August Books

Despite a cast led by Michel Piccoli and Catherine Deneuve, Les créatures (1966) remains one of Varda’s least seen and appreciated films. “In its vision of male-female relations,” writes Max Nelson for Reverse Shot, “it comes off as a grotesque embellishment of the French science-fiction movies it followed and a warning to the ones it preceded.”

Rickey’s book “reveals that the coalescence of Varda’s art and life was even more thoroughgoing than is apparent from the films themselves,” writes Richard Brody in the New Yorker. “The story that Rickey tells imparts a retrospective sense of destiny—a vision of a career that ran long enough, and changed enough along the way, as to cast the entire scope of Varda’s lifelong activity in a cinematic light.”

In an excerpt at RogerEbert.com, Rickey traces the making of Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte (1955), from its inception through the long process of Varda winning over Alain Resnais as an editor to the early screenings that drew Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute and were followed by discussions whose participants included François Truffaut and Chris Marker. In the mid-1950s, the men Varda referred to as the “Cahiers boys” “dreamed of becoming directors,” writes Rickey. “Varda just did it.”

Between the screenings of the two films in New York, Rickey will be joined by fellow critic Molly Haskell for a conversation about this remarkable artist, photographer, and filmmaker. At Air Mail, Rickey notes that when she was writing her Varda biography, “a significant number of filmmakers told me how she had inspired them. ‘I felt that [she] gave me permission to look and the power to tell the subject what to do,’ said the Oscar-nominated director Agnieszka Holland. For a nineteen-year-old Martin Scorsese, Cléo from 5 to 7 ‘[made me feel] that I was seeing the world and experiencing time from a woman’s point of view for the first time in movies.’”

“Rickey’s crisp and swiftly moving book has 224 pages of text,” notes Dwight Garner in the New York Times. “More biographies should be this size . . . I devoured A Complicated Passion happily and so, I suspect, will you. It sent me rushing to the Criterion Channel to rewatch Varda’s movies.”

We’ve already mentioned Chris Marker, who became one of Varda’s close friends and occasional collaborators, and we’ve been mentioning him so often in these monthly books roundups lately because one fresh and notable new title has been following another all year long. Early Film Writings, translated by Sally Shafto and edited by Steven Ungar, and Eternal Current Events, a collection of pieces written for the magazine Esprit from 1946 to 1952 and translated by Jackson B. Smith, “are nicely complementary books, with the former limiting itself to film-related articles while the latter sweeps up a splendid miscellany,” writes Max Goldberg for Film Comment.

The “superlative new edition” of Le Dépays “resurfaces a 1982 photobook that originated as a companion piece to Sans Soleil (1983), and which Marker himself saw fit to translate into English,” adds Goldberg. “If, pace Ungar, Marker the writer remains too little known, then what of Marker the book designer? Take a look at his dynamic designs for the Petite planète travel series, or the two volumes of Commentaires (collections of the texts he wrote for his early films)—which are said to have inspired Richard Hollis’s design for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972)—and it becomes clear that Marker’s ‘writing’ is as much a matter of layout as prose.”

Phillip Lopate has written essays for around twenty of our releases over the years. One of them is Lino Brocka’s “one unassailably compelling masterwork,” Insiang (1976). “A small film in some respects,” he wrote in 2017, “it is also an uncanny, resonant blend of neorealism and melodrama.” Four years earlier, Lopate wrote: “At bottom, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie [1976] is a character study of its grinning, self-estranged protagonist, Cosmo, a small-time, rough-around-the-edges businessman trying to maintain an invented persona of Mr. Lucky suavity and charm.” John Cassavetes “clearly believed the self to be a constant bluff, a desperate improvisation launched in heavy fog.”

Lopate has selected both films to screen at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday, and between shows, he’ll be signing copies of his new book, My Affair with Art House Cinema. “For Lopate, revisiting and reevaluating films, and understanding how their meaning changes as you evolve and, well, grow older, is vital and essential,” writes David Schwartz. “As a writer, Lopate is at once supremely (and deservedly) confident in his aesthetics, and also disarmingly vulnerable and thoughtful enough to always doubt and question himself.”

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader gathers previously uncollected writing on literature, music, and of course, cinema. Rosenbaum has been discussing the book, his long and illustrious career, and the overall state of things in all three fields with the editors of Film Comment and Othon Cinema, and last month in Los Angeles, with Jordan Cronk.

Introducing his interview with Rosenbaum for Reverse Shot, Cronk notes that “what’s so striking about the book is just how pervasively Rosenbaum has juxtaposed and mixed comparisons between all three practices throughout his career. In a 1973 review of Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, he describes the musicality of Thomas Pynchon’s prose (‘with cadenzas like jazz solos based on chord changes by Dickens, a grand rhythmic sweep worthy of Faulkner in his prime’) in a manner not unlike his later characterization of Geraldine Chaplin’s performance in Alan Rudolph’s 1979 Remember My Name (‘a virtuoso “solo” that swirls through diverse possibilities while hitting all the octaves’). It’s an open and exploratory approach that sheds new light on all sorts of unexpected subjects: Richard Pryor, Graham Greene, Sonny Rollins, Roland Barthes, Leo McCarey, Norman Mailer, Charles Mingus, John Waters, Radu Jude, Michael Snow—even Peanuts and MAD, both of which the author frames in auteurist terms.”

