April Books

Ethan Warren, the author of The Cinema of Paul Thomas Anderson: American Apocrypha, has teamed up with Blake Howard and his One Heat Minute Productions to launch Pod Thomas Anderson, a nine-part miniseries in which Warren and a panel of critics will talk their way through the oeuvre. Warren has also been discussing PTA with John Bleasdale; Jim Laczkowski, host of the Director’s Club; and Daniel Moran on the New Books Network. In an excerpt from the book at CrimeReads, Warren writes that with Inherent Vice (2014), the adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel, “Anderson makes his most intricate and effective attempt at a goal that has spanned virtually his entire career: engaging viewers in the act of receiving his stories by alienating them from the typically passive experience of viewing a mainstream narrative film.”

A little over a week ago, we took a look at the first round of critical response to Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors, a string of 450 numbered passages plus an overture and three appendices that reminds John Douglas Millar, who reviews the new book for frieze, of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1940), “an attempt to write theory as quotation.” Penman, who launched his career in the late 1970s as a music critic, implicitly asks if what his generation “took to be radicalism was all too easily amenable to co-option by capital, and whether they knew it all along. The answer seems to be affirmative, yet there is a kernel of resistance here, at the level of style. Penman affirms his attachment to Fassbinder formally, because this is an excessive book.” The Telegraph’s Tim Robey wonders whether Penman’s “flurries of quick-fire erudition add up to a dazzling kaleidoscope overall, or a labyrinth of aborted pathways? The answer is ‘both.’”

February’s books roundup opened with a glance at early reviews of Stuart Klawans’s Crooked, but Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges, a book that Rachel Syme, writing for the New Yorker, appreciates—though she does have one quibble. “If Klawans stumbles, it’s because, for all his trenchant analysis, he veers too often into deep-dish territory,” she writes. Klawans’s “readings aren’t wrong, but they favor the message over the fun.” In the London Review of Books, David Trotter is far more concerned with the films than with the book, but he does suggest that the “complication Klawans has mined to greatest effect is the sense of foreboding that lies just below the surface even of films as jocular as The Lady Eve.”

French journalist Vanessa Schneider’s memoir My Cousin Maria Schneider, newly translated by Molly Ringwald, is written in the second person as a book-length letter “with a rare sense of intimacy and devotion,” finds Thessaly La Force in the New York Times. “It warmly captures the highlights of Maria Schneider’s life: her enduring friendships with Brigitte Bardot and Nan Goldin, her pride in starring in films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, and her later advocacy for women in film.”

The New Yorker is running an excerpt that focuses on the most notorious event in Maria Schneider’s life. She was nineteen when Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci ambushed her on the set of Last Tango in Paris (1972). Without telling her ahead of time, and with cameras rolling, Brando swiped a wad of butter and went at her. It was a simulated rape. “You don’t understand that you could’ve prevented this scene from appearing in the film, since it wasn’t in the script that you had agreed to,” writes Vanessa Schneider. “You could’ve called a lawyer, filed suit against the producers, and made Bertolucci cut it, but you’re young, alone, and poorly counseled. You know nothing yet about the rules and regulations of the film world. The perfect victim.”

Sam Shepard wrote nearly sixty plays as well as several collections of short stories and essays, won the Pulitzer and ten Obies, and was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983). “To organize Shepard’s sprawling creative life and to connect the art to his own tormented emotional struggle for authenticity, a biographer needs to impose some kind of overriding narrative vision on the work and on the psychology of the man,” writes John Lahr for Air Mail. “Robert Greenfield’s True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times doesn’t have the candlepower to do the job.” New York Times critic Dwight Garner, too, finds that the book “lacks a certain density, and a critical sensibility, but it’s well organized and cleanly written. It neatly covers the bases.”

Honey, Baby, Mine: A Mother and Daughter Talk Life, Death, Love (and Banana Pudding) is a joint memoir by Laura Dern and her mother, Diane Ladd. “If you’re in it for the stargazing, you’ll be rewarded with plenty,” writes Mary Laura Philpott in the New York Times, “but that’s not what lingers most after the telling. As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges.”

Nancy Olson Livingston will turn ninety-five in July, and at IndieWire, Michael Rogge finds her to be a lively interviewee. They talk about her memoir, A Front Row Seat: An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood and the Age of Glamour; shaking off Howard Hughes; Billy Wilder’s insistence that she play a script reader in Sunset Boulevard (1950)—her performance earned her an Oscar nomination—and about why, even as she took on the odd role here and there, she decided not to pursue full-blown movie stardom.

Shelley Winters pursued it, achieved it, and wrote about it in two memoirs, Shelley: Also Known as Shirley (1980) and Shelley II: The Middle of My Century (1989). Vanity Fair’s Hadley Hall Meares notes that, taken together, they weigh in at “a jaw-dropping 1000+ pages. But every page feels well-earned, jam-packed with love affairs, feuds, friendships, and more than one nervous breakdown.”

In 2009, Liv Ullmann directed Joel Edgerton and Cate Blanchett in a Sydney Theatre Company production of A Streetcar Named Desire that then traveled on to London, Washington, D.C., and New York. Literary Hub is running an excerpt from Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation in which Nancy Schoenberger notes that Blanchett once “described Streetcar as ‘a gift of a play,’ and she felt that taking on the role of Blanche DuBois was inevitable—a project that somehow chose her. Indeed, she would end up playing the role twice—once in Streetcar, and a second time as a character based on Blanche DuBois in Woody Allen’s 2013 masterpiece Blue Jasmine.”

Reviewing the “witty and illuminating” Juliet: The Life and Afterlives of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine for Literary Review, Kirsten Tambling writes that Sophie Duncan “explores how Juliet has been conceived, reworked, and reimagined in Western culture from her first appearance in the sixteenth century to the present day. There are chapters on nineteenth-century bardolatry and twentieth- and twenty-first-century journalism, as well as discussions of the major cinematic adaptations: George Cukor’s for MGM in 1936 (a ruinous flop starring Norma Shearer and Lesley Howard), Franco Zeffirelli’s in 1968, and Baz Luhrmann’s, with its frenetic kitsch, in 1996.”

John Talbird reviews Cortland Rankin’s Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York for Film International. “Covering roughly the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, Rankin seems to be going for a universal theory of the city’s cinematic production from a time period that, depending on your point of view, is either the nadir or zenith of New York City,” he writes. “For a book of barely over 200 pages, there are a lot of films here . . . I would have liked to see a book focusing on just one of the subtopics raised in one of these chapters in a more in-depth fashion. Either that or a book five times as long.”

In the new Film Quarterly, Bruno Guaraná interviews Hunter Hargraves, the author of Uncomfortable Television. “What has led postmillennial television to embrace discomfort as a desirable affect?” he asks. “Well,” Hargraves replies, “I think it took its cues from neoliberalism, which demands a certain degree of precarity, anxiety, and perversity in our daily lives.”

The Lodz Film School has announced that the dean of its Film/TV Directing Department, Piotr Mikucki, has edited Mise-en-scène: Fourteen Case Studies of Classic Film Practice, a forthcoming book by Rob Tregenza, the writer, director, and cinematographer recently fêted at MoMA.

Having opened this month’s roundup with a new podcast, let’s wrap with a few more. In recent episodes of Writers on Film, John Bleasdale talks movies and books with critics Adrian Martin and Matt Zoller Seitz, and the New Books Network has posted conversations about Italian political cinema, the British video boom of the 1980s, and the making of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967).