Press

SENSES OF CINEMA
Issue 54  December 28, 2009

Great Directors: Jay Rosenblatt

By Brian K. Bergen-Aurand

To reduce Jay Rosenblatt's cinema to a theme is to invoke a violence that is foundational to their composition, a violence they absolutely resist - the violence of reducing the other to the same. Perhaps all of Rosenblatt's films can be summarised by these four words from Dr. Frankenstein's Monster, "Alone bad. Friend good." Perhaps these four words express the ethics and politics of this cinema. To be concise, Rosenblatt's cinema opens to the other. His films open a relationship to the other person through difference and because of difference, rather than in spite of difference or by overcoming difference. 

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DOCUMENTARY
Winter 2010

The Tyranny of Memory: 'The Films of Jay Rosenblatt, Volume I'

By Cathleen Rountree

A few months ago, while flipping channels, I came across an intriguing documentary short that grabbed and held my attention. In a voiceover narrative, a man--the director, I assumed--recounted the very personal story of the death of his seven-year-old brother. The haunting memory of this experience was loosely organized around the Kübler-Ross model of the five stages of grief that accompanies loss: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance, but expanded beyond those into an additional seven sections (i.e., Collapse, Sorrow, Communication).

Afterwards, I discovered that the film was Phantom Limb (2005), directed by Jay Rosenblatt. This disturbing short crossed the border of the personal into the frontier of the collective--a lesson in life's impermanence through the pain of loss.

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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
October 18, 2009

DVD: 'Films of Jay Rosenblatt'

By Mick LaSalle

If short films had a commercial outlet in the United States, Jay Rosenblatt would be a household name. One of the premier makers of shorts, Rosenblatt makes films marked by a great fullness of feeling joined with a rare intellectual precision. This 85-minute collection brings together five films that he made from 1990 through 2000. He is a master at combining found footage, at juxtaposing images from newsreels and public- service films that, together, create a whole other meaning. There is often a mournfulness in his work, an awareness of the passage of time, of the fleeting nature of passions, of the impossibility of achieving what film pretends to achieve, which is to stop time and preserve life. 

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NEW YORK TIMES
January 19, 2006

'Decades Later, Haunted by the Loss of a Little Brother'

"Phantom Limb" can only be called - deep breath - an art film. A dirgelike documentary about the death of a child, the program appears on Cinemax tonight, part of that channel's "Reel Life" series. The film is an impressionistic, anti-verité project, which suits the melancholy material; much of this meditation on grief is rendered soundlessly, using archival images, intertitles and the lonesome music of Arvo Pärt. Art on television - in small doses, it's surprising how easy it goes down.
-Virginia Hefferman

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THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
November 9, 2005

'Matters of Life and Death: Recent Films by Jay Rosenblatt'

Mixing the universally impersonal (newsreels, old educational movies) with the immediately personal (his own home movies), Jay Rosenblatt leaves you to close the gap, and you appreciate the delegation and trust.
-Ihsan Amanatullah

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THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
November 11, 2005

'Matters of Life and Death'

Jay Rosenblatt makes short, pointed, poetic films, and to see a collection of his work is to know he's a major artist. His specialness has no single source. He's a master at matching music and image, and the nature of his work, which usually involves discovering and using found footage, requires profound patience. Yet mostly, I suspect, what makes almost every Jay Rosenblatt film a full emotional experience is his empathy, his deep, unfeigned and unmistakable respect for life in its many forms.
- Mick LaSalle

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
(Sunday Arts and Leisure)
August 6, 2000

'Times When Less Is More Profound'

A one-week retrospective of Mr. Rosenblatt's classic works as well as his new ones, starting on Wednesday at Film Forum, will include ''Human Remains,'' ''The Smell of Burning Ants'' and ''King of the Jews.'' While hardly a household name, he has long been admired on the film-festival circuit and by other filmmakers. The Canadian director Atom Egoyan said, ''He's an exquisite artist who makes beautifully crafted miniatures.'' Mr. Egoyan, himself well known for such features as ''The Sweet Hereafter,'' particularly values the form Mr. Rosenblatt has chosen: ''Jay Rosenblatt isn't making 'calling card movies.' In the current climate of everyone wanting to make an indie feature, he's devoted himself to the very endangered form of the short film. He has stayed pure.''

What is most striking about his masterpiece, ''Human Remains,'' is his audacity in choosing to address atrocity entirely by omission. The audience journeys through archival film of Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Franco and Mussolini, guided only by a soundtrack of quotations and biographical data about their personal habits, all synthesized into an amusing but unlikely confessional.
-B. Ruby Rich

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