind of motto for me. You could explain Trafic [the French “revue du cinéma” established in 1991] just by that motto, because it’s a magazine that has no illustrations except one tiny little still on the cover and it involves literature a lot. It's funny because Serge Daney, who started the magazine and was a friend who invited me to start writing for the magazine early on – he never talked about it being a literary magazine. But all you have to do is just pick up an issue and look at it, even if you don't know French, and you can already see that it is one, because it includes, you know, diary entries, letters. It's a very literary type of magazine about film. And so that was why, in a sense, it was a great place for me to be writing for. And in fact, a lot of the pieces that I wrote for Trafic – where, of course, they appeared in French – are included in this book.
JM: I wanted to mention that same line from the introduction, “Film is literature by other means.” It reminded me of François Truffaut or Bazin or Alexandre Astruc in the 1950s, who made a similar sort of argument during the formation of the auteur theory. Part of this is also their thinking about the relationship between literature and film.
JR: Right, because even the idea of the “auteur” has a literary basis.
JM: Since you brought up images in Trafic, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about the images on the cover of the book. You mentioned the concept for the design while we were outside, and I thought your answer was really interesting.
JR: I actually feel a lot of pride in the front and back cover, because it's the only book of mine that I completely designed. It came from wanting to convey something about the three different art forms that the book is concerned with. Using stills from films obviously represents film. One of the things on the back cover is from an unfinished film by Gjon Mili, the still photographer, which was going to be a kind of sequel to his earlier film Jammin’ the Blues [1944]. It shows Charlie Parker looking at Coleman Hawkins play. Then I thought the composition rhymed with this image, which is my favorite image from Ivan, the Terrible [1944], by [Sergei] Eisenstein. The other aspect that I liked about it was the fact that it was a kind of rhyme. This was at least the way I was representing something literary, the idea of rhyming images – the whole idea of a rhyme is literary because it originally refers to words.
But I also wanted it to be something that was interactive and that solicited creativity from the spectator. When you look at these two things and you think of it in relation to the title of the book, “in dreams begin responsibilities”: are the dreams in this what Coleman Hawkins is playing? Is it what Charlie Parker is dreaming about while he's watching? There are different ways you can interpret that in relation to the title. Similarly, here with Ivan looking at all these people who are coming to pay homage to him. Does he represent responsibility, or is he the dream? There are all kinds of different ways you can read it. I like that aspect. There's a simpler version of this in the front of 2001: A Space Odyssey [Stanley Kubrick, 1968] and PlayTime [Jacques Tati, 1967], seen in terms of concentric circles. But it was a way of conveying basic facts about the book without using any words.
JM: It's a beautiful design, the contrast between Kubrick and Tati. It's funny, too – Kubrick is not a filmmaker that I tend to associate with you in the way that I do with Tati or Orson Welles or Yasujiro Ozu, to name a few. But there are at least four pieces in here that are, in part, devoted to him. The opening essay is on Dr. Strangelove, there's one on Full Metal Jacket [1987], there's one on 2001 and PlayTime…
JR: And there’s one on A.I. Artificial Intelligence [Steven Spielberg, 2001]. A lot of people are horrified, because that's a film that's disliked by so many people. And I really think that what they don't like about it is they see it as a Spielberg film. I think what's really interesting about the film is it can't be called simply a Spielberg film or a Kubrick film, but a kind of impossible synthesis between the two of them. And, of course, Kubrick himself had even wanted and thought about Spielberg as a possible director of a script [for A.I., during early development]. And it's, you know, a collaboration between a living artist and a dead artist, and it's about robots. There's all kinds of ways in which the film is like an inquiry into what it means to be human and what it means to not be human. If I had to pick what would be my favorite Kubrick film, I would either pick probably The Killing [1956] or A.I., which does more for me than almost any other relatively contemporary film. And I'm not alone in feeling this, even though it's generally a disliked movie. Two people who were bowled over by it, apart from me, were Andrew Sarris and Stan Brakhage, actually. Which I think is really interesting, the fact that it could appeal that much to two people as unlike each other as Andrew Sarris and Stan Brakhage.
JM: I didn't know that about Stan Brakhage! That's amazing.
JR: Yeah, I had it confirmed by his assistant. He talked about it all the time.
