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SF Chronicle Datebook, March, 2024 Local News Matters, March 2024 Local News Matters, November, 2022 The New York Times, March, 2022 San Francisco Chronicle, June 2012 La vida nos estremece October 2011.pdf The Village Voice, October 2010 This Week in New York blog, October 2010 Tribeca Film Institute blog, October 2010 Senses of Cinema, Issue 53, January 2010 San Francisco Chronicle, October 2009 San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 2005 San Francisco Chronicle, November 2005 San Francisco Weekly, November 2005 San Francisco Examiner, October 2005 Scene 4 Magazine, October 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian, March 2005 Contra Costa Times, April 2004 San Francisco Bay Guardian, November 2002 Vogues Hommes International, Spring/Summer 2002 (pdf) Miami New Times Review & Interview 2001 San Francisco Chronicle Review, 2001 San Francisco Examiner Review, 2001 San Francisco Bay Guardian Review, 2001 San Francisco Chronicle Profile, 2001 Movie Magazine International Review, 2001 The Stranger (Seattle) Review, 2001 San Francisco Weekly cover story, 2000 New York Times Profile, August 2000 Press
SF CHRONICLE DATEBOOK Jay Rosenblatt is the best filmmaker you probably never heard ofMarch 7, 2024 Jay Rosenblatt is a great filmmaker who works in a medium that most people don’t get to see — short films. Sometimes using found footage, often pulling from events from his own life and almost always dealing in topics of universal concern, he has crafted an original and powerful body of work that’s incisive and heartfelt. He is a local filmmaker but one of national importance, who has won the jury award at Sundance and was nominated for an Academy Award (for Documentary short subject) in 2022 and 2023. On Saturday, March 16, he will appear onstage in conversation with Bill Nichols, in a two-hour program that will show entire films, excerpts from films and trailers from films. It promises to be an ideal introduction to Rosenblatt’s work, one that you can use in your further explorations after you leave the theater. Go to the Roxie prepared for a unique experience. No one makes films like Jay Rosenblatt, neither in style nor in condensed emotional force. -Mick LaSalle WALL STREET JOURNAL
‘How Do You Measure a Year?’ Review: A Lifetime in 28 Minutes
June 13, 2023
Well before people were routinely committing their entire lives to video, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt began recording his daughter, Ella, on her birthday, beginning at age 2 and continuing until she left home for college. He shot her in the same place, asked the same questions and got—as he no doubt expected—an evolving series of answers and attitudes. According to the film that resulted— “How Do You Measure a Year?”—Mr. Rosenblatt waited 17 years to look at all the footage. His response is hard to imagine.
The reaction of Oscar voters was strong enough to earn the film a nomination this year among documentary shorts, but Oscar voters are shamelessly sentimental and untrustworthy. Still, it is easy to see why they liked it and why the once-formidable documentary stronghold of HBO is presenting it on the week before Father’s Day: It is an ideal way to get one’s daughter to sit on the couch with dad, who will have the convincing argument that it will be for only 28 (possibly teary) minutes. The old joke about home movies was that they require watching people on screen about whom you couldn’t care less and being at the mercy of a projectionist who couldn’t care more. But there’s a great deal going on in Mr. Rosenblatt’s film besides him and Ella, their birthday ritual, paternal love, and a daughter’s often impatient response to this thing dad wants to do every year. The running time is not just an asset, it helps make the movie’s point: Life is fleeting—maybe it doesn’t feel that way for the child involved, but watching a girl grow from infancy to adulthood over the course of such a short film is to confront the brevity of childhood, the changes that occur throughout, and the inherent imbalance between the love of parent and child—one being mostly adoration, the other being largely about tolerance. There have been major experiments, for lack of a better word, in the use of motion pictures to achieve a kind of time travel. “Boyhood,” Richard Linklater’s much-honored drama of 2014, featured the actor Ellar Coltrane from ages 6 to 18; Michael Apted’s “Up” series—which followed a group of British “kids” for 56 years, with installments every seven years—was a different kind of documentary creature, but still possessed a sometimes exhilarating and often enough morbid shorthand into aging and mortality. Ella Rosenblatt is still essentially a child when we leave her, but why does she look more mature at age 13 than 15? Why does a hairstyle so change her face? She looks thin. Ah! She went vegan last year. Her attitude ranges from adorable to attitudinal and back again. And so quickly. Mr. Rosenblatt, a veteran documentarian, clearly had a bit of an agenda, as revealed in the questions he asks. Some are predictable: What are dreams? What are nightmares? What do you want to do when you grow up? he asks a 3-year-old Ella. “Put on makeup and eat gum.” Yes, viewers might agree. “What,” Mr. Rosenblatt asks each of his Ellas, “is power?” From the infant version he gets the answer he deserves when she points to her diaper. (She thought he said “powder.”) One Ella wants to be “a grown up when I grow up,” which seems wildly ambitious. “Are we done yet?” asks another, and all one can think is, “Soon enough.” -Mr. Anderson is the Journal’s TV critic. DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD
How Do You Measure a Year?
