June Books

Michael Koresky, the newly appointed senior curator of film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, will be at MoMI on Sunday to present and discuss Tea and Sympathy (1956), one of the films he writes about in Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness. He also discusses Vincente Minnelli’s film with Nicolas Rapold on The Last Thing I Saw and with filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow) in the latest episode of Queersighted.

In a Metrograph Journal conversation with Nick Pinkerton, the focus is on the two films that bookend Koresky’s historical overview of the ways queerness was smuggled into Hollywood movies when the Production Code was being most fiercely enforced. William Wyler’s These Three (1936) and The Children’s Hour (1961) are both adaptations of Lillian Hellman’s 1934 play set in an all-girls boarding school run by two women.

Writing at Crooked Marquee, Sean Burns finds that “what’s most valuable about Sick and Dirty, more even than the extensive research and [Koresky’s] punchy, insightful prose, is the author’s willingness to take a close, thoughtful look at pictures deemed ‘problematic’ by today’s standards. There are many movies from this era that are now routinely dismissed and sometimes despised by a younger generation concerned with the propriety of representation. ‘These films, these phantoms, persist because they speak to the unsettled parts of ourselves that don’t fit into acceptable standards of contemporary queerness,’ Koresky writes. ‘The parts we hush away, the parts that creep into our thoughts at night when we draw the shades and close our eyes after a full, tiring day of being so sure and pure and proud and righteous.’”

J. Hoberman will be at Topos Too in New York tomorrow to talk with Jed Rapfogel, film programmer at Anthology Film Archives, about his new book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. In the Art Newspaper, Dan Schindel points out that Hoberman’s “thesis is laid out simply in the opening sentence of the first chapter: ‘Cultural innovation comes from the margins and is essentially collective.’” Hoberman “has honed a unique style of sociocultural history-telling. He situates the films of specific eras—the 1960s in The Dream Life, the Ronald Reagan ascendance and presidency in Make My Day—within the contexts in which they were made, constructing detailed timelines that demonstrate the feedback loop between art and society.”

Everything Is Now is “as jubilantly overstuffed as its subtitle,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. “The book is a startlingly slow read—and I say that with unbridled enthusiasm. I can’t remember the last book I’ve read that contained so much information so tightly packed, or in which the distillation of vast research offered such relentless ricochets of association, connection, and allusion.”

“Given the depth of Hoberman’s knowledge and his clear love of the material,” writes Milo Nesbitt in the Telegraph, “I found myself wishing he would stop for breath more often. When he lets himself, it’s great: he can’t help himself from digressing on [Bob Dylan’s 1965 album] Bringing It All Back Home (who can?) and its ‘fusion of Buddy Holly and Arthur Rimbaud.’ And I would have liked to read more about his own history with this stuff; a passage recounting a stay with director Alejandro Jodorowsky in Mexico is one of the most entertaining in the book.”

Writing for Forward, Gary Lucas, a composer and self-described “avant-guitarist,” calls Everything Is Now “an essential book. You could teach ten different classes on just about every aspect of the history of New York City in the ’60s using Everything Is Now as a key foundational textbook.”

In 1969, Kenneth Anger was working with Mick Jagger in San Francisco on what became an eleven-minute film emitting what Jonas Mekas, writing in the Village Voice, called “tremendous energies.” Writers on Film host John Bleasdale talks with Jarett Kobek about his new study, Invocation of My Demon Brother.

In last month’s roundup on new and noteworthy books, we noted that Ross Lipman, who has led or had a hand in the restorations of hundreds of films, was planning a series of events tied to the release of The Archival Impermanence Project, a collection of essays, lectures, and documentation. The summer tour has now been mapped out. Next Tuesday, Lipman will talk about “re-restoring” Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, and in July, he’ll be in London and New York before presenting the Los Angeles premiere of his new film, The Book of Paradise Has No Author.

