June Books

Butler will be at MoMI on June 27 to talk about The Perfect Moment with New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson following a screening of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel depicting Jesus’s struggles with his dual nature, both human and divine. “The screenplay, which [writer Paul] Schrader described as ‘a plexiglass layer cake,’ built out of Kazantzakis’s Greek Orthodoxy, Schrader’s Calvinism, and Scorsese’s Catholicism, shifts beguilingly among the mystical, the mundane, and the surprisingly funny,” writes Butler in an excerpt from The Perfect Moment running in the New Yorker.

When word got out that Scorsese was making this movie, conservative Christians pounced. Butler outlines the tense meetings, tentative agreements, and broken promises that led to an all-out brawl in the media between complex networks of studio representatives and Moral Majority–backed political players. For a while, it looked as if the evangelicals had the upper hand. But then some of the most outlandish of the widespread protests “made Last Temptation—still unfinished, seen by at most a few dozen people, and months away from its theatrical release—into a national news story, one in which the noble free-speech warriors of Hollywood were beset by a horde of antisemites and Bible-thumping lunatics.”

Universal, which bankrolled and distributed Last Temptation, “spent far more than usual to guarantee the security of screenings, assuming responsibility for damages, hiring guards to escort every print of the film, and sweeping movie theaters for bombs,” writes Butler. The studio was rewarded by a pretty solid opening weekend, but interest in the film and the controversy it had sparked tapered off quickly. “Although the brethren would claim credit for the film flopping,” writes Butler, “it actually broke even.”

Karl Ove Knausgård—who wrote the essay for our recent release of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, and of course, more famously, My Struggle, the widely acclaimed series of six autobiographical novels—curated an exhibition of paintings by Edvard Munch for the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2017. Trier and his brother Emil made a film about it, The Other Munch (2018).

Now the Paris Review is running Ingvild Burkey’s translation of Knausgård’s contribution to Descendant: Lars von Trier and Nordic Art, the catalogue for an exhibition curated by von Trier and on view at Willumsen’s Museum in Denmark through September 20 before it heads to Stockholm. Von Trier’s selection includes works by Vilhelm Hammershøi, August Strindberg, Paul Gauguin, and naturally, Munch.

Knausgård opens with reflections on Munch’s The Sick Child, a painting first exhibited in 1886 and “an anomaly—it resembles nothing else from that period, and nothing else in Munch’s long life as an artist.” He eventually winds his way to “the effect [von] Trier’s films had when they came out, on myself and on the milieu I was part of—they were important, they were controversial, they were discussed, they left a mark.”

Von Trier’s films are “wildly manipulative,” writes Knausgård, “and the manipulation is obvious and yet impossible to guard oneself against—at least for me. Feelings trump intellect. And isn’t that what happens at every level in his films, actually? And which makes them so provocative for many viewers? Not only are you given an exposition of a moral philosophical question about the nature of the good in Breaking the Waves, you are forced to experience it, and the conflict which the good stirs up everywhere it appears is suddenly brought near to you, to your own emotions, your own morality. This is especially the case with The Idiots, to my mind [von] Trier’s masterpiece.”

At Talkhouse, filmmaker Mark Rappaport (From the Journals of Jean Seberg) introduces his new Book of Dreams, a collection of more than eighty collages in which we find, for example, Marlene Dietrich’s Catherine the Great from Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) attempting to seduce Ivan the Terrible (Nikolai Cherkasov) as he appeared in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 film. Are these images “an intentionally subtle commentary on social mores?” asks Rappaport. “I doubt it. Are they a Rorschach test? I seriously doubt that, too. Why do you make them? I have no idea except that they are all film-related, taking elements from here, taking elements from there, and smacking them together so that they become something else. And what are the viewers supposed to make of them? Whatever they like.”

Artist and designer John Coulthart walks us through a history of cover designs for Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth, and as you might expect, they took a turn after David Bowie starred in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 adaptation.