JM: That's fantastic. I wanted to ask you about a quote from your interview with my friends Devika Girish and Clint Krute for the Film Comment Podcast. Devika asked you something about your critical practice and you gave this as part of your answer: “I’d like to be useful, but I don’t want everyone to think the way I do. I don’t want everyone to necessarily even like the same films I like. One of the problems with film criticism the way that it exists now is you can say something is good or bad, but it becomes meaningless unless you can add to it ‘Good for whom? Good for what?’ The idea that everyone needs to have the same taste is a dubious proposition.” I thought that was a really striking comment. Would you mind elaborating on what you meant?
JR: It's something I've recently arrived at. In a way, it almost throws out what most people consider film criticism – it basically puts a damper on the whole idea. Most people think that the purpose of film criticism is to tell you what films are good and what films are bad, and that's based on a ridiculous notion. It's almost like taking away the idea of the spectator, as if there's some way you could determine what’s “good” and “bad” apart from the individual needs and tastes of one person versus another. I think it's quite normal and reasonable to think that a film that is important and great for me may not be great for somebody else, and vice versa. But so much of the system of consumption and marketing and everything that controls cultural flow, in a certain way, is based on the idea of good or bad, thumbs up, thumbs down, all this kind of stuff, which I think messes criticism up more than it facilitates criticism.
JM: It also speaks to another aspect of your writing that I really admire. Naremore describes you as an internationalist, which can be interpreted to be about the films you watch. But I also think it speaks to the fact that you are in dialogue with critics from around the world, beyond just ones that are in New York or Los Angeles. Through your writing, I’ve learned about so many critics in France, like Nicole Brenez or Serge Daney, who you’ve discussed for years before he was known more widely here in the US. But also in Japan, with critics like Shiguéhiko Hasumi, to whom you address a letter in the book. I mention these names in particular because only in the last two years has their work been translated into English. But you’ve been making the case for the importance of their writing for years.
JR: I thought that part of my job as a critic was to put people in touch with insights that are not necessarily mine, but other people's insights too. I think a critic should not have the first word or the last word about any film. A critic who's doing a good job is improving the level and the terms of the discussion, so that there’s a wider sense of options. But it seems to me that a critic should enter into a public discussion that's already taking place and then leave while the discussion is still going on. The idea of having the “definitive judgment” is, again, based on a kind of faulty reasoning.
JM: It also connects to one of the final pieces in the book, your obituary of [Jean-Luc] Godard, where you cite a similar comment of his.
JR: Oh, yeah. He said, basically, “I want to be considered an airplane, not an airport.” I interpret that to mean that people take you to get where they want to go, not where you want to go, and then they have to get off at a certain point. It's almost like an illustration of what I mean, of people using something for their own purposes, and it's not the same as the purposes of the artist. I remember a book-length interview with Michel Ciment, where he said that the worst thing a critic can do is say the film should be something other than what its artist intended. But it's always a mistake to get into intentions, because I don't think anybody can know what the real intentions behind a work of art are. They're conscious, they're unconscious. To assume that everybody knows the artistic intentions of a work of art is already making a mistake.
JM: I wanted to ask you about a description that recurs in the latter part of the book. There's an essay on Alexander Dovzhenko in this collection, who you call a “hillbilly avant-gardist.” And you return to that description in your obituary of Jean Marie Straub.
JR: I also included Jia Zhangke in that category.
JM: And William Faulkner. There’s a quote included in both essays that I’d like to read. You write, “Straub’s undeserved marginality derives in part from the way we tend to regard country folk, especially when they display the unbridled freedom of avant-garde artists. Many of us unconsciously adopt the city-bred bias that innovative art belongs to urban audiences and depends on some form of city smartness, reluctant to believe it can also come from hillbillies.” I thought this was a really astute comment.
JR: I think that the most challenging filmmakers, in a way, are the people that are cited in this category. People like Faulkner and Straub and Dovzhenko. To me, they go beyond what we can fathom, even. And that's partly because, in order to express what they want to express, they have to create their own structures, which haven’t existed before. To me, the whole idea of innovation in the arts – what it should be – is finding ways of expressing content that haven't existed before. In other words, you innovate in order to express something that otherwise you couldn't express. And so, it's really about [the] content, not about wanting to change an art form. It's wanting to get at what you want to express. At least that's the way I interpret it with these artists.
