May Books

Next Tuesday, Light Industry will celebrate the publication of Immemory: Gutenberg Version, the realization of a project Chris Marker had begun working on with the publishing house Exact Change before he passed away in 2012. Immemory (1997), which Marker called a “guided tour” of a memory, was first produced as a CD-ROM and then migrated to the web, but Marker saw right off that both of these versions would soon be rendered obsolete. Edited by Isabel Ochoa Gold, the book will be available at a reception where guests can also explore Immemory’s digital past lives.

From June 20 through 24, J. Hoberman will be at Anthology Film Archives to present seven programs of films in a series he’s curated to mark the publication of his new book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. “The snake of a title promises a lot to chew on—and the book delivers,” writes Carlos Valladares for Art in America.

Hoberman “charts the unconscious of the shuttered East Village Other and the Village Voice,” writes Valladares, “of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitables and Jerry Schatzberg’s legendary loft parties, of a propulsive youth-led hope that one could conceivably escape the U.S. Cold War situation, of cold-water apartments and splinter-filled SoHo floors before dreary gentrification, of late nights at the Bleecker, of Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films, and of the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. I, at twenty-eight, have never personally experienced any of that, but the cinematic-novelistic glory of Hoberman’s historical writing evokes them so convincingly as to let me feel as if I had.”

Geoff Brown’s Silent to Sound: British Cinema in Transition is “a grand book with multiple themes,” writes Luke McKernan. “Indeed, at times it feels like you are reading a novel, perhaps of the J. B. Priestley school, in which multiple characters weave in and out of our story, while the novelist brings in matters of industry, economics, social change, and nation. Especially nation . . . The global language was not to be that of the London stage but that of the American streets. The American tongue flowed with the rhythm of film; the English tongue, for too many years, did not.”

In an excerpt from Cloud: Between Paris and Tehran, Kiarostami/Corbin/Lacan up at e-flux, Joan Copjec writes that the “ground in many of [Abbas Kiarostami’s] films is ungrounded, hollowed out—or more precisely, made to resemble catacombs. While earthquakes are a difficult geographical fact of life in Iran, Kiarostami’s continuous reference to this datum in many of his films turns it into a fact of another order. No longer just an uncompromising truth of the terrain, it becomes a cultural fact whose meaning cannot be unearthed. Like the past buried in it, the ground turns out in Kiarostami’s world to be active and shifting, an unsettled affair. It is as if the past itself were under construction in his films.”

In Nouvelles Femmes: Modern Women of the French New Wave and Their Enduring Contribution to Cinema, Ericka Knudson “takes pains to examine the women of her story as artists, creative peers of the auteurs they worked with,” writes Farran Smith Nehme for the Wall Street Journal. “Perhaps the heart of the book is its chapter on [Anna] Karina, who Ms. Knudson admires on both a personal and creative level as someone who was molding her own characters and ‘breaking away’ from the typical conception of a woman in film as an ‘object of desire.’”

After Hours: Scorsese, Grief and the Grammar of Cinema is a blend of criticism and memoir in which Ben Tanzer writes about the 1985 film, the loss of his artist father, and his ongoing relationship with his therapist mother. Tanzer tells NewCity’s Ray Pride that “my relationship with Kafka speaks to a variety of impulses that drive the book, while also providing a way into After Hours itself.”

Air Mail and the Hollywood Reporter are running excerpts from Bruce Handy’s Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movie. It’s an “incisive new history of not just teen movies, but teenagers themselves,” writes Chris Vognar in the Los Angeles Times. “Tracing the genre from the days of Mickey Rooney’s Andy Hardy, the aw-shucks, girl-crazy hero of an enormously popular movie series that started in 1937, to the dystopian adventures of Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games franchise, Handy (class of 1976) looks at the juvenile delinquents and the beach kids, the nerds and the mean girls.”

Let’s also make note of two new collections, Becoming Nosferatu: Stories Inspired by Silent German Horror, edited by Matthew Sorrento and Gary D. Rhodes, and Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town, edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer and the first book devoted to the director of Little Caesar (1931) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) who went on to produce The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Quentin Tarantino and writer Jay Glennie are teaming up on a series of books that will tell the stories behind all ten of Tarantino’s features. They’re clearly taking the long view here, considering that Tarantino has yet to even announce his tenth movie, never mind make it. The rollout begins in November with The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Books on Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) will follow in 2026 and 2027.

“Tarantino will write the introductions for each, and the aspirations go much further than a batch of picture books,” writes Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro. They will be “closer in spirit to what Tarantino did in his novelization of Once Upon a Time,in which he fleshed out the mythology of Brad Pitt’s stuntman Cliff Booth. That formed the basis for the Netflix movie that David Fincher will direct, with Pitt reprising his Oscar-winning character. In the film, he becomes a fixer for Hollywood studios.”

