On February 27, the film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum retired from his post at the Chicago Reader, where he had worked since 1987, at age 65. He left behind about 500 extended Reader essays, 5,000 capsule reviews and several controversial pieces, including a No Country for Old Men pan and a September New York Times piece criticizing the late Ingmar Bergman. His last long review praised the little-seen teen comedy Charlie Bartlett for its subversive politics. He exited as he had entered, arguing that good films engage with the real world rather than escape it.

Growing up in Alabama, Rosenbaum spent much of his childhood in movie theatres his grandfather owned. After an English degree from Bard and graduate work at SUNY-Stony Brook, he moved to Paris in 1969, where he became an assistant director to the comedian Jacques Tati. He moved to London in 1974, then through five American cities over the next decade, while writing for film magazines like Sight and Sound and Film Comment. In 1987 he came to Chicago and to the Reader, a small weekly that allowed him unlimited space—while most larger papers limited their critics to a 2,000-or-less word count, Rosenbaum’s pieces ran up to 5,000. “I’m the only person I know who’s had unlimited length,” he told the Independent.

The space allowed him to cultivate a knife-sharp sensibility; rather than affirm the Hollywood dream machine, as peers did, Rosenbaum took it to task for what he saw as lying to the public. Of Saving Private Ryan and Steven Spielberg, he wrote, “I’m wary of trusting the rhetoric of any director who chooses to begin and end a picture with the waving of an American flag.” Of the way that Star Wars  depicted violence as a laser-light show, “It can be, and has been, argued that all this is a glorious triumph of technology—which was also said of the Gulf War.”

Rosenbaum did not tell readers what they already knew, but pushed them to seek films they wouldn’t otherwise. His year-end Top 10 lists, while featuring a few high-profile American films (A History of Violence, Million Dollar Baby), were more prone to showcase revived obscurities like India Matri Bhumi and lesser-known gems like Dead Man, a Johnny Depp-starring Western that he considers the best English-language film of the ’90s. His 2004 book, Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, urges a greater awareness of foreign cinema, including filmmakers like Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami and Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-Hsien. This is not to say that all independent and foreign films are worthy, but rather that Americans miss many great ones because the films seem unfamiliar. In his original Dead Man review, Rosenbaum wrote, “Are we so dependent on movies that come to us exactly where we are—that flatter our current prejudices and enthusiasms and stroke our well-trained reflexes—that we can no longer sit still for movies that require even a modicum of adjustment?”

Hollywood films often provide viewers with self-contained worlds. The filmmakers Rosenbaum values, both foreign and American (Orson Welles, Joe Dante), deal with the world outside the theatre. Many of his favorite films are deeply political, highlighting issues of race, gender, religion, sexuality and class. For him, films are more than entertainment. “Film is about the world,” he said. “I don’t think that films are just about film.”

Rosenbaum’s retirement comes at a transitional moment in American film criticism. The Village Voice recently fired Nathan Lee, one of its two staff film critics. Newsday and Newsweek bought out their critics, as several other publications have throughout the country. The Internet has created a situation in which “younger people don’t read newspapers,” as Rosenbaum put it, and print critics have become expendable as a result. Even those who’ve kept their jobs have suffered; by the time he retired, Rosenbaum’s typical review had been pared down to 1,200 words, and his editor told him to review films the week they opened or not at all.

Yet while the Internet has had a negative impact upon criticism—the proliferation of blogs has devalued individual opinions, especially when they aren’t spell-checked—it’s also popularized it. More people can read Rosenbaum’s reviews now that they are available online, and Internet marketing has improved his book sales. His 2000 book, Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Conspire to Limit What Films We Can See, argues that the public consumes blockbuster junk because it’s conditioned to; in an era when fewer and fewer people see smaller films, the Internet can help many movies survive. Rosenbaum said, “You find a lot of writing... that’s even illiterate, but there’s an awful lot of communication going on.”

More is at stake than finding good films and informed opinions, though. To fight cultural brainwashing, viewers must learn more about the world than what they already know. Rosenbaum said that people “have to know something about the world to know that representations are inadequate.” A good critic, he believes, helps them learn.

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Aaron Cutler B’08 is into Pedro Costa’s films.