Moving Places: A Life at the Movies

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Moving Places is the brilliant account of a life steeped in and shaped by the movies―part autobiography, part film analysis, part social history. Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of America's most gifted film critics, began his moviegoing in the 1950s in small-town Alabama, where his family owned and managed a chain of theaters.

Starting in the Deep South of his boyhood, Rosenbaum leads us through a series of "screen memories," making us aware of movies as markers of the past―when and where we saw them, with whom, and what we did afterward. The mood swings easily from sensual and poignant regret to screwball exuberance, punctuated along the way by a tribute to the glamorous Grace Kelly of Rear Window , a meditation on The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its improbable audience-community, and an extended riff on Rosenbaum's encounters with On Moonlight Bay .

Originally published in 1980, Moving Places is reissued now both as a companion volume to the author's latest book and as a means of introducing a new generation of film buffs to this unique, often humorous exploration of one man's life at the movies.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

202 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a kind of experiment in film criticism, part autobiography (wherein Rosenbaum talks about his life growing up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as the son of the owner of a string of Movie Palaces), and part analysis of an admittedly low-brow film as he watches it repeatedly over the years. By analyzing each different viewing of the film Rosenbaum emphasizes the changing nature of our perceptions and critical faculties, and thereby tries to abolish the notion of detached objective critical standards. One time he viewed it he was tripping on acid! All in all it's a subjective but sharp record of his deep love for and involvement in film.

I give it four stars because at times the book does get egg-heady and annoying as he tries too hard to apply "serious" critical methods to film. In this it reads at times too much like a graduate school thesis.

[Anchoress Evelyn]

The very creative, literary memoir of my favourite film critic. Jonathan Rosenbaum considers his journey from childhood to adulthood, Fifties film fan to Seventies film critic. The text fills in much touching detail on his childhood as a sensitive Jewish boy growing up (in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house!) in Florence, Alabama. His family were well-off movie palace managers, owners of Rosenbaum Theatres; as such, Rosenbaum could spend his youth immersed in movies, inside and out. By the dawn of 1980, when this book was published, Rosenbaum had become an intellectual film critic, moving places (Paris, London, New York) to place movies in writing. This book puzzles at the connection between these two parts of Rosenbaum's life. The result is an at times beautiful, insightful meditation on the interrelationship between the movies we see and the lives we live.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Film at the crossroads of memory and history, beginning with one specific showing of one movie in one theatre and spiralling outwards. Even a mostly forgotten piece of cinematic detritus like On Moonlight Bay can carry tremendous significance. A very personal and insightful work from a great critic (although, important to know going in, and something Rosenbaum makes clear in his 1994 introduction, this isn't a book of criticism per se). Available to read for free on Rosenbaum's website, starting here.

[James Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally got around to reading this after it has been sitting on my shelves for probably a decade. Full of Rosenbaum's tics; even moreso than typical given that it's a memoir. There's a good bit where he chides himself for name-dropping Orson Welles and reveals that he tried to discuss the content of this book with Welles only for Welles to curtly indicate that he was not at all interested. The book made me sad and nostalgic for moviegoing; it's a good book to read a year into the covid pandemic. I could have done with a little less play by play detail in On Moonlight Bay's narrative. But Rosenbaum knows it's not an interesting plot but that it's full of rich resonance for him regardless; that's kind of the book's whole deal.

[Erik Bateson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one was a mixed bag. I’ve always been passionate about movies and film criticism, so this seemed like it would be right up my alley—ultimately, I ended up liking it instead of loving it. While I don’t agree with Jonathan Rosenbaum on everything, I’ve always found him to be a very smart and insightful writer; in Moving Pictures, though, he sort of stumbles with some long, dull sections that weigh things down.

This book was written before home video became an invaluable resource (he describes the emerging VHS format as “ghosts of movies I once knew, or as snapshots of friends I’ll hopefully meet again”), and much of this book is Rosenbaum describing the plots to films based on audio recordings he made from TV showings. While some of this book is very good (I’ll delve into this in a bit), much of it is these really tedious blow-by-blow retellings of movies; I must confess that at a certain point, I started to skim-read.

When he steps away from these plot synopses and starts to really delve into his ideas about film, the book starts to shine. He offers a rather harsh and interesting critique of The Deer Hunter (describing it as “oscar-winning racism” that “was articulated, enjoyed, and rewarded several years after the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam”), and a rather cynical take on how moviegoing has changed over the years (he describes the death of old-school theaters, claiming that people are now “generally watching worse movies for more money”).

One of the emerging trends during the era when the book was written was small movie theaters closing down and new ones opening in shopping malls. In a rather brilliant section of the book, Rosenbaum comments that movies themselves are becoming more and more like shopping malls, instruments of capitalism that use lights and music to manipulate consumers and encourage a certain degree of passivity (he laments films that “offer themselves like self-contained planets, not tools to assist us anywhere else in the universe”). Whether you agree with his criticisms of film becoming more commercial or not, they are thought-provoking, and they do remain relevant.

Ultimately, Rosenbaum is a little too pretentious for my more populist, Ebert-loving ways. I would be curious to read more of his books, and I did enjoy parts of this book very much, but I don’t quite share his objection to overtly commercial filmmaking (small indies can be great, but who doesn’t love films like The Empire Strikes Back?) and some of his opinions are a little out there (like calling Alien “a movie that tries to persuade an audience to get sexually excited by its own nausea”), but I see the role of a film critic not as someone who's right about everything but as someone who provides food for thought, and though it can be a little self-indulgent at times, Moving Pictures does have enough interesting ideas to be worth reading.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

My guy.