Jonathan Rosenbaum - Biography

Biography

Jonathan Rosenbaum grew up in Florence, Alabama, where his grandfather owned a small chain of movie theaters. His childhood home was the Rosenbaum House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. As a teenager, he attended The Putney School in Putney, Vermont, where his classmates included actor Wallace Shawn. He graduated from Putney in 1961.

Rosenbaum developed a lifelong interest in jazz as a teen, and continues to make frequent references to it in his film criticism. He attended Bard College, where he played piano in an amateur jazz ensemble that included future actors Chevy Chase as a drummer and Blythe Danner as a vocalist. He studied literature at Bard with the intention of becoming a writer; amongst his professors there was German philosopher Heinrich Blücher, whose teaching made a serious impact on Rosenbaum. After graduate school, he moved to New York and was hired to edit a collection of film criticism, which marked his first foray into the field.

Rosenbaum moved to Paris in 1969, working briefly as an assistant to director Jacques Tati and appearing as an extra in Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer. While living there, he began writing film and literary criticism for The Village Voice, Film Comment and Sight & Sound. In 1974, he moved from Paris to London, where he remained until March 1977, when he was offered a two-semester teaching position at the University of California, San Diego by Manny Farber. Farber had been a major influence on Rosenbaum's criticism, but the two had never met until the latter arrived in San Diego.

While teaching at UCSD, he shared a house with filmmaker Louis Hock and critic Raymond Durgnat. Towards the end of his teaching stint there, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which led to the writing of his first published book, Moving Places. Rosenbaum then returned to New York, initially sharing an apartment with future Philadelphia Inquirer critic Carrie Rickey, a former student of Farber's.