Camera Movements That Confound Us

Jonathan Rosenbaum

For over half a century, Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about movies with the belief that cinema is a form of literature. He sees certain camera movements as mysterious pleasures to be explored through adventurous prose, rather than mere puzzles to be solved. In Camera Movements That Confound Us, an experimental investigation into a neglected yet essential part of moviegoing, this belief becomes a theme that invites both variations and speculations, ranging across the breadth of film history from the silent features of F. W. Murnau and Yasujirō Ozu, to the work of Robert Altman, Carl Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, Alain Resnais, Michael Snow and Orson Welles, including documentaries and essay films, and even moving beyond film history to take in both early live television dramas and contemporary TV news.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, born in Alabama in 1943, is the son and grandson of movie exhibitors and grew up in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. While living in Paris (1969-1974), he worked as an extra for Robert Bresson and as a script consultant for Jacques Tati, before working as assistant editor for Monthly Film Bulletin and staff writer for Sight and Sound in London (1974-1977). He was the film critic for The Chicago Reader from 1987 to 2008. His books include Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), Midnight Movies (with J. Hoberman, 1983), This is Orson Welles by Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich (edited, 1992), Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (1995), Abbas Kiarostami (with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, 2003, expanded second edition 2018), Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (coedited with Adrian Martin, 2003), Essental CInema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (2004) and In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader (2024). In 2025, Sticking Place Books published an interview book with Rosenbaum entitled Travels in the Cities of Cinema. His website is www.jonathanrosenbaum.net.