Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash

Movies as Politics 4th Edition (Paperback, USED)

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"Rosenbaum offers a polemically pointed survey that makes clear the high stakes involved in every aspect of filmmaking..."

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In this new collection of reviews and essays, Jonathan Rosenbaum focuses on the political and social dynamics of the contemporary movie scene. Rosenbaum, widely regarded as the most gifted contemporary American commentator on the cinema, explores the many links between film and our ideological identities as individuals and as a society. Readers will find revealing examinations of, for example, racial stereotyping in the debates surrounding Do the Right Thing, key films from Africa, China, Japan, and Taiwan, Hollywood musicals and French serials, and the cultural amnesia accompanying cinematic treatments of the Russian Revolution, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. From Schindler's List, Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Piano, and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to the maverick careers of Orson Welles, Jacques Tati, Nicholas Ray, Chantal Akerman, Todd Haynes, and Andrei Tarkovsky, Rosenbaum offers a polemically pointed survey that makes clear the high stakes involved in every aspect of filmmaking and filmgoing.

From Library Journal

Rosenbaum may not be well known to the general filmgoing public, but his essays, autobiographical books on the filmgoing experience (Moving Places, Univ. of California, 1995), and influence as a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee have impressed serious film people for several decades. This collection of criticism, ranging from the early 1970s to the recent past, finds him covering the waterfront, from Hollywood blockbusters to semiobscure independent productions. As a writer, Rosenbaum is no stylist, but his knowledge of film history and critical history is remarkably deep. His idiosyncrasies, such as calling the much-maligned Ishtar one of his favorite films of the 1980s, are the expression of a unique sensibility. Ultimately, however, the book audience may be confined to a small minority of readers who can keep up with his critical leaps and bounds. For larger film studies collections.?Thomas J. Wiener, editor, "Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

For years, Rosenbaum, film critic for the weekly Chicago Reader, has provoked readers with his politicized observations on movies. What some filmgoers see as light entertainment, Rosenbaum views as the product of ideological decisions (e.g., Star Wars is "a guiltless celebration of unlimited warfare"). This collection of pieces first published from 1972 through 1995 in the Reader and various film journals affords, overall, a look at Hollywood and world cinema and an examination of the market forces that not only shape many of the films made today but also determine whether they are eventually released. Targets of Rosenbaum's disapprobation include the contrived sentimentality of Forrest Gump, the bald revisionism of Mississippi Burning (which represents the FBI as "sole heroic defender of the victims of southern racism in 1964"), and the contradictions inherent in Spike Lee's "Oscar-lusting" Malcolm X. Rosenbaum also endorses films such as the gypsy musical Latcho Drom, Charles Burnett's underrated The Glass Shield, and Atom Egoyan's Calendar, and he pays tribute to directors Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, and the almost-forgotten Cy Endfield. Benjamin Segedin

From Kirkus Reviews

A spirited, frequently tendentious, collection of essays and reviews dissecting some of the more notable films of the last 20 years. While most film critics tend to hide their ideological biases behind the Oz curtain of objectivity, Rosenbaum (Moving Places, 1980, etc.), a film critic at the Chicago Reader, freely confesses his numerous ideological inclinations. This can lead to a distracting emphasis on autobiography, but it also allows us to see how and why Rosenbaum arrived at some of his more iconoclastic opinions: Movies today ``are designed to splinter and isolate us from one another, not draw us together. Apparently someone figured out that more money could be made that way.'' He has a real talent for deconstructing movies, elucidating their subtler meanings, exposing the xenophobic impulses behind Star Wars, for example, or the radical, democratizing impulse behind the compositions in Jacques Tati's Playtime. Yet Rosenbaum rarely falls into the traps of shrill polemicizing or academic esotericism awaiting those who snub the mainstream. He has a buff's genuine love of movies and seems to have seen almost everything (his analysis of the seven versions of Orson Welles's Mr. Arkadin is particularly revealing). But his relentless resistance to ``pure,'' nonpolitical aesthetic values, particularly in Hollywood films, seems unnecessarily limiting. His left-leaning politique des auteurs stance anchors his criticism, it also means his aesthetics tend to echo the old Marxian preoccupation with social utility--a work of art's real worth resides in its political attitudes. Typically, he writes of forcing himself to resist his gut-level enjoyment of Forrest Gump in order to focus on its political failings. The slippery-slope danger here, of course, is that art becomes valued only as propaganda. First-rate film criticism labored by second-rate social analysis. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Inside Flap

"I think there is a very good film critic in the United States today, a successor of James Agee, and that is Jonathan Rosenbaum. He's one of the best; we don't have writers like him in France today. He's like André Bazin."—Jean-Luc Godard

"Rosenbaum is unusually at home in the worlds of both academic film study and weekly film reviewing. There is great sophisticated intelligence without impenetrable high theory, and there is wonderful accessibility without cheerleading. This voice belongs to a true cosmopolitan, who makes movies matter on aesthetic and political grounds, who attends to major non-American films neglected in this country, and whose growing impatience with the contemporary Hollywood product retains a sense of humor."—Michael Rogin, author of Blackface, White Noise

"Rosenbaum is one of the few film reviewers with a deep understanding of film form, its sources in film history and theory, and even more its place as a twentieth-century art form. He refuses to embrace high-art intellectualism or pop-art fun exclusively and likewise refuses to forgo either. The unique quality of his reviews is their immediacy. He engages and argues with film audiences, filmmakers, and distributors, demanding a response to the standards he sets. It is in this sense that this collection is profoundly political."—Tom Gunning, author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film

From the Back Cover

About the Author

Jonathan Rosenbaum is film critic at the Chicago Reader, author of Moving Places (1995) and Placing Movies (1995), both published by California, editor of This is Orson Welles (1993), and a member of the New York Film Festival selection committee.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of California Press; 0 edition (June 30, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 350 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0520206142
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0520206144
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.06 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches

All copies are USED guaranteed in Good to Very Good condition. May have library or remainder markings, and some underlining.

About Our Store

MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and Directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.

Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."

About the Partners

Matt Zoller Seitz

Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.

Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.

Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch and the new The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. In October 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre, considered the biggest film event of Dallas in 2024 by Dallas Observer!

Judith Carter was in the Upscale and Luxury Hospitality Industry for most of her life. In 2004 she had a beautiful baby boy with Special Needs and put the pause on her career until 2017 to dedicate herself to him and then others, assisting and volunteering as a legal advocate ensuring the best medical care, evaluations and educations for Special Needs children and their families.

Matt and Judith were family friends for over 20 years. She was there with her family in support when his wife Jen passed away suddenly in 2006. Then just 6 weeks later while Matt was in Dallas; he and his Father, Dave, and Step-Mother, Genie, were there as support, when Judith was alone and her son received the first of many diagnoses that changed the trajectory of their lives. So it made sense in the turbulent year of 2020, Matt asked Judith to take over running the online store that has become MZS.press. The rest as they say is, "Their"-story.

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash

Movies as Politics 4th Edition (Paperback, USED)

From Library Journal

From Booklist

From Kirkus Reviews

From the Inside Flap

From the Back Cover

About the Author

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

The Arts Bookstore of the Internet

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz Directed by Judith Carter“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”Haruki MurakamiPhoto by Carlos Torres on Unsplash

Movies as Politics 4th Edition (Paperback, USED)

From Library Journal

From Booklist

From Kirkus Reviews

From the Inside Flap

From the Back Cover

About the Author

About Our Store

About the Partners

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Carlos Torres on Unsplash