Moving Places: A Life at the Movies – Jonathan Rosenbaum
$31.95
“Some movies are harder to bury than others,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in his first book, a recounting of his private cinematic awakening which doubles as a rich social history, laced with bittersweet memories of a departed world. His childhood was spent in 1940s and ’50s Alabama, where his family ran a small chain of cinemas, and Rosenbaum conjures the whiff of grandad’s cigar smoke, waterfalls installed in theater lobbies, a traumatic screening of Freaks (1932), and the Florence Times Sunday column in which the week’s theatrical highlights were spruiked (where Rosenbaum made his critical debut, age 14). Shapeshifting and formally experimental, this memoir—published in 1980 and driven by countercultural zeal—slides personal anecdotes (bad drug trips, Civil Rights marches, an undescended testicle) up alongside sharp-shooting analyses, making the case that the appreciation of movies is inextricably bound up in the context in which they are seen.
Moving Places: A Life at the Movies
Jonathan Rosenbaum
University of California Press
In Print
1995