July Books

In October, NYRB Classics will release new translations of Pasolini’s first and third novels. Boys Alive (1955) chases young petty criminals through the borgate romane, the slums of Rome that provided the settings of Accattone and Mamma Roma (1962). Theorem (1968), blending prose and poetry, retells the story of Teorema (1968), in which Terence Stamp plays an enigmatic stranger who seduces each and every member of a prosperous Milanese family.

The Paris Review is running an excerpt from Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, a selection of catalogue essays, exhibition reviews, and public lectures that Verso will release on August 1. “Caravaggio invented an entire world to place in front of his studio’s easel” and “replaced the universal, platonic light of the Renaissance with a quotidian and dramatic one,” wrote Pasolini, most likely in 1974, the year before he was murdered. “The third thing that Caravaggio invented is a membrane that separates both him (the author) and us (the audience) from his characters, still lifes, and landscapes. This membrane, too, is made of light, but of an artificial light proper solely to painting, not to reality—a membrane that transposes the things that Caravaggio painted into a separate universe.”

Chris Marker, too, was a writer both before and after he started making films. He traveled the world as a journalist and photographer and sent in frequent contributions to the French literary journal Esprit from 1946 to 1952, the year he made his first feature, Olympia 52. In October, Inpatient Press will release Eternal Current Events, a collection of these short and frisky pieces translated by Jackson B. Smith, who introduces a handful of them in the Baffler.

The weeks since the last roundup on new and noteworthy books have brought news of further promising titles. Violet Lucca is currently working on Clinical Trials: The Films of David Cronenberg, which will be out in the fall of 2024, and Glenn Kenny is putting the final touches on The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, which should be out next May.

Anthem Press has just released On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular: Figurative Invention in Cinema, a collection of essays written in the 1990s by the scholar and curator Nicole Brenez and freshly translated by Ted Fendt. Jonathan Rosenbaum calls the book “the most valuable volume by a French cinephile in English to have appeared since the translations of André Bazin and Serge Daney—a book that I believe filmgoers will still be learning from half a century from now.”

Dark Days: Fugitive Essays, a collection from Roger Reeves, will be released in a couple of weeks, and the Paris Review has an excerpt in which the poet writes about William Selig’s Something Good (1898), a short that runs just half a minute and captures the first on-screen kiss between a Black man and woman. “This kiss,” writes Reeves, “this something good, could not be killed, punished, burned, Jim Crowed, couped, circumvented, forced to sit in the balcony, hung from a telephone pole, hung from a bridge because it whistled at a White woman, hung from a tree in the middle of a town square for demanding wages earned for working in some White man’s field. This kiss was without tradition, and therefore inaugurates tradition.”

Editor Richard Skinner has gathered contributions from poets, novelists, and academics to put together The Hinge of a Metaphor: A Collection of Essays on Cinema, and the Guardian has posted selections from publisher Patrick Fry’s latest project, Moving Pictures Painted: 200 Posters from the Golden Age of Egyptian Cinema.Pamela Hutchinson recommends Bryony Dixon’s The Story of Victorian Film, “an absolute delight” coming out on September 7. “It was as early as the Victorian era that British filmmakers learned how to introduce narrative continuity, special effects, and suspense into their short films,” writes Hutchinson. “One is tempted to think that progress has been much slower in the decades since.”

Against all odds, periodicals in print are still going strong. A. S. Hamrah reviews new books on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sofia Coppola, and Michael Cimino in the inaugural issue of the Whitney Review of New Writing. And the team behind the late and lamented Bookforum has partnered with the Nation to revive the magazine. The Summer 2023 issue should be out next month.

Writing for the New Yorker, Lauren Michele Jackson takes measure of the lasting impact of Laura Mulvey’s 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and suggests that our current use of a key concept has gotten out of hand. “Contrary to Mulvey’s approach,” writes Jackson, “uses of the ‘gaze’ today—be it the male gaze, the white gaze, the straight gaze, and so forth—seem more invested in matters of identity than in the project of aesthetic analysis. They want to name who is doing the looking rather than how. What too often gets elided from current gaze talk is the possibility of looking as an act of ambivalence.”

In the 1970s and early ’80s, Mulvey and her partner, Peter Wollen, the author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), made six films together, and now, Oliver Fuke has edited the collection The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Scripts, Working Documents, Interpretation. “There is something strange about seeing these polyvocal, image-dense films on the printed page,” writes Anna Shechtman in the New York Review of Books. These “are not ‘film-texts’ so much as companion texts. As companions, they’re worth having. The new essays are particularly useful guides through films that demand the viewer’s close attention to produce meaning.”

