Clean-shaved, Well-behaved
by Sam Warren Miell
Hat and Beard Press, 500pp, ISBN 9781955125321, $40.00
The title of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s new, career-spanning tome comes from Yeats, and seems like a mouthful at first. Bounce it around for a moment and its iambic music starts to sound; like in much Yeats, rhythm — ‘the glimmer, the fragrance, the spirit of all intense literature’, as he had it — marshals a lofty, vatic sense.
Music is at the forefront of Rosenbaum’s seventh collection of criticism. Not only does he include the handful of articles he has written on jazz, his main extracurricular interest, but he wants to impress upon us the stylistic links between film, music and writing. To this end, his introduction makes much mention of Manny Farber, the Carlyle of film criticism and briefly Rosenbaum’s colleague at the University of California, San Diego, who provides an epigraph and is described as ‘one of the guiding lights of this book’. Farber was also a jazz buff and, as Rosenbaum notes, wrote critical prose in which ‘the twist of a thought can become a dance step or a bleat’. Like great jazz playing, his writing is physical, offhand, eccentric, and lodges itself in the brain. Its apparent proximity to musical improvisation has to do with Farber’s actual extemporary verve; witness his sympathetic response to a student exasperated at trying to follow Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew: ‘it’s like trying to find a friend in a stadium.’
Now, to my ear, moments like this are not abundant in Rosenbaum. For example, it’s hard for me to imagine a construction like ‘richly imaginative and nuanced direction’ returning to anyone’s mind next time they watch F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, its beneficiary in one of the essays Rosenbaum collects here. Without the scene descriptions that follow, this woolly blurbese could describe a hundred filmmakers. And if I’ve put my thumb on the scales by selecting some exemplary fluff, it should be added that Rosenbaum’s plainness has some intention about it. It’s one of the paradoxes of this bona fide hipster, who was reading smuggled Olympia Press editions of Burroughs in his mid-teens, that he should have from the start chosen to write clean-shaved, well-behaved prose. Rosenbaum is clear and straightforward and dedicated to finding the shortest distance between what he thinks about a film and what he puts down on paper. His lack of any discernible stylistic ego seems to have to do with his strong aversion to anything in the neighbourhood of the macho. Disinclined towards outright polemic, his mode can come off peevish and teacherly — many of his pans could end with the sentence ‘Must do better’, where Farber’s could end with the sound of approaching ambulance sirens — but it is also designed to get the critic out of the way of the film.
That’s another paradox, since Rosenbaum has often brought both his unusual biography — Jew from Alabama who had stints in Paris and London in his early career — and the contexts of his viewings into his writing. His review of Tsai Ming-liang’s The River begins with an admission of hesitancy, justified as follows:
What’s my alibi for this lack of confidence? First of all, a sense that when one encounters something as downright peculiar as The River, the first impulse is not to assert anything at all but to ask, ‘What the hell is this?’ And to pretend to answer such a question, one ultimately has to fall back on one’s experience before even attempting an analysis.
He then explains that he’s so far seen the film twice, both times in unfavourable conditions: the first with German subtitles and the second on video. The point of this anecdotal data, like his autobiographical ornaments, isn’t to provide gonzo self-insertion, but rather to distance himself from the apodictic tenor of those critical Olympians who watch every film in the Eternal Theatre of Judgement; compare, for example, his habitual use of ‘I’ to the domineering ‘you’ with which the likes of Farber and Pauline Kael shanghaied their readers into sharing their points of view.
Nevertheless, look at how this alibi shifts from ‘my’ to the third person ‘one’, lending normative force to the recourse, first, to diagnosis, and then to personal experience. Now look at how the self-effacing ‘to pretend to answer’ sits alongside the universalising ‘one ultimately has to’. And by the last sentence of the piece, we’ve definitively arrived in the realm of the large assertion: ‘Sex and plumbing, seduction and infection, a spray of steam and a torrent of rain are all factored into the same inexorable flow.’ Rosenbaum, who has waged a lifelong campaign against American cultural chauvinism, is most diffident when he’s dealing with what the 1990s branded ‘world cinema’. Yet this ‘inexorable flow’ he offers as the monistic substance of Tsai’s film feels, a quarter of a century on, too much like the insipid Zen-ish Oriental soup into which a good deal of Asian cinema was being dissolved by Anglophone critics around the turn of the millennium. It’s a weak, half-considered landing for a piece that so earnestly tries to extol the virtues of a subject that deserves the effort.
The fishy smell grows stronger in the very next article, an essay from 2000 on Abbas Kiarostami, one of the filmmakers Rosenbaum most vehemently championed around the time his opinion held the most cachet. Immediately we learn that ‘Iranian cinema is becoming almost universally recognized as the most ethical in the world’. Forget the suspect passive construction — doesn’t this immediately conjure bizarre images of an Official Cinema Ethics International League Table? How are the points being doled out? I feel like I’m about to be advised to buy moral stocks. And though the meat of the piece ties Kiarostami’s film The Wind Will Carry Us both to its Iranian context and the director’s previous work, explaining the self-critique incorporated via the surrogate character of Behzad, Rosenbaum’s way of bringing the point home is hard to take:
Part of this movie’s vitality is that it feels as up-to-date as the postelection fracas in Florida—Behzad and his crew waiting for the old woman to die recalls the spin doctors impatiently awaiting recounts and judges’ decisions while telling us what they presume we’re thinking.
