Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the media limit what films we can see.
London: Wallflower Press, 2002.
ISBN 1 903364 60 4
234 pp.
£12. 99.
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

“If Vincent Canby got fired from the Times today, and he went to a bar and started talking about a movie he has just seen, nobody there would give a fuck what he thought. They’d probably just tell him to shut up. ” (Rosenbaum, 198). So Samuel Fuller told Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1987. When Rosenbaum’s predecessor at the Chicago Reader Dave Kehr went on to the Chicago Tribune in the 1980s, his word count was cut in half, then again when he “graduated” to the New York Daily News, “and each time his salary went up when his word count went down!” (207). Elsewhere, publications draft writers with no film expertise to write about films. The way film writers are treated in the contemporary journalistic market place is merely one symptom of a malaise which, for Rosenbaum, afflicts film culture from the publicity departments of the Hollywood “majors” down to the politics of the backwater lifestyle website.

First published in the US in 2000, Rosenbaum’s book is a critique of distribution practices, their causes and effects, which resonates with the “Art vs. Mammon” struggle at the heart of film history. Echoing the “military-industrial complex”, that postwar rationale for US defence spending, Rosenbaum sees a “media-industrial complex” dominating American film distribution, exhibition and consumption. This historical analogy is symptomatic of an air of alarm that permeates his account of how American viewing choices and critical perspectives are constrained by the ways in which the mainstream press colludes with corporate constructions of public taste.

As a film writer working in the UK, a territory key to Hollywood hegemony and one afflicted by the same impoverishment of the distribution and film-critical landscapes, I am particularly interested in the implications and consequences for film writing. Film writing should be, but so often isn’t, a record of the history and evolution of film aesthetics, feels Rosenbaum. On the one hand, he celebrates the work of Abbas Kiarostami, a contemporary link with the grand tradition of films that traded in nothing more but nothing less than the human condition itself. On the other, he sees the legacy of Orson Welles not merely as a valuable part of the canon but a significant challenge to mainstream conceptions of cinematic worth. Rather than refine its own rhetorical prowess in industry-friendly critiques, good film writing should engage with film history as it unfolds. Unusual for a “name” writer, Rosenbaum has written extensively on both Kiarostami and Welles. In muckraking style, he interrogates the industry by drawing upon the history of what actually happens to films and filmgoers beyond the polaroid sheen of corporate decision-making and cost-accounting. If we see ourselves in this sheen, it is because, according to corporate estimates, the sheen reflects who we are.

The evidence seems damning. In the 1990s Miramax, everyone’s idea of an arthouse-friendly distributor, cut films, bought films up, held films back, shaping an exhibition scene according to Miramax’s perceptions of the typical arthouse patron. Owning the negative, Jim Jarmusch refused to recut Dead Man (US/Germany 1995) to satisfy them. So Miramax bad-mouthed Dead Man at every festival venue and screening room in Europe and America. I have known few films with such bad buzz by the time they screened for the UK magazine press. At Cannes in 1999, the American press were disgusted at the awards received by Rosetta (Belgium/France 1999) and L’humanite (France 1999), films whose portraits of straitened lives were considered dull and irrelevant by Janet Maslin of the New York Times. For Rosenbaum, these films’ regional flavours, in all their specific detail, made them fresh, exciting, real. Armed with a model of the reader as consumer of received metropolitan wisdom dazzled by journalistic flash, the mainstream press, beneficiaries of studio publicity largesse, simply represent and legitimize the ignorance of the public, thinks Rosenbaum. Seldom are writers required to write knowledgeably about films, the cultures out of which they emerge, or the experiences with which they interact. When I served as Film Editor of a Cambridge, UK listings website, we were invited to a press conference on the back of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (China/Taiwan/US 2000). But my expert on martial arts cinema was ill. Perennially challenged by “difficult” films, the Associate Editor urged me to approach anyone who could string a sentence together. However fondly Rosenbaum may recall London in the age of the Monthly Film Bulletin (1960s-1980s), UK film literature within and beyond the capital is in danger of becoming as insular and impoverished as in the American Midwest. Rosenbaum deftly uses the unexpected success of The Blair Witch Project (US 1998), with its trio of bewildered and panicky film students, as a metaphor for the predicament of American filmgoers, isolated and alienated from the rich and strange cultures around them.

A key plank of Rosenbaum’s argument is that, for all their apparently scientific method and efficiency, the “test-marketing result”, Hollywood’s avowed means of gauging public opinion, can never gauge the heats and modulations of actual audience response. Indeed, in an October 2002 interview, Rosenbaum told me that he had as much faith in “test-marketing” as he had in “the false image of consensus” projected by the Bush administration around war with Iraq. “In both cases, it appears essential to pretend that the opposition doesn’t exist. ” Rosenbaum’s working assumption is that Americans want to be citizens of the world, savouring a range of films reflecting the myriad flavours of international filmmaking practice. This is, of course, a worthy and commendable thing, making me curious about what audiences really think. Who are the “we” who should, in the book’s closing self-interview, change things?

Rosenbaum suggests finding out how studios construct audience members, behaving in a way that refutes their assumptions, and learning how to speak and be heard. The explosion of Film Studies in and out of academia since the 1960s spawned a mass of public knowledge about the ways in which cinema operates institutionally and aesthetically. DVD and video consumption since the 1970s, (at least potentially given their inherent limitations), made a generation more cine-literate. Academic reception studies have made us more aware of the ways in which individuals relate to individual films in cinemas and at home. Before the Internet, there were film societies and “little” magazines. Now there are websites ranging from niche and cult celebrations and personal pages, to academically rigorous journals. What is needed, perhaps, are more investigations into the byways and avenues of contemporary film culture in search of a more solid account of the textures of worldwide film consumption. Movie Wars triggered something. Now we need to discover who “we” are.

Richard Armstrong,
United Kingdom.

Created on: Friday, 27 June 2003 | Last Updated: Friday, 27 June 2003