In the Baffler, Will Harrison finds that Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat, a new collection of essays by moving-image artist Hito Steyerl, “extends its web in all directions, forming a vast, teeming network of themes: the veracity of the image in the age of deepfakes and visual brain rot; the connection between surveillance, facial recognition, phrenology, and statistics; the literal heat that machine generated images release into the atmosphere; the intentionally secretive data centers that ‘drain the planet’s energy in order to create a stable thermal environment—not for people but for information’; the compulsive, ongoing race to produce artificial general intelligence, or AGI; the tech monopolies that hijack ‘access to public utilities like information and communication’ and sell people ‘back the products wrested from their own expropriation’; the unseen human labor behind every automated action; and the way that art or aesthetic novelty is used as a cover for all of this.”

For Document Journal, Jayne O’Dwyer reviews Snow Business, a collection of Philippa Snow’s recent reviews and essays as well as flash fiction “in which she steps into the minds of women, real or fictional, from Brittany Murphy to She in Antichrist. Writing as Carol White in Safe, she likens Carol to ‘an appliance that a man might buy himself as a reward for being rich.’” Snow offers “a deep show of empathy for her subjects, and for the reader, transportational visits to the fictional worlds of these women for a few hundred words.”

G. W. Pabst’s The Love of Jeanne Ney (1927) has turned silent film historian Paul Cuff on to the writer of the 1924 novel it’s based on. Ilya Ehrenburg’s Men, Years—Life (1961–1966) is “one of the most extraordinary memoirs I’ve ever read,” writes Cuff. “It is almost unbelievable what this man experienced: from imperial to post-Stalinist Russia, from trenches in Spain to the skyscrapers of New York, from the cafes of Paris to the battlefields of the east, from writing poetry in garrets to making speeches at peace rallies, Ehrenburg experienced almost every conceivable facet of the early twentieth century.” In two gripping entries, Cuff offers “a selected tour through some of Ehrenburg’s life and his relationship with cinema: cinema as culture, cinema as literary adaptation, cinema as a way of seeing the world.”

Reviewing Kenneth Turan’s Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation for the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik suggests that “the real difference between Mayer and Thalberg, it becomes clear, was not that one was classy and one was not; it was that they had different theories, still alive today, about how to make the most money possible in the entertainment business. Mayer believed in reliable formulas, endlessly repeated for predictable profit; Thalberg believed that the entertainment business is a gold-rush, bonanza enterprise, in which one very big hit can make up for minor failures, many small successes can’t make up for the absence of a very big hit, and the big hit tends to be the new thing splendidly done. A wise tycoon tries to anticipate where the audience wants to go and get there first.”

Brian De Palma’s Ambrose Chapel, a screenplay for a movie that was never made, is a “blueprint for a most eccentric thriller,” writes Sean Burns at North Shore Movies. It was “written between 1993’s Carlito’s Way and 1996’s Mission: Impossible, but finds the filmmaker in the playful, self-referential mode of his 1992’s Raising Cain.” James Kenney “smartly cites the screenplay as the missing link between Cain and the filmmaker’s 2002 rapturously naughty Femme Fatale.”

Between September 2022 and March 2023, film critic Murielle Joudet spent more than thirty hours getting Catherine Breillat to talk through her entire filmography, from A Real Young Girl (1975) to Last Summer (2023). Semiotext(e) will release I Only Believe in Myself: Conversation with Murielle Joudet, translated by Christine Pichini, in October.

Wes Anderson, too, has just looked back on all of his features in chronological order, but in Vanity Fair’s video, he genially takes us from Bottle Rocket (1996) through this year’s The Phoenician Scheme in just under an hour. At Literary Hub, Brittany Allen has put together an annotated and ranked list of all the books that exist only in Anderson’s fictional worlds. She also points us to a four-minute video in which Bob Balaban introduces animated renditions of the books Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is carrying in her suitcase in Moonrise Kingdom (2012).