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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 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 calfled] up the loan shark with threats and more abuse in order to...