Publications

Note: Corrections for this section are welcome. Please contact me at jonathanrosenbaum at earthlink dot net.

See also 2. Other Publications » and 3. Published But Unavailable on This Site

An alphabetical index of all my long reviews for the Chicago Reader can be found here; for a chronological list of my posts and all my other pieces, go to About This Site, and for a chronological list of all my book reviews and longer pieces about literary subjects on this site, go here. I retired from the Chicago Reader at the end of February 2008, so people wishing to contact me for professional reasons should email me at the above address, not at the Reader or at Facebook or at The Auteurs. For a list of my books and links for ordering them on Amazon, go to this link. (Following the advice of Arindam Datta, a correspondent from West Bengal, India, here is another link that allows one to access an online version of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies, for free. Speaking of which, thanks to Catherine Grant’s invaluable web site, you can access online 91 other film-related books, some of them essential works, for free by following this link.) Furthermore, Moving Places can also be accessed on this site, a chapter at a time.

Books

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A reasonably complete list of my books can be found here. For a list of my books and links for ordering them on Amazon, go to this link.

My two latest books are both  collections — a two-volume work called Cinematic Encounters that appeared in November 2018 and June 2019. Volume one consists of interviews and dialogues, volume two is subtitled Portraits and Polemics, and University of Illinois Press is publishing both volumes.
 
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An expanded and updated, Spanish-language edition of Abbas Kiarostami, the book I coauthored with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, has come out in Argentina, and a similarly updated Persian edition is also out (see above covers); I can also happily announce that a second edition in English became available shortly after my 75th birthday. More recently, Monte Hermoso Ediciones in Buenos Aires has brought out an Argentinian edition of my collection Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia.
 
 
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A Simplified Chinese translation of my Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See (2000) has recently come out, and this has led to an increased number of Chinese visitors to this site.

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My first book as an editor, Rivette: Texts and Interviews (1977), was never reprinted and is difficult to come by nowadays, but virtually its entire contents (apart from the annotated filmography), as well as most of my articles about Jacques Rivette, are now available on an excellent web site, “Order of the Exile,” devoted to Rivette.

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In 2010, the University of Chicago Press brought out my latest collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia. A Korean translation and edition that was expected to come out soon has unfortunately been canceled.(Go here for the new preface that I wrote for this.)  But meanwhile, another Korean publisher, Emotion Books, has published a Korean edition of Essential Cinema (see below), and, as noted above, an Argentinian Edition in Spanish is also in the works. IMG_0804-1

On April 17, 2013, John Lingan published a lengthy interview with and profile about me in the Los Angeles Review of Books. There’s a lengthy interview with me, largely about this book, featured in the December 2010 issue of the German film magazine Cargo.  (One can access the interview via this link, but not, alas, in readable form.) And I was delighted to discover [on May 23, 2011] that a translation into Indonesian of one short piece in this book — “In Defense of Spoilers,” which started out as a blog post — has just appeared. More recently, in early June, an Italian translation of my 2007 essay “Film Writing on the Web: Some Personal Reflections,” has appeared in the first issue of an ambitious new online film magazine, filmIdee.


My second most recent book, The Unquiet American: Transgressive Comedies from the U.S., published only in hardcover and designed to accompany a month-long retrospective at the Austrian Film Museum in Fall 2009 (see below), is also available from Amazon. And the Austrian Film Museum’s Fritz Lang retrospective yielded a collection in German this year [2012] in the same series, edited by Astrid Johanna Ofner, that includes a translation of my 1976 Monthly Film Bulletin review of Spione, an expanded version of which can be accessed here.


The paperback edition of my 2004 collection Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Johns Hopkins University Press), with a new Afterword that includes some additions to my list of 1000 favorite films, came out in 2008. On March 24, 2014, my friend Eric Levy posted a cross-referenced chart devoted to films on both these lists that are available from Criterion. And a slightly updated Korean edition of this book was published by Emotion Books in February 2016; go here for the Afterword that I wrote for that edition. For over three years, Plot Ediciones in Spain announced on their website a forthcoming Spanish edition of Essential Cinema, although they stopped responding to my emails several years ago and their web site no longer appears to be functioning. In early 2010, however, I did have an exchange of emails with Lola Mayo, who was proofreading and revising the Spanish translation and assured me that this book would be coming out eventually — even though five years after that assurance, no publication date has been set so far….In early April 2015, I was informed that a Korean edition of this book is in the works.


