Coming to a DVD near you

Famed film critic opens lens into the future of cinema

November 28, 2010|Saul Austerlitz, Globe Correspondent

Does film have a future? The question is ideologically freighted and fraught with ambiguity: Just what do we mean by film? Is the cinema something that can only exist when 35mm film is run through a projector in the dark of an auditorium or can it be a more private, less technically ideal experience, involving DVD players, flat-screen televisions, and copious use of the pause and rewind buttons?

Jonathan Rosenbaum has become, by some consensus, the most widely respected film critic in the United States in the last decade in part because of his willingness to tackle such thorny questions. With his answers, he has also provided a bridge between the starry-eyed nostalgists of the 1960s, when Godard and Buñuel and Antonioni roamed the earth, and the movie-mad youngsters of today, far less numerous than their predecessors, but quite possibly even more passionate.

For all that, however, Rosenbaum remains something of a cult figure himself, more “The Man Who Fell to Earth’’ than “Star Wars.’’ To begin with, there was Rosenbaum’s outlet for many years: the Chicago Reader, an alternative newspaper with little to no national presence. There was also Rosenbaum’s attitude, diametrically at odds with the what-to-see-this-weekend tone of most mainstream newspaper critics. Often, Rosenbaum penned feature-length reviews of films that would receive only limited theatrical releases — or no release at all. Rosenbaum was using his critical soapbox to agitate for films that he believed deserved a larger audience; he also was reminding serious moviegoers that part of the experience of being a film buff was knowing that some works would forever remain beyond their grasp.

“Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia’’ traces a transformation, both in Rosenbaum’s outlook and in the nature of the obsessive movie love of which he is both exemplar and chronicler. The new cinephilia, as he sees it, is no longer tied to the theatrical experience: “[O]ne of the crucial qualifications of an educated and cosmopolitan DVD watcher,’’ Rosenbaum opines, “is owning a multiregional player,’’ which allows users to view discs from all over the world, regardless of the embedded region code. Newly equipped, Rosenbaum has become film criticism’s philosopher-king, less devoted to the trench warfare of the Friday review than the view from the ramparts.