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  • Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition by Jonathan Rosenbaum
  • Nabeel Siddiqui
Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition Jonathan Rosenbaum. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. 369 pp.; $25 paper.

For over forty years, Jonathan Rosenbaum has provided film criticism to audiences around the globe through a unique transnational perspective. Always critical and polemical, Rosenbuam’s previous work, Movie Wars, provided a scathing analysis of the Hollywood system. He has sought to expose readers to independent and obscure cinema while still keeping an eye on classical works. Notably, Rosenbaum also maintains a heavy online presence and offers free access to his articles during a time when other film critics of his generation deride the Internet for the erosion of quality film criticism. In Goodbye Cinema/Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition, Rosenbaum provides a collection of previously written essays divided into four parts: Position Papers; Actors, Actor-Writers-Directors, Filmmakers; Films; and Criticism. The work addresses most centrally the changing nature of film in part through Rosenbaum’s reflections on his personal and political life.

To understand Rosenbaum’s engagement with cinema, it is important to examine his upbringing along with the ways that the Internet has altered his professional life. Essays throughout the collection highlight Rosenbaum’s peripatetic childhood and his early understanding of film’s impact on culture. His grandfather ran a movie theater in Douglas, Wyoming and went on to build another one in Little Rock, Arkansas. Eight years after building his first theater, Rosenbaum's grandfather [End Page 93] moved the family to Florence, Alabama. Along with its usual showing of feature films, the final theater he built there also served as an opera house. Rosenbaum vividly reflects on the racism of the region. He describes his grandfather’s berating of a black servant whom a loan shark had deceived: he treated the servant “in the most demeaning way possible, as if he were a stupid child, and then call[ed] up the loan shark with threats and more abuse in order to extricate the servant from his highly exploitative debts” (185). Although disliking the prejudices of the South, Rosenbaum clearly has an affinity for the region. In one essay (“Southern movies, actual and fanciful”), he brilliantly examines the subtleties in the region’s dialect and life. Later, Rosenbaum moved to New York and Paris where he was exposed to French New Wave films, which greatly expanded his film repertoire. The experience of heterogeneous cultures allowed Rosenbaum to gain an appreciation for global and independent cinema that would serve him throughout his career.

Rosenbaum’s seniority as a film critic makes him an apt candidate to examine both the past and future of film criticism. According to him, “it’s a strange paradox that about half of my friends and colleagues think that we’re currently approaching the end of cinema as an art form and the end of film criticism as a serious activity, while the other half believe that we’re enjoying some form of exciting resurgence and renaissance in both areas”(l). Rosenbaum is clearly in the latter camp. He views the Internet and DVDs as tools to reconfigure cinematic engagement. While he agrees that the cinema of mainstream multiplexes is fading, he believes that a new “cinephilia” is taking its place due to the availability of a greater variety of films. For example, he notes how MoveOn.org was able to bring attention to Robert Greenwald’s documentaries through cinema clubs and sees little reason to believe that this model could not extend to the exhibition of other less known films.

The investigation of political influences on film is a key focus of Rosenbaum’s work. For instance, in one essay (“What Dope Does to Movies”), Rosenbaum discusses the impact that 1960s drug culture had on the creation of films of the time. For Rosenbaum, the 1960s liberated films from linear structure and introduced the idea of the “Movie as Trip.” Other essays in the collection are deeply personal and political. Throughout the work, Rosenbaum’s distaste for the Bush administration is evident. In “Bushwacked Cinema,” he points out the impact that the Bush Administration had...

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