For many years, Roger Ebert hosted an annual event at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado, called Cinema Interruptus. It was spread out over four days. On day one, the audience would watch a movie together in the usual way. Over the next three consecutive days, they would meet again and do a thorough re-examination of that same movie, with Roger in charge of playback. Anyone who wanted to ask a question or make an observation about any aspect of the movie could yell, “Stop” and raise their hand, whereupon Roger would pause the movie and the viewer would have their say, sometimes sparking additional comments from other viewers, or even a full-blown discussion.
Cinema Interruptus fell dormant after Roger’s death, but Chicago-based film critic Josh Larsen revived it in 2017 and has been hosting it ever since. From 2017-2023, it was in Boulder. But last year, for the first time, Larsen brought Cinema Interruptus to Chicago, at the Siskel Film Center. It’s happening again at the Siskel August 11-14. This year’s movie is Robert Altman’s classic 1991 crime thriller/film industry satire “The Player.”
I spoke with Josh about the series as a whole, the different layers of the viewing experience, the various movies he has shown, and the idea that film criticism is something anyone can do with the right training, and that some people already do without realizing it.
How did you end up hosting Cinema Interruptus?
It was all thanks to Michael J Casey, a film critic for the Boulder Weekly who was also on the film committee for the Conference on World Affairs for many years, which is where Roger Ebert hosted it for decades and also participated in any other panels that the organizers asked him to do, which is something Roger was capable of doing because he was just so interesting and entertaining and smart. Michael had been on the committee in the years after Roger stopped doing Cinema Interruptus due to his illness, and then, after his death, Michael was on the committee that brought in critics from time to time to carry on the tradition. Michael knew me through my work on the Filmspotting podcast and extended the invitation. Chaz and I had chatted a bit over the years, and so when this opportunity arose, I ran it by her.
Were you familiar with Cinema Interruptus prior to this?
I had been following Cinema Interruptus from afar since I was in high school, reading Roger religiously. He would always share dispatches from each year’s experience. And I just thought “Someday, someday, I’ll get to go to that event somehow,” but I never managed to do it.
So the first time you hosted the event was also your first year going to the event? That’s wild.
I had always hoped to go as an attendee, not as the moderator, right? Michael was instrumental in helping me that first year. He was like, “Well, this is how it used to go,” but he was also very supportive in encouraging me to try some different things. There were people there in my first year who had been attending Cinema Interruptus with Roger, some of whom had been doing so since the 1970s. The idea was to serve the original, existing audience while also trying to attract new people.
What was the first movie you chose for Cinema Interruptus?
I wanted to show something that I knew intimately already and loved and that I knew would hold up to scrutiny. So we went with Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore.”
Oh, that’s a good choice!
As you know from his work, it’s tailor-made for this kind of event. And he’s probably my favorite working filmmaker. I also thought it might be interesting to go the comedy route. There’s a lot of pathos and more than just comedy going on in that film, but if you look at the movies that have been chosen over the years, there were a lot of classics that you could call “heavy lifting.”
Could you describe the event in more detail for those who are having a hard time imagining how it works?
Yes, I have fallen on the simplest phrase “four days of communal film criticism,” because what I’ve come to realize is that’s really what the moderator is there to do: to help folks who aren’t critics, but want to think about movies as a critic might, a chance to exercise those muscles. They bring their natural instincts for that to it, but they also learn a little bit about what to look for, how to notice it, how to talk about it, and how to put it in the context of the film in general, and a filmmaker’s career.
Do you still do the thing that Roger did, where anybody can call out “Stop!” and ask a question or make an observation?
That’s still the heart of it. That’s why it’s communal. We still watch the film in its entirety on the first day so that we can experience it as a movie, and then we come back the second day and start from the beginning. That’s where someone can yell “Stop!” within the first second if they want to.
Do people really do that?
Oh, yeah! Some years it happens. It’s usually someone who, for years, has been dying to say something about the title card or the opening shot. In other years, people are a little tentative, and I have to be the first one to say, “Stop!” and then I usually say, “Yeah, we’re really going to do this!”
Can you give us an example of something that might be said after an audience member yells “Stop”?
What’s fun is when it kind of becomes a group project, we latch on to something that maybe hasn’t ever been written or talked about before, but that we’ve become obsessed with. You remember the dog Pippet in “Jaws”?
Oh, yeah–his owner throws a toy into the water for him to fetch, then one time he doesn’t come back out, and that’s how you know the shark’s out there.
We got obsessed with tracking every time the dog appeared onscreen, and we asked, “Could there be reasons for that? What was the danger level for the poor dog?” That one sticks in my mind.
Another one that always sticks was when we showed “Mad Max: Fury Road.” I always conduct thorough research and come prepared to contribute as much as possible to the experience while still allowing space for others. A young woman attended the event who knew everything about Mad Max lore, from the films and also from any peripheral media that had been produced. Whether it was fanzines or fan fiction, she had read it all! She devoured it all. And so she became our Mad Max expert. If there was a question about the world-building that I didn’t have answers for, we’d go right to her, and it got to the point where people would yell “Stop!” and they wouldn’t ask me. They’d just go right to her with a question like, “Did that car ever show up anywhere else in the Mad Max universe?”
Can you give me an example of something that you’ve never noticed in a movie that you thought you knew very well, but that somebody else called to your attention for the first time at one of these events?
“Phantom Thread” was the movie we showed last year, and it happened to be the first one Cinema Interruptus showed here in Chicago, at the Gene Siskel Film Center last December. On first watch, somebody had noticed the paintings in the background of the family cottage, where Reynolds Woodcock goes to kind of recuperate and re-energize. We identified the paintings in the background of these scenes and talked about what they might reflect about his family, his character, his upbringing, and his art.
The “Phantom Thread” screening is a good example of a movie that’s good to show at an event like this. It’s got a lot going on in all the different aspects, like art direction, set design, and production design. These aren’t things that standard reviews necessarily spend a lot of time on, but people spend their careers thinking about these things for the movies they work on, right? Let’s take 10 minutes to discuss what makes for good production design and art design, or why a painting was chosen and what it might reveal about a character.
What is the most surprising thing that being the emcee of this event has taught you?
I would say I’m surprised by how many people can be good critics. You know, I think we like to think about a very particular passion and maybe even a skill set, and it is. But really, if you give anyone the space, time, and community to watch a movie closely, the inner film critic comes out. And by “critic,” I mean appreciator. It’s really about giving people the opportunity to exercise muscles that maybe they didn’t know they had.