For the New Republic, Jane Hu writes about periodically revisiting Stanley Cavell’s 1981 collection of academic articles, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. “Cavell’s prose can be impossibly irritating,” writes Hu, and his readings of seven classic screwball comedies “are ones that I find I both sometimes can’t stand, and also know I can no longer do without . . . As a work of scholarship, Pursuits of Happiness would never pass peer review today. Though I’d like to make a case that its outrageousness, to use Cavell’s word, is exactly why we might learn to treasure it anew.”

For Nirris Nagendrarajah, Tale of Cinema (2005) is not one of Hong Sangsoo’s best films, and so he wonders why Dennis Lim chose it as a way into the oeuvre in his 2022 book, Tale of Cinema. Writing for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Nagendrarajah finds that Lim “makes a case for it by identifying the elements that mark a distinctive transformation in Hong’s approach to cinema: ‘It was Hong’s first self-produced film. It introduces two devices previously absent in his work: the zoom and the voiceover, both of which he has continued to deploy, often in counterintuitive ways. It is his last film with an explicit sex scene, and as such, a window into his evolving attitudes toward gender relations.’ Self-financing; the zoom; narration; sex, death and hotels; gender relations; these are the subjects that Lim expands upon across the book’s pithy chapters.”

Critic and programmer Geoff Andrew has recently caught up with Godfrey Cheshire’s In the Time of Kiarostami: Writings on Iranian Cinema, a collection of writing on Dariush Mehrjui, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf, Bahman Ghobadi, Jafar Panahi, Asghar Farhadi, Mohammad Rasoulof, and of course, Abbas Kiarostami. “Since I too was privileged to get to know Kiarostami a little during the last sixteen years of his life,” writes Andrew, “I can confirm that Cheshire’s account of Kiarostami the human being seems to me as perceptive and unsentimentally appreciative as his grasp of Iranian culture is illuminating.”

Kalton C. Lahue’s Bound and Gagged “may sound like the kind of porno mag you’d find torn up in a wood,” writes David Cairns, “but it is in fact an extremely well-researched tome on a lost continent of cinema, the American silent serial. Lahue ignores Feuillade and the rest of the world—but this is good, [because] it allows him to concentrate on those filmmakers within easy reach and still somewhat alive in 1968. He’s gleaned lots of tidbits from their anecdotage, some fairly gruesome.” Cairns has also recently “very much enjoyed” Tom Gunning’s D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, a book that’s raised a few questions in his mind about Griffith’s use of close-ups.

The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter talks with Keanu Reeves and China Miéville about The Book of Elsewhere, the novel they have cowritten that springs from the world of BRZRKR, the comic book series Reeves cocreated with writer Matt Kindt and artist Ron Garney. To call Elsewhere “a weird book doesn’t begin to capture its genre-defying, protean strangeness,” writes Alter. “It centers on Reeves’s 80,000-year-old warrior—called Unute or sometimes B—who is freakishly strong, able to rip people’s arms off and punch through their chests, but has grown weary of his deathless state. It’s a pulpy, adrenaline-fueled thriller, but it’s also a moody, experimental novel about mortality, the slippery nature of time and what it means to be human.”

Twenty-one-year-old Vera arrives in 1950s Hollywood from Mexico to take on the lead role in a beatnik retelling of a biblical myth in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s tenth novel, The Seventh Veil of Salome. “Books that skew more cinematic than conventionally literary are often dismissed as formulaic,” writes Lauren LeBlanc in the NYT, “but in Moreno-Garcia’s skillful hands, you’ll find the satisfaction of richly drawn characters, saturated settings, and deftly constructed plot twists. Inhaling her backlist has been the unexpected delight of my summer. No matter the genre—gothic, horror, noir—she’ll embody its essence with a verve all her own.”

A24’s new book How Directors Dress “digs deeply into the phenomenon of the director as moodboard inspo,” writes Dave Schilling in the Los Angeles Times. “The book features essays from luminaries like the Washington Post style critic Rachel Tashjian, Puck’s fashion reporter Lauren Sherman on topics like louche dressing, Jean-Luc Godard, and the idea of director style as, first and foremost, workwear.” Schilling reaches out to Hagop Kourounian, an editorial consultant on the book who launched @directorfits three years ago and now has more than 71,000 followers.

Taschen’s LIFE. Hollywood is a two-volume, 708-page honker of a coffee-table book featuring hundreds of images from the heyday of the legendary weekly. Variety offers a sneak peek at twenty-two of them, including shots of Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Robert Mitchum, and Judy Garland bouncing baby Liza Minnelli on her knee. The Guardian, in the meantime, offers a taste of 1001 Movie Posters: Designs of the Times, a collection edited by Tony Nourmand that will be out on September 3.

Speaking of Liza Minnelli, the Hollywood Reporter’s Etan Vlessing passes along a recent announcement: “‘Tell it when I’m gone!’ was my philosophy. So, why did I change my mind? A sabotaged appearance at the Oscars, in front of billions of people . . . a film with twisted half-truths . . . a recent miniseries that just didn’t get it right. All made by people who didn’t know my family and don’t really know me. Finally, I was mad as hell! Over dinner one night, I decided, it’s my own damn story . . . I’m gonna share it with you because of all the love you’ve given me.” Minnelli’s memoir will be out in the spring of 2026.

Rolling Stone’s David Fear is currently working on a biography of Paul Thomas Anderson, and ReFocus: The Films of Abel Ferrara, a collection edited by Florian Zappe, will be out in December. For further notes on recently published titles, see the latest roundups from Leonard Maltin, and at the Film Stage, Christopher Schobert.