October Books

King has been a steady fixture in pop culture for half a century, but enthusiasm for De Palma has waxed and waned. It’s on the rise again. Glenn Kenny’s The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface came out this summer, and in August, Sticking Place Books published De Palma on De Palma, a collection of conversations with Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud. Last month saw the release of Laurent Bouzereau’s The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens, an appreciation of seven films: Sisters (1972), Phantom of the Paradise (1974), Obsession (1976), Carrie, The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Blow Out (1981).

Bouzereau has been “putting together first-rate multimedia movie companions since the halcyon days of the laser disc format and has since branched out into feature documentaries,” noted Glenn Kenny at the Decider this summer in his review of Bouzereau’s latest feature, Faye, “a satisfying account of Dunaway’s career and a moving, not-infrequently surprising portrait of Dunaway the person.” Bouzereau’s first book, The De Palma Cut: The Film of America’s Most Controversial Director (1988), was also the first on the director to be published in English.

The De Palma Decade is “less a critical consideration or biography so much as, to borrow the title of the unnerving Frederick Exley novel, a fan’s notes,” finds Chris Vognar in the Los Angeles Times. There’s an excerpt up at IndieWire which is essentially an oral history of the casting of Carrie (1976), which was more or less conducted in tandem with the casting of George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977).

Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams’s Kubrick: An Odyssey is “a comprehensive Life,” writes David Bromwich in the London Review of Books. “It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair number of motifs are traced between one film and another, and between Kubrick’s experience and what went into his films.” And that’s about all Bromwich has to say about the book, though his essay runs long and deep with provocative readings of each of Kubrick’s features. “If Kubrick sometimes treated existence itself as a problem to be solved,” writes Bromwich, “integrity seems the right word for his willingness to be embarrassed by the result.”

Earlier this month, Variety critics put together an annotated list of the “100 Best Horror Movies of All Time” and put Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) at the top of it. American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, a collection edited by Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson, “encourages you not only to forge new thematic connections within one of Hooper’s works but also between them,” writes Budd Wilkins at Slant. “Hooper assuredly deserves the designation of ‘auteur,’ whatever that much embattled word may be worth these days, and these essays offer a convincing case for the filmmaker’s continuing importance to the horror genre and beyond.”

Kevin Stoehr and Cullen Gallagher’s King Vidor in Focus “traces Vidor’s artistic development and innovation from peak-silent era filmmaking to a discussion of later films made during the decline of the Golden Age of Hollywood,” writes William Blick for Film International. “The writing is informative, erudite, and comprehensive in several ways, with exhaustively precise details of Vidor’s career.”

IndieWire’s Bill Desowitz talks with Don Peri, a Disney historian, and Pete Docter, Pixar’s chief creative officer and the director of Up (2009), Inside Out (2015), and Soul (2020), about their new book, Directing at Disney: The Original Directors of Walt’s Animated Films. Their story begins with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and carries readers through the making of The Jungle Book (1967). Peri says that “not only did we get to bring to light some of these people that nobody knew about, but [we also got to] really to look at the process of how these movies got made.”

New York Times Book Review critic Alexandra Jacobs has been reading two books about writers having a generally miserable time out west: Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Sylvia Plath specialist Gail Crowther and They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir by New Yorker cartoonist and television writer Bruce Eric Kaplan. “In some ways these writers couldn’t be more different,” writes Jacobs, but “both are prone to gazing into the abyss. ‘I think this book is actually turning into my suicide note,’ Kaplan writes on Page 246. Like Parker’s poem ‘Résumé,’ though, They Went Another Way takes a hopeful turn.”

Having published the annotated screenplay for Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in 2019, Inventory Press follows up with a new volume on Us (2019). “The real prize here are the footnotes,” finds Film International’s Matthew Sorrento. “The distinctive voices in these mini-essays help avoid a continuous reference text style, and while some of the contributors use personal slants, they don’t cloud the objective goal of illustrating the film’s background.”

Roger Corman once said that the only film he ever lost money on was Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), starring Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. Jonathan Rosenbaum, though, considers the film to be Hellman’s “most underrated” and has written that “as a dark comedy and closet art movie, it delivers and lingers.” The Austin Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker gets a few words with Kier-La Janisse, whose new book, Cockfight: A Fable of Failure, is “as personal as it is academic: a mixture of rigorous research and earned insight.”

In Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy, Patricia Aufderheide tells the story of the Chicago-based nonprofit production company that’s overseen some of the most vital American nonfiction films made over the past sixty years. Filmmaker is running an excerpt recounting the making of Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994).

Featuring essays by Mamadou Diouf, Yasmina Price, and Zoé Samudzi as well as interviews with Samuel Fosso and Souleymane Cissé, Amy Sall’s The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power is “a dazzling compendium that brings photographic and cinematic practices from across the continent into long awaited dialogue,” writes Chrystel Oloukoï for Metrograph Journal. “The book honors a heterogeneous tapestry of visual approaches grounded in a common material context: the collective project of refusing, subverting, or bypassing altogether colonial ways of seeing.”