After making the entirety of his 2022 book Intimate Impressions: The Cinema of James Gray freely available online, Collin Brinkmann began writing about the late-career work of Howard Hawks. He toyed with the idea of turning those thoughts into a book, but eventually dropped it. Then Paul Cronin of Sticking Place Books picked it back up again, offering to publish Late Style in Film. This “year-plus, nights-and-weekends kind of labor of love” offers Brinkmann’s insights into the evolving dialogue between auteurism and debates on the very idea of “late style” as well as three in-depth chapters on Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Back in the summer of 2024, we put together an overview of the first enthusiastic reviews of Carrie Rickey’s biography A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda. Writing for the London Review of Books, Lili Owen Rowlands finds that the Varda “who emerges is obstinate and evasive.” Rowlands reruns the life story with a particular emphasis on its darker passages.

Before he left for MGM, where he would make Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), John Sturges worked his way up at Columbia. In “An Extended Apprenticeship,” an essay that first appeared in The Lady with the Torch: Columbia Pictures 1929–1959,Farran Smith Nehme tells that story, pausing now and then to dwell on a few outstanding titles such as The Walking Hills (1949), “a modern western, with a set of deceitful and back-biting characters that could easily have fit in a heist-driven noir.”

R. Emmet Sweeney talks with Henry Nicolella about his latest book, You Have to Run Fast: The Feature Films of Edward L. Cahn. Sweeney describes Cahn as “a promising director of fatalistic noirs at Universal (Afraid to Talk, Laughter in Hell) before spinning his wheels for MGM short subjects in the late ’30s. He reemerged as a pathologically prolific director of B-Westerns, sci-fi, and gangster films in the 1940s and ’50s.” Nicolella recommends a few favorites from each decade.

Before winning this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, Daniel Kraus wrote Whalefall (2023), a survival thriller that he and director Brian Duffield have adapted for a film to be released in October. In 2020, Kraus completed the novel that George A. Romero was working on when he died, The Living Dead. And March saw the release of Partially Devoured: How Night of the Living Dead Saved My Life and Changed the World, a deeply researched history and a close personal reading of Romero’s 1968 classic. Talking to Dan Mecca at Letterboxd about Romero and more, Kraus says that “I have this document of what I’d like to put into a second edition, and it grows by the day. I keep learning new things about it. I’ll never be finished with it.”

On the latest episode of Writers on Film, John Bleasdale talks with Laura Horak, the founding director of the Transgender Media Portal, about her new book, Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds. And today in Milan, the Museo del Novecento will host a presentation of Italian Female Filmmakers in the Sixties and Seventies: Lives, Histories, and Identities, a Fondazione In Between Art Film project edited by Carla Subrizi, Paola Ugolini, and Maria Alicata.

Last Friday, we noted that J. Hoberman’s new collection, Across the Movie-verse: Writing on Film, 2011–2021, a survey of his work since he and the Village Voice parted ways, will be out in August. Stuart Klawans, the film critic for the Nation from 1988 through 2020, has a collection out now, My Strange Love: Selected Film Reviews and Essays, 2001–2021. And Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell, with a foreword by Kristin Thompson and a preface by Damien Chazelle, will be out in December.

Bright Lights Film Journal is running an excerpt from Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism in which editor Joseph McBride writes about Footlight Parade (1933), a pre-Code musical starring James Cagney, directed by Lloyd Bacon, and featuring musical numbers overseen by Busby Berkeley. “By a Waterfall” is an “incredible number, one of the most ambitious in the history of the musical,” writes McBride, who quotes Berkeley recalling, “The day I had the idea, I let Jack Warner know about it and he told me I would ruin even the Bank of America.”

Liz Helfgott, our editorial director, introduces her conversation with Peter Cowie, who has written a new memoir, Flashbacks: A Passion for Film. “As a pioneering film critic, historian, publisher, festivalgoer, and commentator,” she writes, “Cowie helped introduce legendary film artists—including Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Louise Brooks, Satyajit Ray, and Alain Resnais—to audiences all over the world, creating the foundations for a widespread cinephilia that is exploding again in the twenty-first century.”

Reviewing the third edition of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film for the New York Times in 2002, Sarah Kerr wrote that critic and author David Thomson “proves anew that he is irreplaceable.” Thomson’s publisher is calling his latest book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies, “a career capstone of sorts.” On July 12, Thomson will be in Berkeley to launch the book and present Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (1965).

Thomas Doherty has written books on pre-Code Hollywood, World War II–era cinema, and the Blacklist, and he tells Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network about his latest, How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America.

