Cinejournal

CINÉ-JOURNAL

Updated 5/16/03

By George Robinson

     This website is an ongoing compilation of my current thoughts on film as art and industry. It takes its name from the column (and later two books of those columns) that the late Serge Daney wrote for Liberation in the early 1980s when he was a columnist there.
     When I started this webpage three years ago, I was making most of my living writing on Jewish issues and Jewish music. Today, I probably spend as much time writing on film, albeit with an emphasis on Jewish-themed movies. That career trajectory is mildly ironic, since I began as a film critic and cinema remains my first love (not counting my wife and our cats, of course).
     Who am I? As a film critic, I have been published in numerous places -- the New York Times, Newsday and Jewish Week (NYC) most prominently. The work that will be most familiar to readers, however, isn't really signed by me at all; for six years I was senior contributing editor of the Blockbuster Entertainment Guide to Movies and Videos. In that capacity I reviewed (literally) several thousand films and, once the book was published and being annually updated, well over a hundred new films a year. (For a sample of my other writing interests, check out my website "Essential Judaism and Beyond.")
     I am a graduate of the Film Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts, where I studied under Andrew Sarris and was part of the burgeoning army of auteur critics in the early and mid 1970s. We were, I guess, sort of the third generation of American auteurists, following Sarris and his contemporaries, and then the men and women who wrote for him at the Village Voice and their contemporaries (the second generation). Finally, we came along like an occupying army. The main combat was over, the auteur theory was tacitly and sometimes overtly the ruling paradigm in film aesthetics in the popular press and, by and large, the academy. Of course, in the academy, auteurism was being supplanted by other theoretical developments -- structuralism and post-structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, a wide range of Marxisms, feminisms and what-have-you.

Three personal favorites: Melville's Le Samourai, Polonsky's Force of Evil, and Rosi's Il Caso Mattei

By temperament I'm a syncretist. Over the years I've taken whatever seemed to me to work in the other theories and used it as a cognitive grid overlaying my basic auteurist perspective, but always leavened all of this stuff with -- I hope -- a solid grounding in the political and economic realities that had an impact on the film industry. Without an understanding of those, the rest is empty wool-gathering.
But if you want a real solid idea of where I'm coming from, check out my ten-best list page and follow my my ongoing journey in Movie-land. You may also want to read about the New York Independent Film Critics Circle, of which I am a member. If you want to read more of my film criticism (and my music writing as well), go to Jewish Week's website, register (it's free) and search for "Robinson." You'll find everything from Jean-Luc Godard to klezmer, as well as some of the finest reporting on Jewish issues in the United States.

NEW:

LOTS OF NEWS, SOME TERRIFIC NEW FILMS AND MORE HERE.

ANOTHER TERRIFIC DOCUMENTARY JUST OPENED IN NYC. GO HERE TO READ MORE.

New piece available on the Jewish Week website, highlighting a very fine new Holocaust film.

To e-mail me, click here.