Film: The Front Line—1983 by Jonathan Rosenbaum (review)

Of her own making, Malina creates a portrait of herself as a woman in constant crisis of one sort or another, with more than a dose of Sturm und Drang in her. Yet she has remained remarkably steadfast since she wrote, in 1956, "I set my course by the landmarks of my history, for I love monument, memorial, anniversary, and poem, cherish inscription, symbol, and ritual drama." Perhaps the next installment-for surely she will continue beyond 1957-will help people of the theatre to understand why those good qualities of a life are simply not enough to keep a theatre living in succesive generations. Bonnie Marranca Film: The Front Line-1983 Jonathan Rosenbaum Arden Press, 238 pp., $10.95 (paper) According to the blurb on the backcover, "Film: The Front Line is an annual publication. Each volume will treat approximately 20 filmmakers who are changing the shape of the movies shown in our neighborhood theatres, though their work will likely never be seen there. The line of experimental and personal filmmakers is long, and to ensure that this series travels the length of that line, Arden Press will open each volume to a critic whose aesthetic inclinations are in opposition to those of the previous author." The aims of Arden Press are, of course, laudable, especially at this time, when the independent and avant-garde film movements (not necessarily congruent) have been endangered by decreasing foundation and governmental support and increasing incursions by commercialism. As a contributor to Film Comment, Sight & Sound, and Cahiers Du Cinema, Jonathan Rosenbaum has provided intriguing and lively observations on the international film scene for more than a decade, so there was an eager anticipation for this volume in the independent film community. Unfortunately, the book is digressive when mere descriptiveness might have proven more useful, and personal in all the wrong ways. There are eighteen major entries in the book (bracketed by two interviews, one with Jonas Mekas, the other with Peter Gidal), with filmmakers ranging from Robert Breer to Chantal Akerman. Yet Rosenbaum shows little (if any) discrimination in his discussions of these filmmakers, making no distinction between filmmakers working in visual, non-narrative modes (Louis Hock and Michael Snow) and those working in verbal, narrative modes (Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, Mark Rappaport); he makes no distinction between those filmmakers who are working in a quasicommercial framework (Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman) and those who are working in a totally noncommercial framework (Jonas Mekas, James Benning). Another disfiguring feature of his work is his tendency to bait other critics, 101 in particular, his distortion of the positions of such critics as Annette Michelson, P. Adams Sitney, and Pauline Kael. His statement on the nature of his biases (causing him to neglect Baillie, Gehr, Landow, Sharits, Frampton ) never takes into account the fact that other people might have similar biases. Rosenbaum attempts to divorce the works discussed from currents in other arts which might be relevant: he treats film as if it were a Platonic idealization of a severely limited consciousness. Rosenbaum believes that every vagrant impression is important, and, as film is such a complex art, this would be fine if he were not so intent on a totally solipsistic viewing of the contemporary cinema. The fact that the independent and the avantgarde currents in contemporary cinema have become even more "invisible" over the past few years makes the failure of Film: The Front Line-1983 even more painful. Books like this are needed, now more than ever, and if this book directs attention to such filmmakers as Leslie Thornton, Manuel De Landa, and Jon Jost, then a service will have been done, yet the price of that service is a book which is more of a confessional than a critique, and a book which never once gives an accurately detailed, precisely rendered, fully thought-out impression (let alone an analysis or a critique) of a single film. Daryl Chin Richard Wagner: The Stage Designs and Productionsfrom the Premieres to the Present Oswald Georg Bauer; Foreword by Wolfgang Wagner Rizzoli, 288 pp., $60 (cloth) This splendid volume is worth the price for its wealth of illustrations alone. But it is much more...