February 28, 2023
HBO Documentary Films has acquired worldwide and television streaming rights to the Oscar-nominated short How Do You Measure a Year?, a film director Jay Rosenblatt shot over the course of 17 years with his daughter Ella. Every year on Ella’s birthday, from the ages of 2 to 18, he recorded as he asked his daughter the same set of questions, such as how she would describe herself and how she defines the word “power.” Her answers – funny, poignant, wise, surprising — form the basis of the 29-minute film. At age 9, for instance, Ella describes herself as “fun, funny, jokeful, loving, peaceful — sometimes.” Two years later, as she turns 11, she offers this definition of power: “Power is being yourself. That takes a lot of power.” HBO Documentary Films says it will premiere How Do You Measure a Year? on HBO in June 2023, coinciding with Father’s Day. The film will also be available to stream on HBO Max. This marks the second year in a row Rosenblatt has earned an Academy Award nomination, following his recognition last year for When We Were Bullies, a documentary about an incident in his childhood in New York. HBO also acquired When We Were Bullies, and today’s acquisition extends a long partnership with the director.“I am thrilled HBO has acquired How Do You Measure a Year?,” Rosenblatt said in a statement. “Given that HBO has debuted two previous films I made with my daughter, and much of my other work, they are the perfect home for this film and for me as a filmmaker.” Rosenblatt says until the Covid pandemic hit, he had never looked at any of the material he shot over that nearly two-decade span. At a screening at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles Monday night, he discussed the editing process. “It came quicker than probably any film I’ve done,” he told the audience. “Like the last film, the Bullies film, that really was a long process. That took four years to make. This was a few months of editing; I mean, it was a long period of time of filming, but it just fell into place. It was so clear what were the little gems. I think the biggest challenge was to keep it moving forward, not just with the chronological age, but with the cuts and how to go from one year to the next and just keep propelling it.” He added, “The other thing is that it was so enjoyable. It could have taken longer and I wouldn’t have cared because I was having so much fun just seeing [Ella] grow up and going back to the footage.”
Locomotion Films presents How Do You Measure a Year? by Jay Rosenblatt, featuring Ella Rosenblatt. Jay Rosenblatt is producer, director, and editor of the film, with cinematography by Thomas Logoreci and Jay Rosenblatt. Sound design and mix are by Dan Olmsted, with color grading by Robert Arnold; Summers Henderson is the online editor.
-Matthew Carey
48 HILLS
February 16, 2023
Pam Grady
THE WASHINGTON POST
A guide to the 2022 Oscar Shorts
Critic’s pick “When We Were Bullies” really stands apart here. Made by Jay Rosenblatt, an experimental filmmaker known for “collage documentaries” that incorporate archival footage, “Bullies” is a deeply personal essay about the director’s childhood, centering on an instance of bullying in which Rosenblatt participated when he was in fifth grade. It’s an exhumation of the long-buried past, told with a mix of found footage, animation, first-person voice-over and traditional interviews. It may not be the most topical or newsy of the documentary selections, but it is, hands down, the most artful. - Michael O'Sullivan
THE NEW YORKER
When We Were Bullies
February 11, 2022
Chance and intention spark painful memories in “When We Were Bullies,” Jay Rosenblatt’s multilayered new work of personal nonfiction and historical inquiry, which made the Oscar shortlist for Documentary Short Subject. (It opens on Feb. 11 at Film Forum, paired with the feature “Playground.”) The story begins with a snippet of archival footage that Rosenblatt included in his 1994 film, “The Smell of Burning Ants”; that clip reminded him of an incident in 1965, in which, as a fifth grader in Brooklyn, he took part in the schoolyard beating and humiliation of a classmate. A serendipitous encounter with another participant in the bullying, a troubling interaction with the victim, a school reunion, and even a meeting with his fifth-grade teacher (now in her nineties) lend passionate detail and self-scourging power to Rosenblatt’s vision of spontaneous collective brutality and his long-suppressed memory of it. Conjuring the past with an enticing array of cinematic devices—close analysis of film footage, the playful animation and manipulation of still photographs, copious interviews on camera and in voice-over, and his own trenchant and rueful monologues—Rosenblatt evokes lifetimes of anguish while also pondering the ethics of telling the victim’s story. — Richard BrodySAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
February 2, 2021
‘When We Were Bullies’
By Pam Grady
Nearly 30 years ago, San Francisco filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt made a short film, “The Smell of Burning Ants,” about the roots of toxic masculinity in boyhood. A three-frame image of a child injecting himself into a fight between two others with a punch of his own jolted Rosenblatt into remembering an incident from when he was in the fifth grade. He and his classmates turned on one of their own in the schoolyard with a vicious bullying attack. Twenty-six years since revisiting that event with his film, Rosenblatt has not been able to let it go and so he returns from the vantage point of 55 years to look at it once more in this insightful autobiographical short. A blend of documentary, animation, photos and found footage, “When We Were Bullies” marries the serious with the playful, the latter evident in opening frames as Rosenblatt and old friend Richard Silberg clumsily scale the locked gate of PS 194, their Brooklyn alma mater.