Film International has posted an excerpt from the introduction to Christian Petzold: Interviews. “A voracious explorer of film history since his youth in the small West German town of Haan, Petzold seemingly cannot not refer to Hitchcock for more than a few interviews at a time,” write editors Marco Abel, Aylin Bademsoy, and Jaimey Fisher. “Petzold’s penchant of talking through other films about his own—a habit we witness in virtually all interviews included in our volume—can be understood as a proof of his conviction that it is impossible for him to make films in an unmediated fashion.”

In his final film, Blue (1993), Derek Jarman presents a single shade of a single color while he and three collaborators—Tilda Swinton, John Quentin, and Nigel Terry—weave tales, talk politics, and reflect on the filmmaker’s impending death. David Zwirner Books has now published the script with a new introduction by Michael Charlesworth. “In 2023, Blue (as a film and a book) presents a suspension rather than a moment or happening,” writes Nick Bennett in the Brooklyn Rail. Blue is “now more like an endless performance . . . that one can step into at any moment.”

In an excerpt from Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood's Greatest Love Affair up at Literary Hub,William J. Mann writes that Lauren Bacall’s “candor about some things—[Humphrey Bogart’s] last illness, for one—seemed to make her a reliable narrator and distracted readers from the things she had skipped over—such as Bogie’s affair with his hairdresser and the extent of his alcoholism. Bacall’s crafting of the legend was always more about omission than invention. By the time she died in 2014, the mythology of Bogie and his Baby was solidly in place, and it was pretty much of her own design.”

In her 1991 memoir, Moving Pictures, Ali MacGraw “recounts her life story—which has included romances with Robert Evans, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Peter Weller—with taste, refinement, humor, graciousness, and a dose of new-age introspection,” finds Vanity Fair’s Hadley Hall Meares. “It is the autobiography of someone who lived a dream life, but found herself lost in the glamour she craved.”

In 1956, Lorenza Mazzetti and Lindsay Anderson drew up the first Free Cinema manifesto that would be cosigned by Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson. Born in Florence, Mazzetti and her younger sister were raised on a Tuscan farm by her aunt and uncle, Cesarina and Robert Einstein (cousin of Albert). After making her first films in London—including Together (1956), which was recognized with a Special Mention in Cannes—Mazzetti returned to Italy and wrote her first novel, The Sky Is Falling (1962), which Another Gaze Editions has published in a new translation by Livia Franchini.

The novel, drawing on Mazzetti’s memories of growing up in fascist Italy during the Second World War, was first published in Italy by Attilio Bertolucci (Bernardo’s father); Fellini was an admiring reader. In 2000, brothers Andrea and Antonio Frazzi directed an adaptation written by Suso Cecchi D’Amico and starring Isabella Rossellini. “Over nearly seven decades of writing, shooting, painting, and playing,” writes Ian Wang in his piece on The Sky Is Falling for the Baffler, “the canny, protean artist maintained an implacable puckish smirk; she was unceasingly loyal to the ludic, recalcitrant outlook of her childhood self and thumbed her nose at the indulgences of the bourgeois adult world.”

Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ninth novel, Silver Nitrate, is “a horror mystery set in the decaying film industry of 1990s Mexico City about friends whose attempt to break a decades-old curse unleashes something even more terrifying,” writes Miguel Salazar in the New York Times. “Like our protagonists, searching for clues to ward off Nazi spirits and curses, the pages flow ‘directionless, yet confident in their steps.’”

As Kerri Maher explains in the Washington Post, Karin Tanabe’s The Sunset Crowd is essentially a retelling of The Great Gatsby set in late-1970s Hollywood. “Although readers familiar with the Fitzgerald classic will see the end coming, Tanabe pulls off the magic trick perfected by the best historical novelists,” writes Maher. “She crafts a suspenseful page-turner even for readers intimately familiar with the events.”

For many, many more notes on new titles, see Ruben Demasure’s roundup for Sabzian and Christopher Schobert’s latest for the Film Stage. And for anyone looking to go shopping in New York on the evening of Monday, July 31, Light Industry will be hosting “a one-night-only sale of some truly excellent film books: over 500 volumes, covering the entire history of cinema, from camera obscuras to video games, all priced to move.”