For Film International, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas talks with Robert Singer about his new book, Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice, which she calls “a radical and fundamentally joyous celebration of Naturalist cinema . . . Confidently weaving critical threads including film and literary studies and art history together with seamless precision, Singer likewise leaps back and forth in time, from cinema’s earliest days and beyond into novels, paintings, and so much more. And yet, Beyond Realism never loses sight of our current moment and issues surrounding contemporary discourse.”

A few fresh reviews of books previously featured in these monthly roundups call for shout-outs. In the Los Angeles Times, Stuart Miller talks with Pedro Almodóvar about The Last Dream, a collection of twelve previously unpublished short pieces. At 4Columns, Jeremy Lybarger finds that “the enfant terrible turns out to be a holy bore,” while in the Washington Post, June Thomas isn’t quite as harsh. “The Pedro Almodóvar who emerges from these black-and-white pages is a mediocre writer,” offers Thomas. “It is the heightened colors of the movie screen that reveal his undisputed genius.” Almodóvar plans to start shooting his next feature, Bitter Christmas, in Spain early next year.

With A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, Carrie Rickey “gives Varda the remembrance she deserves,” writes Conor Williams in the Los Angeles Review of Books. At e-flux, Brian Dillon finds himself longing “for more complexity and passion, for something more oblique but daring, like Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (2012) or Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (2023). A book, in other words, that would pay Varda the joyful and rigorous attention she paid to the world. One task for a sedulous and loving biography like Rickey’s is to prepare the ground for such adventures in the future.”

E-flux also has an excerpt from My Cinema, a collection of writing by Marguerite Duras translated by Daniella Shreir. “Notes sur India Song,” from 1975, begins with one of the most quoted and referenced passages in all of Duras’s work: “I make films to fill my time. If I had the strength to do nothing, I would do nothing. It is only because I haven’t the strength to do nothing that I make films. For no other reason. This is the truest thing I can say about my practice.”

The perception of Elaine May as “an outsize and uncompromising personality . . . has taken on a mythic stature,” writes Alex Kong in the Nation. “Replete with vivid anecdotes,” Carrie Courogen’s Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius “provides ample evidence to bolster that myth, as well as contributing to the effort to reframe its political significance. When May was still making films, she was derided for her intractability and then shut out of Hollywood; since then, the narrative has ricocheted in the opposite direction, celebrating her refusal to give in to the demands of a misogynistic industry.”

The Guardian is running not only two favorable reviews—from Abhrajyoti Chakraborty and Kathryn Hughes—but also a generous excerpt from Al Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy. “At its best,” writes Chris Stanton at Vulture, reading Sonny Boy “feels like pulling up a stool next to the actor as he unspools one anecdote after another.” In the New York Times, Caryn James notes that “the memoir barely mentions many of the most significant personal moments,” but for Chris Vognar in the Los Angeles Times, “the eccentricity of Sonny Boy is part of its charm.” At Air Mail, Bruce Handy highly recommends the audio version read by Pacino himself.

The latest essential roundup at Sabzian of new international publications—put together this time around by Ruben Demasure and Tillo Huygelen—features titles on Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, Larisa Shepitko, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jonas Mekas, and other filmmakers. At the Film Stage, Christopher Schobert has notes on Joseph Maddrey’s The Soul of Wes Craven and collections of interviews with Ken Russell, Alan J. Pakula, and Gaspar Noé.

In the New Yorker, Francis Ford Coppola discusses a handful of books that influenced Megalopolis, including Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber and Goethe’s Elective Affinities, “a great book. I wanted to make a film of it at one point. Will I? God knows what’s happening—I don’t even understand my life or why I’m still doing it.” And because it’s October, we wouldn’t want to let a list of personal recommendations from NYT Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz slip by. His four “creepy” favorites are not all directly related to cinema, but one of them is Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, which was adapted in 2018 by Alex Garland.

Temporal Territories: An Anthology on Indigenous Experimental Cinema, edited by COUSIN Collective (Sky Hopinka, Adam Khalil, Alexandra Lazarowich, and Adam Piron), will arrive on November 19: “With topics ranging from science fiction to found-footage filmmaking to the strange case of the DeMille Indians, the book surveys a varied and vital body of work, and suggests new forms still to come.”

Writers on Film host John Bleasdale talks with Adam Woodward about The Worlds of Wes Anderson: The Influences and Inspiration Behind the Iconic Films, which will be coming out this week. A Companion to Ingmar Bergman, a collection of thirty-two original essays edited by Daniel Humphrey and Hamish Ford, will be out in January, and Rob King’s Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger is slated for a release in March.