March Books

Metrograph’s Journal is running an excerpt from Gary Indiana’s forthcoming collection Fire Season: Selected Essays, 1984–2021. Writing about Pasolini’s free adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 1785 novel The 120 Days of Sodom, Indiana suggests that it is “impossible to watch Salò without the troubled awareness that the same director who made it filmed The Gospel According to St. Matthew, and this awareness makes us doubly attentive to the film’s transgressive movements, from mania to murder.”

The Shining: A Visual and Cultural Haunting gathers interviews with Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd and contributions from performance artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, designer Margaret Howell, musician James Lavelle, and artist Gavin Turk to reexamine Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic “through the lenses of music, art, mythology, fashion, and gender,” as Film and Furniture explains. Edited by Craig Oldham, the unbound box of four hundred pages presented as a “writing project” by Jack Torrance will be out in July.

Having worked together on Adam Nayman’s books on Paul Thomas Anderson and Joel and Ethan Coen, Abrams Books and Little White Lies are teaming up for two more handsome volumes addressing the work of filmmakers with substantial and dedicated followings. Hannah Strong’s Sofia Coppola: Forever Young will be out in May, and Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema, written by Karen Han, a contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Slate, will be out in November. That same month will see the first release in the U.S. of Shuna’s Journey, a graphic novel by Hayao Miyazaki published in Japan in 1983.

Scheduled for a June release, The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinema Years, 1962–1981 gathers Christine Pichini’s new translations of Serge Daney’s contributions to the paradigmatic French journal that he edited from 1973 until he left to become a full-time critic for Libération. “It’s about time English-language readers had access to the full range of Daney’s thought and his unparalleled work on the cinema,” writes A. S. Hamrah in the foreword.

Jacques Ledoux, the first curator at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium and the founder of the Cinema Museum in Brussels, “did not have the celebrity status of Henri Langlois,” notes David Bordwell. “Quietly and modestly, he went about the task of building one of the great film libraries and launching traditions that outlived him. He was at the center of Belgian film culture, which was as cosmopolitan as any you would find in bigger European or American cities.” The multilingual book Jacques Ledoux gathers tributes as well as Ledoux’s correspondences with such filmmakers as Jean Cocteau and Chantal Akerman.

With Tell It to the Stones: Encounters with the Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, editors Annett Busch and Tobias Hering have put together a book “that on the one hand shows why the intransigent art of Straub/Huillet is often deemed inaccessible, difficult, and even impenetrable,” writes Christophe Huber in Cineaste, “but on the other hand manages to explicate beautifully why not only the two filmmakers themselves see it as open, inviting, and even popular, I guess. The result offers a springboard for newcomers, but also insights for longtime followers of Straubiana, and not only the self-declared ‘Straubians.’”

In an excerpt from Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press—at the Hollywood Reporter, no less—Eric Hoyt explains how the Great Depression led to the formations of the Screen Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild. “All of these groups read the local trade papers closely, looking for voices in the press to affirm their perspectives and call out the greed of their opponents,” writes Hoyt.

Introducing his conversation with Ross Melnick about his new book, Hollywood's Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World, Film Quarterly contributing editor Bruno Guaraná notes that “Hollywood’s soft-power diplomacy, with its clear and effective ideological, political, and cultural functions, would prove particularly valuable to U.S. efforts against Nazism and communism during the twentieth century. As Melnick playfully summarizes, Hollywood actively ‘sought to vertically integrate the mind of the global moviegoer, to watch American films in an American cinema in a distinctly American way and context.’”

The Essential Directors: The Art and Impact of Cinema's Most Influential Filmmakers is one of the many titles Christopher Schobert recommends in his latest roundup for the Film Stage. Author Sloan De Forest is “adept at zeroing in on the key works and styles of filmmakers from Chaplin to Spielberg while also providing useful contextual evidence for their importance,” he writes.