And I think, you know, the whole thing about being from the country is you got to sort of… you have to invent yourself more, if you're a hillbilly. It's funny, in terms of the autobiographical: do I consider myself a hillbilly? Yes, and no. The trouble with being from the city is that in order to succeed as a kind of urban artist, you have to conform to an awful lot of rules that are not your own. Whereas it seems to me that if you're a hick artist, you can invent your own rules in a certain way. And then, of course, people can find you very difficult for that reason. Or, you know, it may present problems to the audience.
JM: I came to this book excited to read the film writing, but the writing on both literature and jazz is really fantastic as well. There’s an essay in here on Truman Capote, and another on Vladimir Nabokov that I really liked. I was curious if you could talk about how you selected which authors to include in this collection.
JR: I wasn't thinking about which authors as much as I was thinking about which pieces. For example, I've published reviews of all of [Thomas] Pynchon’s novels, except for the first and the last. I published reviews of all the others. I think The Crying of Lot 49 was published in a college newspaper. I got to review Gravity's Rainbow for the Village Voice. I always thought that was one of my better pieces, and I was always frustrated that I couldn't include it in any of my books.
JM: One of the other books you review is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. I bring this up in part for the film students who are in the room, since Barthes is required reading here at Berkeley. But you also have another essay on him, I think, in Placing Movies.
JR: Yeah, “Barthes & Film.”
JM: I find it really interesting. Barthes sometimes gets thrown into the idea of “Screen Theory”, this high-theory, academic understanding of film. But I think you write quite persuasively about your own experience, at least, of what he means to you as a writer.
JR: To me, he's a literary writer. More of a literary writer than [Jean-Paul] Sartre is, for example – he was probably the biggest influence on intellectual writers since Sartre. But I've never been that interested in Sartre as a literary writer, while it seems to me that Barthes can only be interesting if you read him in a literary way.
JM: I feel I should ask you a question about jazz, although I must say I'm out of my depth…
JR: I have to say that I consider myself more of an amateur when it comes to writing about jazz than I do when writing about literature or film. I'm really a fan, but I'm not someone who's ever studied jazz, whereas I've studied literature and I've studied film.
JM: I was curious about the final essay, which I believe is the only one that was written exclusively for the book. It’s about a critic who comes up frequently throughout, André Hodeir.
JR: Yeah, the final essay, which was done especially for the book. The piece of jazz that I listen to the most often is an hour-long Big Band composition that uses two women singers and a text from Finnegans Wake, “Anna Livia Plurabelle”. Even though there's no improvisation at all in the piece, I guess you can call it “simulated improvisation.” It sounds improvised, but it's not.
The final essay deals with all three art forms. The way it relates to film is that, fortunately, anybody who wants to can see a performance of this piece on France Musique. In other words, it qualifies as a film, and anybody can access it on YouTube – you don't even have to go out and buy the record. It was a way in which I was basically dealing with all three of the art forms together. And it was a big challenge for me to write about it that way, too. André Hodeir is not very well known even in France, although he's well known enough that there have been two separate performances of Anna Livia Plurabelle that came out on records or CDs, at least one of which is still available.
JM: He also has an essay on the Marx Brothers, which kind of brings it full circle.
JR: He also wrote about Hiroshima Mon Amour [Alain Resnais, 1959] when it came out. And in fact, it's a really interesting piece that actually compares it to music. A lot of his books were translated by Noël Burch. And when Burch organized a film school with Jean-André Fieschi, Hodeir taught at that school, actually.
But I never met him or anything. The thing that's also fascinating about Hodeir is that he went from being a jazz performer and a jazz composer to being a fiction writer. He became a literary writer. The whole last part of his life consisted of first writing a book of jazz criticism in a literary way, basically imitating various literary forms, and then writing short stories and novels, which are all based on musical forms. All the late writing that he did was of that nature. I have some of the books, though my French is not good enough, so I can't really say that I know them that well. But that kind of transition really fascinates me, that somebody could very logically go from being a composer to being a literary writer, and it being a kind of natural evolution in some ways. At least he regarded it, I assume, as some kind of natural evolution. He’s quite a neglected figure, but I think he's important for that reason. And as a jazz critic and theorist, he was kind of interesting, but he's very eccentric, obviously.