Perhaps the least known of my books, Film: The Front Line 1983, finally went out of print in early 2018.,  Copies can still be found on Amazon, priced exorbitantly.


A Spanish publisher, Errata Naturae Editores, brought out a Spanish translation and edition of Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, a 2003 collection I coedited with Adrian Martin, on January 24, 2011 — with a new and lengthy Preface by Pere Portabella. (I finally received a copy of this book in mid-May of that year, thanks to the kindness of Portabella’s assistant, Helena Gomà, who Fedexed me a copy; the greedy publisher, after taking the trouble to send me the photograph reproduced below, refused to send either Adrian or me a single one of those copies.). In March 2014, I learned that a Persian translation of Movie Mutations was in the works, and this finally came out in October 2015 (see below), and Adrian and I wrote a new introduction for it — a new exchange of letters. I

n early May 2016, I learned this is going into a second printing! Movie Mutations in Farsi


Another relatively recent book of mine is Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press, 2007). One of its pieces, an essay on F For Fake written for the 2005 Criterion DVD of the film, has also been reprinted (in English) in the 4th issue of the trilingual Italian online magazine La Furia Umana, which has a very sizable section devoted to Welles, including an excellent discussion of Welles’ Heart of Darkness project by James Naremore; and in the same issue, among much else, there’s also a provocative piece by Adrian Martin about “pulp poetry”.  My last chapter, on Welles’ Don Quixote, has appeared in a new Spanish collection, Espejos entre ficciones. El cine y El Quijote (2009), edited by Carlos F. Heredero and published by the Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales. And the book’s Appendix, “The Present State of the Welles Film Legacy,” is included in the recent (2011) Russian translation of This is Orson Welles, which I edited. Speaking of which, I wrote an essay about Welles for the Barnes and Noble Review. The same piece has turned up on Salon’s web site, with a different title and headline.


At the end of July 2011, J. Hoberman and I attended the Era New Horizons Festival in Wrocław, Poland, where they brought out a Polish edition of our 1983 book, Midnight Movies, translated by our very generous and tireless host, Michał Oleszczyk. (Go here for a Polish sample.) I had a wonderful time there — it was my first visit to Poland, and I hope it won’t be my last — and I saw a good many films I liked: especially Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (no less than three times), which I wrote about for the September-October 2011 issue of Film Comment (the same piece has been translated into French for the Spring 2012 issue of Trafic and a Spanish translation has also appeared in the February 2012 issue of Caiman Cuadernos de Cine; also, go here for my brief contribution to a critical roundtable on Tarr at Indiewire), but also Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, André Téchiné’s Impardonnables (also known as Unforgivable), Pip Chodorov’s Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film, and two programs of early shorts by Andrzej Munk. (Regarding midnight movies, a five-minute video interview with me for a Polish web site is available here; one can hear me discuss Eraserhead briefly with Michał, who translates my words into Polish, here, over silent images from the film, and a brief video discussion of Midnight Movies in English and Polish with Jim Hoberman and Michał — with superimposed images of Divine in Pink Flamingos! — can also be accessed. And, finally, here is an 11-minute stretch from a discussion of The Rocky Horror Picture Show cult by Jim, me, and Michał.


dm Casablanca Publishers has issued a Czech translation and edition of my book on Dead Man, for which I’ve written a new Foreword. And a French edition translated by Justine Malle (daughter of Louis Malle) was published by by Les Éditions de la Transparence in 2005; I’ve also recently discovered that an unauthorized Iranian translation in Farsi appeared in 2006.  This is another unauthorized publication of mine in Farsi — a collection including 13 of my articles from the Chicago Reader; I’m told that its title translates as Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Reviews, and the last I heard, it could be bought in Tehran for roughly the equivalent of a dollar.


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It was almost a year since La Mirada Americana. Cincuenta Años de Film Comment, a Spanish collection edited and translated by Manu Yáñez Murillo with three pieces of mine (“Guilty by Suspicion,” an early Paris Journal about Playtime, and a dialogue with J. Hoberman about midnight movies), came out, and in Mexico City at FICUNAM (late February 2013), Manu was kind enough to give a copy. (Film Comment, which was supposed to forward me a copy, couldn’t be bothered.)