He goes on to enlist the film as ‘some sort of millennial statement’, in spite of the fact that, as he acknowledges, Iran doesn’t use the Gregorian calendar. We slide from the too-narrow to the too-broad, missing the point at which films like Kiarostami’s actually strike. By the time Rosenbaum’s done with it, The Wind Will Carry Us is a tale of ‘who owns this world and who deserves to’. And he asks: ‘Is there any more relevant global issue at the moment?’
Rosenbaum’s frustration at the moviegoing American’s unwillingness to engage with anything outside their ken can lead him, as here, to stamp a worthwhile film with a label of ‘relevance’ that he is sure the viewer would notice if only it were put up to the right light. But this idea can be just as imperialistic as that of absolute foreignness, strong-arming artworks into dialogue with the local issue of the day (thus, Kiarostami meets Bush v. Gore) while simultaneously sanding them down to fit the Procrustean bed of ‘global issues’ (thus, ‘who owns this world’ — which one would have to assume is ‘relevant’ more often than merely ‘at the moment’).
Rosenbaum has always had a stronger grasp of film form than his contemporaries in American print criticism, but the transition from form to something like ethics — from dreams to responsibilities — is often fudged in this way, as the critic reaches for the ‘contemporary world’ and grabs hold of ever the same broad left-liberal sentiment. Where this manoeuvre can’t easily be invoked, we often end up spending a good deal of time jogging in place.
Take the book’s longest piece, an essay on Chantal Akerman written for a 2011 retrospective. Early on, Rosenbaum presents something like a thesis statement:
More generally, if I had to try to summarize the cinema of Chantal Akerman, thematically and formally, in a single phrase, ‘the discomfort of bodies in rooms’ would probably be my first choice. And ‘the discomfort of bodies inside shots’ might be the second.
Already, qualifications are being piled on qualifications: ‘If I had to’ (who made him?), ‘try to’ (no guarantees), ‘probably’ (don’t bet on it), ‘might’ (give the man some space). Four of the next five paragraphs begin with retreats or caveats:
It’s treacherous, of course, to attempt to squeeze an oeuvre as complex and as varied as Akerman’s into anything as formulaic as either of those phrases...
Yet it’s hard to be too conclusive about this impression of aggressiveness.
There are of course many other exceptions or variations to my formula that could be found in Akerman’s work...
It’s also possible that some of the discomforts found in Nuit et jour, A Couch in New York (1996), and Demain on déménage (2004) may be more a matter of real estate than of rooms per se.
At which point the original thesis has been not thickened by nuance but eroded into a stump. Although Rosenbaum likes to bring out the word ‘dialectical’ whenever two things that are different swim into his field of vision, this fussy auto-nuance is not dialectics, but hedging, bookkeeping, finickiness. So we plod on with data, descriptions, one could argues and it could be argueds, and encounter neither anything totally objectionable nor anything that really sticks. The essay, which is entitled ‘The Integrity of Exile and the Everyday’, ends with a conclusion that could be guessed from its entry in the contents page: ‘Being outside and being displaced remain not only constants in her work, along with an absorption in the everyday; they become defining values.’
Rosenbaum’s circumspection usually protects him from howlers, but too often, especially in these longer pieces, he’s passing the ball around in his own half. The speculative element of criticism is almost entirely foreign to him, despite his avowed admiration for deeply speculative film critics like Jacques Rivette and Serge Daney, and he retreats from those moments that demand a real aesthetic intervention that cannot be indemnified in advance by moderation or decanted from the analytic into the descriptive mode. In Rosenbaum, the strong claim is much more likely to be deflationary and moralistic, of the ‘one must be careful here’ genre, than venturesome or generative or inviting. The result is a critic whose predominant value consists in roughly everything but actual critical assertion.
For it is undeniable that few Anglophone film critics of the last 50 years have been as humble, curious or open-minded as Rosenbaum. No widely-read American critic has maintained as close a relationship with the critical and cinematic cultures of Europe and Asia, or has been a more consistent enemy of a culture at home that derives profit from the closing of minds. But the culture Rosenbaum inveighs against is also the one whose critical avant-garde he has ended up representing. Rosenbaum has been an attuned witness to the death of print criticism as either a forge for taste or a viable career path, and the simultaneous rise of the internet as the predominant avenue for film education, access to movies, and the collective enterprise of cinephilia.
Now that film, and everything it entails, is available to an extent that the 20th century could scarcely imagine, and everyone has a take and a platform to air it, it seems to me that criticism will matter only as criticism – and not as directory, bulletin, aggregation or dissertation. It will be up to those whose aesthetic formation has been premised on this shift to figure out what they will take from a major predecessor like Rosenbaum and what they will reject. The merit of this collection is to have provided an opportunity to do so.