September 21, 2007
The new Barney Rosset documentary, Obscene
The prolific film blog GreenCine Daily has all the information you’d ever want about Obscene: How Barney Rosset Published Dirty Books for Fun and Profit, a new documentary from directors Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor. The title is somewhat misleading, of course, as the “dirty books” it refers to are not your average Hustler fare. Rosset instead published, through his Grove Press and through the Evergreen Review, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and the first US edition of The Story of O.
GreenCine’s post excerpts reviews from two other sites:
"You may not know Barney Rosset but the world we live in would be radically different without him," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Rosset is a fascinating subject, still possessed of a remarkably nimble mind well into his 80s, and gives refreshingly frank interviews. Better yet, he's also a bit of a pack rat and has maintained a sizeable archive of family movies, radio interviews, television appearances and the like, all of which have been made available to the filmmakers."
"Visually, however, the film never treads into the territory of he innovation and modernism that embody Rosset's life's work, instead limiting the story to an orthodox, chronological summary of what happened," adds Tom Hall. "I liked this movie a lot, especially because I believe so strongly in Rosset's principled stance that adults should be able to make up heir own minds about what books they read and images they care to take in... but I felt it could use an extra 'oomph' that more concern about the visual strategy (and the better integration of some of the film's talking heads in to the movie's storyline) might have delivered."
In the September/October/November 2006 issue of Bookforum, the writer Mike Topp visited Rosset at his Fourth Avenue apartment:
At eighty-four, Rosset is a startlingly lively man with pale skin, piercing blue eyes, and an encyclopedic recall. It was hard to believe that this was indeed the radical left-wing publisher who had been investigated numerous times by the CIA. Rosset extended his hand and seated himself, sipping a rum and Coke.
”This is a duplicate library. Many parts of my collection have been sold to Boston College, Boston University, the University of Texas, and the University of North Caroline. As a publisher, you pick up an incredible number of books.” His low-pitched cadence seemed more befitting an old-school gentleman publisher than today’s crop of bottom-line watchers.