"Chicago Isn’t Peoria, but It Isn’t Far Away"

"There’s an element of intellectual biography to everything Rosenbaum writes. (A bona fide autobiography, Moving Places, was published in 1980 and is out of print.) Born into cinephilia as the son and grandson of Jewish film exhibitors in northwestern Alabama, he saw a half-dozen movies per week until leaving for boarding school in Vermont in 1959. Ten years later, after a short stint in graduate school, he moved to Paris, surrendered to a heady swirl of kino-lust and Marxism and began contributing pieces to The Village Voice and Film Comment. (The young man’s take on Gravity’s Rainbow can be found somewhere in the Voice archives.) An apprentice with unusually discerning tastes, the kid got around. He worked as an assistant to Jacques Tati, appeared as an extra for Robert Bresson and adapted a J.G. Ballard novel into a screenplay that he unsuccessfully shopped to Susan Sontag."

Akiva Gottlieb in The Nation reviews Jonathan Rosenbaum's Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia.