Things Have Changed: Reading Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia

Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Trade Paperback: University of Chicago Press, 2010 – eBook Available

As I tore into Jonathan Rosenbaum’s collection of essays with a great deal of vigour. I wasn’t all that well versed with his writing, nor had I even looked all that closely at what the book was going to be about…but nonetheless  it grabbed me. The essay he chose to open the collection with was poignant, sophisticated, and complexed. Likewise, the next few were pointing me in wonderful new directions – suggesting titles I’d never even heard of, and justifying them with compelling prose.

However, looking back, those first several chapters feel now like swimming straight out from shore as hard as I could in gloriously warm waters. Pretty soon though, I looked around, figured out how deep the water around me had become, and started to struggle to keep my head above water.

Thinking back on Goodbye Cinema, something that jumps out at me is the selective nature of the films Rosenbaum chose to include. Sure, he spends a few hundred words on THE GODFATHER and PLAYTIME – both of which many would consider “Film Lit 101”. However, he seems to understand that to truly hold a reader’s attention, and spark their imagination, he needs to point the conversation places it doesn’t normally go. To that extent, he does a great job at discussing titles the reader might not have seen, and in some cases might not even have heard of. Using PLAYTIME as an example, he spends much of an early chapter discussing its influence on a modern Chinese film called THE WORLD.

This can be a slippery slope.

If you’ve ever been part of a conversation that included the phrase “If you liked that, you’ll love…”, you know how easily such conversations can get lost in a forest of tangents. Title after title comes up, one gets caught up in and endless sequence of comparisons, and pretty soon you’re just dropping names. Rosenbaum keeps the writing concise, usually limiting each essay to just a small cluster of titles. None of them feel like reviews, but rather an introductory comment; crafted in a way that makes you wonder why you never watched the film in question before.

If these pieces did feel like reviews, one might feel the urge to start skimming – or worse yet, breeze past the ones they hadn’t seen yet. Instead, by framing the conversation around an actor, a style, or a movement, Rosenbaum holds the readers’ interest, even when the reader has never even heard of the film they are suddenly interested in.

However, as much as I was enjoying what I was being taught about the wonderful world of cinema, I eventually felt like the student in the back of the class who wasn’t understanding the lecture.

Over the last few years, I’ve read ten or twelve different books on film. Some have been oral histories, some have been collections of essays, some have been biographies, and some have been nothing but an endless string of viewing suggestions. In all that time, over all those pages, this is the first time I got a feeling of confusion.

It took a long time to get there; the moment of truth arrived in the last third. None of these chapters feel stuffy, or overwrought…they just clearly aren’t meant for me yet. The work at hand feels like the sort of piece that would be at home in Sight & Sound or Cinema Scope(both of which Rosenbaum contributes to). The writing one finds in those publications is both insightful and intelligent, but they are aimed at a better class of criminal. While I have perused both magazines from time to time, I don’t subscribe to either, and don’t consume the same sorts of cinema. To be specific, such chapters were devoted to Godard’s HISTOIRE(S) DU CINEMA, or Carl Dreyer’s ORDET.

So, as if it wasn’t bad enough that Rosenbaum had started to use an awful lot of big boy words, he was using them to talk about material I couldn’t relate to.

My hope is that after some time passes, my film literacy will increase and I can return to those pages. For now though, they might as well have been written in Greek.

Returning though to the chapters where I felt far less intimidated, I was rather smitten to read what a critic of Rosenbaum’s pedigree had to say about the state of cinema and the state of criticism.

The title itself refers to the imminent death of filmgoing as it was known in its heyday. Rosenbaum underlines that gone are the days of devoted filmgoers waiting with baited-breath for something special. It used to be that word-of-mouth stoke a maverick effort – perhaps a groundbreaking piece from another country – to become a community event. Filmgoers with a desire for the new and the special would gather together and be challenged en masse.

No more.

These occurrences still happen in certain large markets and at certain film festivals, bu they are exceptions – not the rule.

What has come in its stead is different, but no less wonderful. It’s difficult to drum up enough interest to get the community to gather, but never before has such a wealth of material been available to so many, all with the ease of a few buttons. Rosenbaum says that while we might be missing something in sacrificing the shared experience, we are gaining so much more by the bounty we each individually have before us. The group might be suffering without those gatherings we once had, but the individuals within the group are flourishing by the endless wonderful works of film that can be summoned with ridiculous convenience.

Pat Solitano would call that a silver lining.

As I return the book to the shelf, I find myself encouraged and challenged. No volume I’ve read yet has left me scribbling down so many titles that I wanted to see. Better yet, Rosenbaum made the case for films I‘d been convinced were “lesser efforts”. So now what were once completest ideas have been given new light and perspective (anyone else ever extolled the virtues of AVANTI!)

Most importantly, Rosenbaum spends a great deal of time in the late-going writing specifically about the sort of writing I do, and that which many like me down out here in the blogosphere. Considering how confused he’d left me mere chapters before, he’d be well within his right to call me and others like me pretenders – static drowning out the symphony.

Happily, he doesn’t. Very much the opposite. He sees the value in what people like me are doing, and the way it can work hand-in-hand with what learned writers and thinkers offer to cinephiles the world over. It’s a great piece of encouragement…enough to make me wan to do my homework, so I can understand those heavier chapters.