Jonathan Rosenbaum interview

[Tony]

Many thanks to Larry French for providing the link to the wonderful interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum; I encourage everyone who hasn't seen it to check it out: it's 70 minutes of pure heaven. I only wish it were longer!

Rosenbaum is not at all how I pictured him, in appearance or manner. He's rather like a slightly shy, retiring and sweet professor with nevertheless strong and wonderfully (and seemingly spontaneously generated) views. He also has a great sense of humour, and often laughs charmingly at his own wonderment.

Really not to be missed, IMO.

Thanks Larry!

[ToddBaesen]

Besides the long interview, Jonathan Rosenbaum has posted this info at A FILM BY, on how to view the clip from DON QUIXOTE seperately online. He titles the piece, "The Most Beautiful Six Minutes in the History of Cinema," a title which comes not from Jonathan, but from the essay he includes on his blog. There is also some interesting info Mr. Rosenbaum posted on both the sequence and the ongoing disputes between Oja Kodar and the Italian editor, which has now apparently been resolved.


I recently contrived to show my favorite sequence from Welles' Don
Quixote, not included in the execrable Jesus Franco edit of the film,
on a cable TV show airing twice this weekend. And, at the suggestion
of the Chicago Reader's webmaster, this silent sequence has been
posted on YouTube via the Reader's film blog at:

http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/film/

I wish the visual quality of this reproduction was better. The clip
comes from Italian television and though it looks okay on the cable TV
show (see the film blog for details about where and when it's
showing), it's a lot darker and blotchier on the Internet, even after
some tweaking from the webmaster. But at least it can now be seen in
some form. And thanks to "a film by" regular Adrian Martin, I've been
able to accompany this clip with a beautiful text about it by an
Italian philosopher.

Jonathan

**********

JR: I don't know specifically why Bonanni decided several years ago to air this sequence on Italian TV, though I'm pretty sure it was Ciro Giorgini, who works for RAI, who arranged for the screening. And the only update I can offer is that he and Oja Kodar were in a legal dispute for years over the Welles footage he was holding--a dispute that was finally settled in her favor a few months ago. This means that the footage, once it's been inventoried, will eventually wind up at the either the Munich film Archives or the Filmoteca Espanola.

As far as I know, most or all of the remaining McCormack footage apart from this sequence was held by both Bonanni and the Filmoteca Espanola (the latter in Barcelona, not Madrid--as I discovered to my regret when I went to Madrid to do research on "Quixote" a few years back). Most of what Madrid has is the wreckage left by Jesus Franco, most of this consisting of Welles' hack documentary miniseries made for Italian TV in the 70s, "Orson Welles in the Land of Don Quixote" (not part of the film "Don Quixote" at all, though appropriated by Franco as if it were).

As of last August, when I visited Oja in Croatia, she still hadn't seen the footage and was speculating on whether it might include some things apart from Quixote footage, such as the missing material from "The Merchant of Venice".

[Tony]

If Bonnini has indeed lost control of the footage, then I wonder what Oja's going to do with it? Seeing as she's such a stickler for "doing what Orson would have done, or wanted to do", and as the original argument about this footage was because Bonanni wanted it included in the 92 version and Oja didn't, then I think there's a chance we'll never see an official release of it, other than as a bonus on a DVD.

[Alan Brody]

Rosenbaum answers questions at the Chicago Reader about the Don Quixote fragment:

http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/film/200 ... ry-cinema/

[tonyw]

I've not been able to access either version of the Rosenbaum interview on my computer, Could somebody provide alternative links?

Thanks

[Skylark]

Nice show - with nice scene selections - they do a good job at debunking the misconceptions - he's got a good take on Welles - this show is like the ideal introduction to Welles IMO...