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Weapons
of Mass Distraction
Jonathan
Rosenbaum is an internationally renowned writer on film and
an Orson Welles specialist. More importantly he is an unpigeonholeable
intellectual dissident at a time when dissidence is at a premium.
He has just published Movie Wars, a fascinating critique of,
among many other things, the way large corporations fashion
our way of thinking, or not thinking, about cinema. He spoke
to Lir Mac Cárthaigh
and Tony Keily
during his recent visit to Dublin. [Extract]
One of the central issues raised in Movie Wars is the
notion that lack of curiosity on the part of the audience
helps large corporations to limit the kinds of films that
they see.
There's a kind of analogy to that
with things like foreign policy in the United States where
lack of curiosity about the rest of the world on the part
of the public enables the United States government to do what
it's doing right now. And also, just as there are assumptions
made about the moviegoing public that I contest, I would similarly
say that contestable assumptions that are being made about
most Americans wanting to go to war, because I don't believe
in a lot of the polls. I don't think anybody knows.
The book was originally published
in the States in 2000. Do you feel that there have been any
changes in the film world since then?
The situation has at least potentially
improved. A thing that made me feel more vindicated was the
enormous success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
a subtitled film that played in shopping malls all over the
United States and did extremely well, thereby proving that
if people want to see a film they would be perfectly willing
to see a film with subtitles. In other words they're getting
beyond the idea of 'foreign film' equals 'art film'. Another
example is a film that's been doing well lots of places is
the Inuit film The Fast Runner. But in terms of the
industry, what their broad views are, nothing has changed.
The Guardian described Movie Wars' publication as "the
season's first exciting event".
The American publishers partly
proved the thesis of my book; they were convinced no-one was
going to be interested in this book outside of the United
States! I'm busy with other books of a more cross-cultural
nature, like a collection I'm editing with Adrian Martin,
an Australian film critic. It's called Movie Mutations:
The Changing Face of World Cinephilia and deals with various
kinds of international exchanges between people about changing
patterns of cinephilia. Then there's another book on Kiarostami
that I co-wrote with an Iranian friend in Chicago. That's
coming out in March.
Did you hear that Kiarostami
couldn't get to the New York film festival because of visa
restrictions on Iranians?
Oh yeah. In fact I learned about
it when I was at an Iranian film conference at Lincoln Centre
in New York just before I came here. It's horrifying! Unfortunately
it's already been very difficult for Iranians to get into
the United States. It's ridiculous. The only reason they can
provide for this is he's one of the 'axis of evil' people.
Another thing that interests me
about your work in general is that you don't seem to want
to be an easily-defined professional, that you don't want
to belong to a film ghetto. Do you feel that there is a lack
of community in the film world?
I do feel that I belong to a community
now, but it's a different notion of community: one that exists
on the internet and is international. What you're saying is
true in a way, but it was something I backed into. If I'd
gotten a PhD I might have wound up having a career in film
studies, but I never got more than one-year contracts before
I got the job at the Chicago Reader. I'm also the beneficiary
of having more space and freedom as a weekly reviewer than
anyone else I know.
A thing that's really interesting to me in this regard is
that, although there's always been a separation between academic
film studies and mainstream film culture especially in America,
some of the best critical and scholarly work that's being
done now is being done on DVD, for labels like Criterion,
which are being sold in Tower Records. So it means that all
this stuff that would be completely ghettoised before is available
to everyone and it's difficult to know what that's going to
mean. It has enormous potential and is creating a different
kind of film culture. A lot of people are going out of their
way to find multi-region DVD players, going to the trouble
of getting the French deluxe edition of In The Mood For
Love which is better than the American deluxe edition,
even though there are some advantages to both. It seems to
me also that these DVDs are the best ways to learn languages.
There are problems emerging between
the distributors in different territories: if a film is offered
with English subtitles it becomes a threat to the distributors
of that film in English-speaking countries.
This is all going to create havoc,
but I think it's going to be very creative havoc. One thing
that continues to exist all over the world is where either
copyright doesn't exist, or they pretend it doesn't exist.
Most films that are seen by most people in Iran are brand-new
American films on pirated videos, for example. Until recently
there was no copyright in Taiwan. If enough people start taking
the initiative of ordering things from other places it's going
to create a new concept of economic catagories, and regulations
too. It's very hard to police the internet, and it's also
hard to police this kind of international trafficking. It's
an entry route into all kinds of aspects of culture.
When I'm being at my most Utopian and hopeful I think that
eventually it's going to be more possible for the audience
to develop certain interests which become commercially viable
through the internet when national boundaries don't matter
quite as much. I order DVDs a lot now from Paris. I just got
one from Japan recently it's not that hard to do. Of
course we're supposed to stay in our own cages, our own territories.
But once that can become more common, there are enormous political
possibilities, not just in relation to film. The most interesting
thing that's happened worldwide through the internet is the
'love' virus suddenly proving that one teenager who's
goofing around can practically bring the whole business world
to a halt it's amazing. When you start consciously figuring
out how to do things, and how it can be co-ordinated all over
the world, the political possibilities are staggering, and
yet nobody's really been able to harness that.
For
more information on Jonathan Rosenbaum, see The
Chicago Reader website
The
full text of this article is printed in Film Ireland
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