Jay Rosenblatt Focus

The Smell of Burning Ants (1994), for instance, focuses on the experience of being male in the violent and threatening milieu in which Rosenblatt was socialized, surrounded by bigger boys looking for any sign of weakness in their peers. King of the Jews (2000), meanwhile, emphasizes the bewildering experience of growing up Jewish-American in the decades following the Holocaust, always aware of the never-ending precarity of Jewish life. On the other hand, Rosenblatt’s films articulate the much broader experience of being a gentle, perceptive soul thrust into a world too frequently populated by sadists – from schoolyard tyrants to mass murderers – in which nearly everything is beyond the individual’s control. To unearth the links between his unique personal experience and those more universal human struggles, Rosenblatt chose a very particular path: searching for glimpses of his likeness – his existential kin – in the cinematic archive.

Like the human psyche, the archive is haunted. As a vast but also devastatingly incomplete repository containing the written, visual, and audial traces of the past, it is the ideal place for Rosenblatt to seek echoes of his own ghosts, finding them especially in discarded educational films, industrial films, and newsreels. By locating, selecting, arranging, and juxtaposing found sounds and images with text and voiceover, Rosenblatt tells his own life stories – of bullying to avoid being bullied, of trying to understand antisemitism and the Holocaust and the death of his brother – through others’ faces and voices, which he then entwines with images of his own family. Indeed, the underlying themes of his films are those that nearly every human being shares: of having a family, with all the love and rage and guilt that necessarily entails; of the pain of growing up; of experiences of power and of powerlessness. In his complex repurposing, Rosenblatt editorially interweaves the collective unconscious of the cinematic archive with his own psyche. Indeed, when he mixes educational footage with 8mm movies shot by his own parents, the viewer of his work may sometimes find it difficult to distinguish one from the other. This is not, however, a reduction of self to other or vice versa; rather, it is an act of archival retrospection – a looking back, into the remains of the cinematic era, now at its close – in search of kinship with the dead and with the audience

In some of his more recent work, Rosenblatt has shifted away from mining the extant public archive to producing his own private archive, particularly of his daughter Ella’s birth and childhood, and then applying his strategies of archival retrospection to his experience of parenthood. To some extent, watching these films feels like watching a stranger’s most personal home movies; and even in the age of frantic digital exhibitionism we currently inhabit, this act can feel voyeuristic and intrusive. Heartbeat (2025), in particular, which retrieves from Rosenblatt’s domestic archive footage that he and his wife and collaborator Stephanie Rapp produced while they were trying to have a baby, can read as too intimate, an overexposure. 

Yet, the thoughtful, retrospective lens of the film is what distinguishes it from the domestic exhibitionism now rampant online. Because the footage was recorded nearly a quarter century ago, the time elapsed transforms this intimate footage into a record of feelings felt long ago, long enough that they can mean something different now. These anxious images can be handled precisely because of the temporal distance afforded by an archival, indexical medium and may be subsequently transformed into a narrative of an experience others may – at least partially – recognize. A related film, How Do You Measure a Year? (2022), is at once a series of home movies, a longitudinal documentary, and a sort of structuralist experiment, in which Rosenblatt asked his daughter the same set of questions on her birthday every year between the time she was two and eighteen, recording her answers.From one perspective, this record of someone else’s beautiful child growing up is really none of our business; from another, however, it can be read as a careful and sustained imaging of time’s passage, of growth and transformation as inscribed in the face and body of one’s most beloved. By creating an archive of his own family life, Rosenblatt becomes a retrospective authoethnographer, treating the traumas of his own past while also reminding us – despite it all – of the joys of still being alive and never quite knowing what will come next.

- Jaimie Baron

Jaimie Baron

Jaimie Baron is a writer, editor, curator, and theorist. She is the author of The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History (Routledge, 2014) and Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era (Rutgers, 2020) as well as many journal articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews. She is the founder and director of the Festival of (In)appropriation, a yearly international festival of short experimental found footage films and videos. She is also a co-founder and co-editor of Docalogue, an online space for scholars and filmmakers to engage in conversations about contemporary documentary, and the Docalogue book series. She also co-edited a collection entitled Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relation (Oxford, 2021) and co-authored the 4th edition of Introduction to Documentary with Bill Nichols. She previously held the position of professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a 2022 – 2023 recipient of a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship. She currently lectures in Film and Media at the University of California, Berkeley.