Fall Books

Oscilloscope’s Musings has posted an excerpt from Jason Bailey’s new book, It’s Okay With Me: Hollywood, the 1970s, and the Return of the Private Eye, in which he argues that the “racial politics are surprisingly middle-of-the-road” in Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971).

David Cairns recommends hunting down a copy of The Cleopatra Papers: A Private Correspondence by Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss, originally published in 1963, the year of the film’s release. “Basically,” Cairns explains, “two Twentieth Century Fox publicity men preserved and edited their correspondence accumulated during the production of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s epic gabfest, Cleopatra, and the result is a unique window into the life of that embattled studio and production. Along the way, the authors . . . get in pot-shots at the (other) turkeys on the Fox roster.” And that’s the true heart of Cairns’s amusing round of snippets from the book.

Interviews

For the past few years, scholar David Bordwell has been thinking and writing about a crucial decade for American movies, the 1940s. Talking to a former student, Henry Jenkins, who now teaches at the University of Southern California, Bordwell notes that in two of his previous books, The Classical Hollywood Cinema and The Way Hollywood Tells It, he was able to “build up a general picture of norms of storytelling and style.” But last year’s Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling allowed him to “dig more into the dynamic of how narrative strategies develop in a short time span.” In the second part of the interview, Bordwell notes that, toward the end of Reinventing, he’s “floated the idea that the much-vaunted ‘New Hollywood’ of the 1970s emerged out of conditions similar to those that nurtured the 1940s innovations.”

On an entirely different note, Dan Callahan, the author of books on acting, Barbara Stanwyck, and Vanessa Redgrave, now has a novel out. That Was Something centers on three young cinephiles in the Manhattan of the late 1990s. Kristin Iversen interviews Callahan for Nylon, and for Full Stop, Quinn Roberts asks him about a Susan Sontag cameo. She “actually stood behind me in line for a half hour out in the cold to see Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975) at the Museum of Modern Art in 2003,” says Callahan. “She kept falling into me and coughing on me and then apologizing, and it was truly one of the most erotic experiences of my life.”

Theory

For Richard Marshall in 3:AM Magazine, reading Stewart Home “can be a strange and electrifying experience, one tinged by the sense you’re reading works by a maniac writing towards the edge of an abyss that is more and more your own.” Home’s latest book, Re-Enter The Dragon. Genre Theory, Bruceploitation and the Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema, “is the first in-depth look at movies that riff on tropes associated with Bruce Lee and that sometimes transformed this actor into a mythical superman.”

Also in 3:AM Magazine, Ali Raz reviews the new revised edition of Nicholas Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age. “If film theory is dead—dead because outstripped by the pace of change and the particular forms of digital media—how do we revive it?” asks Raz. “The largest ambition of this book is to offer one possible solution, a solution it performs rather than states.”

Returning once again to Film International, John Duncan Talbird reviews Film as Philosophy, a collection edited by Bernd Herzogenrath. Talbird finds that all fifteen authors, “although they may have different approaches and support their shared thesis to a greater or lesser degree, really do seem to be collaborating on a book with a single argument, primarily that film is able to ‘do’ philosophy.”

Coming Soon

Those who read French can look forward to Post-éditions’ publication on November 21 of Textes critiques, the first complete collection of criticism that Jacques Rivette wrote between 1950 and 2009 for such magazines and journals as Gazette du cinéma, Arts, and Cahiers du cinéma. The volume will also include interviews and previously unpublished writings. For an English-language sampling of Rivette’s insights into the work of Rossellini, Lang, Melville, Hitchcock, and Bresson, among many others, see the interview Frédéric Bonnaud conducted with him in 1998; Kent Jones’s translation appeared in Senses of Cinema in 2001.

Next month also sees the publication of The Earth Dies Streaming, a collection of film writing for n+1, the Baffler, Bookforum, Harper’s, and other publications by the always perceptive and witty A. S. Hamrah.

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