Glennie is a busy man, and according to Spike Lee, a “great writer. He did the Deer Hunter book and the Raging Bull book,” Lee tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Keegan. “We’re writing a book about Do the Right Thing. It’s coming out next year.”

In a similar vein, Sheila O’Malley’s Frankenstein, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Guillermo del Toro’s forthcoming adaptation, is slated for an October release. Featuring concept art, storyboards, and on-set photos, the book will offer commentary and interviews with del Toro and members of the cast and crew. The shoot wrapped last fall, and Netflix is aiming to release the film starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz in November.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: An Original Graphic Novel, adapted by Chris Ryall and featuring art by Jacob Phillips, will also be out in October. “I hoped the graphic novel would take its own flight, with its own artists and writer so that it would be a sibling of the film, rather than just an echo,” says Coppola, adding that he feels that the team has accomplished just that.

The Archival Impermanence Project, a collection of writing by the renowned restorationist Ross Lipman, will be out on Monday from Sticking Place Books. The “remarkable essay on Cassavetes and Mingus is the best and most useful thing I’ve ever read about either artist,” says Jonathan Rosenbaum. Lipman, who has restored or overseen the restorations of more than 360 films, is probably best known for Notfilm (2015), his fascinating documentary essay on the making of Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965) with Buster Keaton. He’ll be at Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 21 through 29) with the new book, and several events are planned for July, so be sure to check next month’s roundup.

June will also see the release of Heat, a newly revised edition of Nick James’s monograph on Michael Mann’s 1995 film; and Urthworks,a vision of a future in which our planet has suffered an environmental collapse. Film and digital images by Ben Rivers are supplemented by texts from science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell.

Looking ahead to November, Insomnia will be the late Robbie Robertson’s telling of his collaboration with Martin Scorsese, which began with The Last Waltz (1978) and carried on through Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). And Reflections: On Cinematography will be a “visual memoir” from Roger Deakins, whose frequent collaborators include Joel and Ethan Coen, Sam Mendes, and Denis Villeneuve.

“If you’re seeking an understanding of the ease with which anyone can be brought, step by small step, to sell her soul to fascism, you must read this book,” writes Susan Neiman in an excellent overview of the work of Daniel Kehlmann in the New York Review of Books. Neiman is referring to The Director, and a few weeks ago, we took a look at early reviews of this reimagining of the life of G. W. Pabst, who left Europe for Hollywood as the Nazis were coming to power but returned to eventually find himself shooting Nazi-approved movies. “Nothing I’ve ever read conveys so well how people in Nazi Germany got on with their lives,” writes Neiman.

Kehlmann is “the leading German novelist of his generation,” writes David Denby in the New Yorker. Referencing the Expressionist classics of the 1920s, Denby finds that The Director “combines history, biography, and detailed dramatizations of filmmaking; it joins all of these to the active suggestion that, under Nazism, German and Austrian life became an everyday version of the countries’ most tormented films from years before.”

John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is “both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive,” writes David Thomson for the London Review of Books. “Bleasdale is especially good on Malick’s early life and the details of it that have appeared in his movies. But he is an observant enough member of Malick’s church to know that wonder can be compromised or limited by the facts.”

Bleasdale is also the host of the Writers on Film podcast, and one of his recent guests is Jason Bailey, the author of Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend. You’ll find excerpts at RogerEbert.com and Vulture. Another guest is the great Walter Murch, the winner of three Oscars for his work on Apocalypse Now (1979) and The English Patient (1996) and the author of a new memoir, Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design.

The Hollywood Reporter and Literary Hub are running excerpts from Matthew Spektor’s new memoir, The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood. In the New York Times, Alexandra Jacobs finds that the book “has an appropriately retro, hard-boiled texture, as if John Lahr’s biography of his own father, Bert, Notes on a Cowardly Lion, were sprinkled into one of Norman Mailer’s nonfiction novels. It assumes that life and the movies are in a state of permanent overlap. In this it may already be outdated, and yet, like a long rattling drive down Sunset Boulevard, it both lulls and arouses.”

Two for the ears and one for the eyes. Turner Classic Movies host Alicia Malone is in the Projection Booth, talking about her new book, TCM Imports: Timeless Favorites and Hidden Gems of World Cinema,and she’s on Guide for the Film Fanatic, too, discussing Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). And at Literary Hub, Matt Stevens introduces Good Movies as Old Books: Films Reimagined as Vintage Book Covers, his collection of more than two hundred what-ifs.

For yet more early summer reading (and listening and viewing) recommendations, turn to Christopher Schobert at the Film Stage, where he’s got notes on books about Brian De Palma, Pedro Almodóvar, and Anthony Mann as well as several works of fiction.