Revisiting Doris Day: Her Own Story, the 1976 autobiography cowritten with A. E. Hotchner, and David Kaufman’s “detailed and rather cold-eyed” Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door (2008) for her latest Old Hollywood Book Club column in Vanity Fair, Hadley Hall Meares prepares us for the story she’s about to recount: “‘I’m not the all-American virgin queen,’ Day told Hotchner in their first conversation. ‘The image I’ve got . . . it’s not me, not at all who I am. It has nothing to do with the life I’ve had.’”

Stephen Galloway’s Truly, Madly: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century is “a contribution to the LarViv literature that is—if not strictly essential—coherent, well-rounded and entertaining,” writes Alexandra Jacobs in the New York Times. “To the couple’s tale of passion he adds compassion, along with the requisite lashings of gossip.”

In a generous excerpt from When Women Invented Television at RogerEbert.com, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong details the rise of Betty White as a quick-witted performer who thrived on improvisation. “That charisma of hers alchemized into a superpower in 1949 as television came into its own,” she writes.

Joseph McBride has written nearly two dozen books, including biographies of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg. John Bleasdale talks with him about his latest, The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers, and Bright Lights Film Journal is running an excerpt. “Their most identifiable trait—and most marketable as well as most controversial—is their audacious blurring of the thin lines between comedy and violence,” writes McBride. “Like Welles and Kubrick, the brothers have many idiosyncrasies of style and obsessive themes that audiences and reviewers have come to recognize, but the unique mélange of styles and subject matter that characterizes their work resists easy definition.”

McBride’s previous book, Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge, came out last October, and we’ve been mentioning it in nearly every books roundup since—usually alongside Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna, a collection of Wilder’s journalism translated by Shelley Frisch and edited by Noah Isenberg. Writing for Bookforum, A. S. Hamrah recommends both as well as Jonathan Coe’s novel Mr Wilder and Me, whose storyline is framed by the making of Wilder’s Fedora (1978). “One of the best movie-set novels,” writes Hamrah, “it sticks closely to the facts but turns them into an elegant, melancholy reflection on Wilder’s escape from Germany, his return to Berlin, and the troubled production of his late-career film maudit. All three books are excellent reminders of a German complaint published in the Berliner Zeitung when Wilder’s breakneck Cold War spoof One, Two, Three came out in 1961, right before the construction of the Berlin Wall: ‘What breaks our heart, Billy Wilder finds funny.’”

Two more books brought up more than a few times here, often together, are James Curtis’s Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life and Dana Stevens’s Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. “If you want a sense of passionate attachment to Buster Keaton—either as one of the great comic filmmakers of all time, or as a loyal and likable man in an industry famed for those who lack both qualities—that’s Dana Stevens,” writes Farran Smith Nehme in the Wall Street Journal. “But her book isn’t designed to provide the authoritative perspective offered by Mr. Curtis. As a lifelong lover of Buster Keaton and his films, I regret to state that you need them both.” For more, note that Keith Phipps (The Reveal) and Anne Thompson (IndieWire) interview Stevens.

Isaac Butler has been talking to John Bleasdale and LARB Radio Hour hosts Kate Wolf and Eric Newman about his new book, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. “As an author,” writes Natalie Walker in Bookforum, “Butler accomplishes what the Method’s devotees sought to do in their performances, bringing color and dimension to figures who might have been boxed into archetypal roles (omniscient godhead or exploitative charlatan) and presenting them to us in all their brilliant, infuriating complexity. The scope of the book is sweeping, the figures entering and exiting the narrative often larger-than-life, but each quote and anecdote Butler chooses to include draws them close enough to touch.”

Kyle Buchanan’s oral history Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road “offers a candid, sometimes contradictory, always compelling examination of the most unlikely big-budget cinematic triumph since Titanic,” writes Chris Klimek in the Washington Post. You can read excerpts addressing the animosity between Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy (Vanity Fair), the contributions to the female characterizations from playwright and activist Eve Ensler (The Vagina Monologues) (Literary Hub), and the challenges of shooting in the desert (Guardian). “The biggest anxiety by far was safety,” says director George Miller. “One hundred and thirty-eight days, big stunt days every day, and I was thinking: what do we have to do today not to kill anybody?”