In the film, Rosenblatt seeks out as many members of his class as he can find, as well as their teacher, Mrs. Bromberg, still thriving in her 90s. A funny thing happens as he probes what happened that afternoon when they all turned on the other Richard in their class, the bullied boy they called Dick. Rather than bring the incident into sharper focus, both it and Dick recede further into jumbled memories.
If “When We Were Bullies” represents a reckoning, it is one between the 60-something Rosenblatt and his 10-year-old self. What is gained through the course of the film is perspective and greater understanding and empathy for that boy and for all the boys and girls, each carrying their personal pain. The shame Rosenblatt feels for having bullied another is palpable, but he has taken that and made a work of art that is sad and funny and very much in touch with the human condition.
FILMMAKER MAGAZINE February 1, 2021 “Complicity Comes in Many Forms”: Jay Rosenblatt on His Sundance Short About Bullying, When We Were Bullies
By Lauren Wissot
Jay Rosenblatt’s latest inventive short When We Were Bullies, world premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, originated with a stranger than fiction coincidence surrounding a guy named Richard and the making of Rosenblatt’s 1994 short The Smell of Burning Ants — which itself had been influenced by another Richard, who is likewise the spark for this film. Fifty years ago the director and the former Richard, fifth-grade classmates, had been on the bullying side of a bizarre incident involving the latter Richard — a moment in time subsequently frozen in both their minds in similar, yet distinctly different, ways. So to get at the heart of what truly happened at a Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn public school a half century ago, Rosenblatt travels back down memory lane, contacting classmates whose recollections of the collective attack range from the totally blank to the weirdly specific. (One former student even surprisingly recalls the teacher as being a bit of a bully. So of course Rosenblatt also reconnects with that now nonagenarian teacher.) As the meta, or perhaps circular, quest ensues revelations begin to build as do the questions. All of this culminates in Rosenblatt’s disturbing recognition that culpability lies equally with leaders and collaborators, a dangerous lesson we’ve all been painfully learning over the past four years, right through to this very day.
VARIETY November, 2016 Filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt on His Role as Provocateur, Entertainer, Healer By Will Tizard San Francisco-based filmmaker and artist Jay Rosenblatt works with archival footage, original images, voiceovers, and ominous classical pieces by the likes of Arvo Part to create new stories that explore dark, ironic themes ranging from the personal habits of dictators, as in 1998’s “Human Remains,” to the heartrendingly confessional meditation on grief, 2005’s “Phantom Limb.” Honored this year with the Camerimage award for achievement in documentary, the former psychologist returns to Bydgoszcz, Poland to screen a new film, “When You Awake,” and to speak about his work.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE DVD review: The Films of Jay Rosenblatt, volume 2 By Mick LaSalle Make no mistake, Jay Rosenblatt is a great artist. He makes short films unlike anything you've ever seen, some as short as a minute, some as long as a half hour. Most of his films - not all - involve the use of found footage. Rosenblatt, who is program director for the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, will take snippets from instructional, industrial and education films from the middle of the 20th century and put them together with music and narration to achieve profound emotional effects. Those effects are also hard to describe. To see a Jay Rosenblatt movie is to come into contact with something deep and true in the human experience, a kind of sadness that's beyond tears.
NEW YORK TIMES By Mike HaleJay Rosenblatt makes friendly art films. Their subject matter may be grim - suicide, grief, violence, murderous dictators - but his constructions of found footage and appropriated narration are inviting and accessible. Hence they turn up in mainstream environments like the Sundance Film Festival, Film Forum and Cinemax (where they're called shorts or documentaries, "art" and "experimental" being words a programmer would rather not hear). This appeal stems partly from their formal beauty. Mr. Rosenblatt splices together bits of all kinds of footage - industrial and educational films, news, home movies - as seamlessly as any crack Hollywood editor. The resulting films feel stately and deliberate despite their hundreds of cuts.
FILMMMAKER By Peter Bowen Since his 1990 breakthrough Short of Breath, San Francisco-based filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt has honed a particular film aesthetic, a form more related to poetry and essays than traditional film narrative. Combining found footage, poignant spoken narratives and targeted scores, Rosenblatt explores large social, even philosophical, issues with poetic precision. Images and spoken word do not so much illustrate as resonate against each other, suggesting a range of meanings and further associations, but never definitely naming one. The meticulousness by which he creates these short films lead Atom Egoyan to call him "an exquisite artist who makes beautifully crafted miniatures."
SENSES OF CINEMA By Brian K. Bergen-Aurand DOCUMENTARY By Cathleen Rountree 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. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE By Mick LaSalle NEW YORK TIMES '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.
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