Priya Parmar’s The Original “draws on the many existing biographies of [Katharine] Hepburn to explore, in a lightly fictionalized way, the actress’s tempestuous first decade as a newly fledged Hollywood star,” writes the Telegraph’s Tim Robey. In the New York Times, Alida Becker suggests that “anyone interested in Hepburn’s early career will have a hard time resisting this stylish, insightful deconstruction of her carefully crafted public persona.” Parmar’s “depiction of Hollywood in the 1930s is particularly adroit: ‘In this town, the air is curdled with sex. Here, anything can happen, and anything happens every night.’”

Benjamin Myers’s tenth novel, Jesus Christ Kinski, toggles between the night in 1971 when Klaus Kinski set out to perform a text he’d written, Jesus Christus Erlöser, prompting a mutiny in the audience at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, and what Jon Day, writing for the London Review of Books, calls “a meandering autofictional essay.” In the view of the nameless narrator, “Kinski’s performance was ‘every bit as potent as any mythologized rock’n’roll performance or art happening,’ whereas today art has lost its shock value.”

James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential) has a new novel out, called Red Sheet, a crime thriller set in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Introducing his interview with the author, Seth Abramovitch warns Hollywood Reporter readers that Ellroy truly “believes a genuine Moscow-controlled espionage network was operating in Hollywood back in the 1950s, that the Soviet threat was grave, and that history has gotten the era’s heroes and villains exactly backwards.”

“I read James Ellroy not quite as I would Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, those L.A. noir maestros whose lyrical loneliness is simply beautiful and whose plot-machines (call them trick coffins) I can never admire enough, right down to the last countersunk death’s-head screw,” writes William T. Vollmann in the New York Times. “In place of the twentieth-century moral code of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and the family neuroses of Macdonald’s characters, I find in Ellroy’s books the semi-despairing ugliness of Georges Simenon.”

“Television was an immersive media which divided the world into a before and after in a manner that no technology had since Guttenberg’s printing press,” writes Ed Simon in the Baffler. “Though the history of broadcasting is a global one—any fair appraisal is going to consider Programme One in the USSR or the BBC as much as CBS, ABC, and NBC—the television is not just an invention, but indeed is only matched in the United States by the automobile as a perspective, ideology, and lifestyle. In that way, it was unavoidable that my new book, American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States, would have to fumble for the remote.”

Over the course of four seasons appearing intermittently since 2015, Documentary Now! has presented itself as a straight-faced PBS-style news magazine with episodes—narrated by Helen Mirren!—parodying classics of the genre directed by the likes of Albert and David Maysles, Werner Herzog, and Robert Flaherty. Documentary Now!: Fourth Edition (Revised and Expanded) is “a gorgeous coffee table book that parrots the show’s deadpan conceit of pretending it’s a real, long-running, widely revered television institution,” writes Scott Tobias at the Reveal. “Even the foreword, by critic Matt Zoller Seitz, is a parody of what Matt Zoller Seitz might have to say about its place in the cultural firmament.”

For his interview with showrunners Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono, Tobias decided to “focus on a single episode to demonstrate the amount of detail that figures into the direction of the show. To that end, we chose Mr. Runner Up: My Life as an Oscar Bridesmaid, the two-part finale of Season Two, which parodies Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein’s Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.”

June 30 will see a Zine Launch Party in Toronto for the second volume of The Journal of Stoogeological Studies. “One of my motivations for launching this semi-regular Three Stooges journal in 2023 was that I thought it would be funny,” writes editor Will Sloan. “The idea of soliciting a bunch of millennials (with some representatives of Gens X and Z on either end) to write about a lowbrow comedy team that was famous during the Depression and whose core members were all dead by the Carter administration . . . I thought that was a good bit. But during the full-body immersion of assembling the submissions and revisiting so much of the Stooges’ work, I realized I had a deeper motivation. I love these guys.”

On the New Books Network, Pete Kunze asks Robin R. Means Coleman and Novotny Lawrence about editing The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film, and our curatorial director, Ashley Clark, is a recent guest on Guide for the Film Fanatic, chatting with hosts Jason Bailey and Mike Hull about Perry Henzell’s reggae gangster classic, The Harder They Come (1972), and his new book, The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films.

We’ll wrap with Christopher Schobert’s latest books roundup for the Film Stage, where he recommends David F. Walker’s Black Film: A History of Black Representation and Participation in the Movies as well as new titles on Hitchcock, Scorsese, Twin Peaks, and Audrey Hepburn.