August Books

Whitney Strub’s Films That Explode Like Grenades: Robert Kramer and the Search for a Radical Cinema “presents Kramer as an ambivalent figure,” writes Benjamin Crais, “a major filmmaker in the history of committed cinema, a frequent embodiment of his milieu’s worst tendencies, and an artist who discovered his humanism amid the rubble of the revolutionary left.”

Reviewing On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s,Jay Gabler notes that for author Matthew I. Thompson, “the ‘long 1970s’ filmmaker who most productively probed the relationship between humans and the environment is David Cronenberg. In movies like Shivers (1975), The Fly (1986), and Naked Lunch, ‘the body is porous: despite our best efforts to police its boundaries, the ecosystem flows through it,’ writes Thompson.”

The Curse of Queen Kelly—a sort of critical biography of Erich von Stroheim’s 1929 film that, newly reconstructed and restored, has been a staple of repertory programs over the past year or so—is the latest book from Pamela Hutchinson, one of dozens of contributors to The Silent Film Companion: A Recovered and Expanded History. The collection, edited by Liz Clarke and Martin L. Johnson, is slated for release in January.

Writing about The Curse of Queen Kelly, Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that the “mythological status of three roguish, double-dealing con artists—producer-star Gloria Swanson (the book’s heroine), her lover and coproducer Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s dad and the book’s villain), and writer-director Stroheim (Swanson’s muse and my own principal interest)—ensured an organizational challenge to even a silent-movie specialist as seasoned as Hutchinson. She does a superb job of following Queen Kelly’s multifaceted history and afterlife, including such matters as the repurposing of its bordello set in Tay Garnett’s Her Man (1930) and the use of a Queen Kelly clip in Sunset Boulevard (1950).”

Over at the Realm of Silence, Paul Cuff finds The Curse of Queen Kelly to be “a superb book, impeccably researched, engagingly written—and incredibly insightful. It will be of huge value to anyone interested in Stroheim, Swanson, or Kennedy; in the Hollywood of the 1920s; in troubled film productions; in studios and stars and stardom; and in the kind of mad stories of meteoric success and devastating catastrophe that seem to characterize the silent era. Throw bricks by the hour into the most densely populated areas of film literature, and you would struggle to hit a more appealing read than Hutchinson’s book.”

Élisabeth, the first and only novel by Eric Rohmer, was published in 1946—fifteen years before the Cahiers du cinéma editor made his first feature—and has now been translated by Aaron Kerner. “Élisabeth’s flaws are not flaws of content, but of form,” finds Shreya Khullar in the Metropolitan Review, “and it was indeed his mode of expression that shifted radically, and to staggering effect.”

Back in Film Comment, Annie Berman writes that, as a novelist, Rohmer “adeptly pulls focus to various sensual details that aggravate the tensions of [his characters’] fraught relationships: the fleshy curve of a girl’s knee caked with mud (a taste of the genuphilia that will pervade his oeuvre), the flavor of cool peppermint liqueur (like a ‘mild electric shock’), the odor of ‘leaves in the first flush of rot.’ This insistent encroachment of the physical world into the narrative anticipates the so-called ‘thingness,’ or chosisme, of the Nouveau Roman, popularized by writers of the 1950s and ’60s, including other eventual cineastes like Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.”

The novel of the moment, though, is Rachel Cusk’s Life of M. “The reigning queen of autofiction, the literary subgenre in which the lines that divide narrator from author are knowingly smudged,” Cusk is “renowned for her cool, glassy prose and her stark austerity of vision,” writes Becca Rothfeld in the New Yorker. In a 2017 review of Transit (2016), the middle entry in a trilogy for which Cusk is best known—the other two books are Outline (2014) and Kudos (2018)—the New York Times’ Dwight Garner referred to Cusk as the author of “dense, aphoristic, philosophically acute novels that read like Iris Murdoch thrice distilled.”

Over the course of eleven novels, Cusk has been chipping away at the idea of character, assigning her narrators and the people with whom they interact initials rather than full names. At the beginning of Life of M, the first narrator, “I,” who will eventually pass the mic on to “We,” tells M, a famous movie star, that he or she—the genders of the narrators are explicitly left undefined—intends to write M’s autobiography. M is intrigued, or at least amused, and plays along until she reads a passage.

“I don’t like the way you portray me,” M tells the narrator, who replies, “But it isn’t you . . . It isn’t anyone.” For Rothfeld, who finds Life of M to be Cusk’s “weakest novel yet,” Cusk’s “crime is not that she has used a real person as inspiration for a character, as writers have done since time immemorial, but that the protagonist of her novel ‘isn’t anyone,’ that she is little more than a device for thematizing the dissolution of the self.”

The real person Rothfeld is referring to is Natalie Portman, who has enthusiasticallyrecommended Cusk’s novels to her many fans but is reportedly unhappy to be the barely disguised subject of this latest one. As Fran Hoepfner points out at Vulture, the identity of M’s real-life counterpart is hardly even dusted over, never mind buried or hidden in any way.

Talking to Alexandra Alter in the NYT, Cusk more or less argues that all that is beside the point. “The book explains itself and defends itself pretty comprehensively,” she says. And writer Sheila Heti tells Alter: “Everyone who is projecting onto Natalie Portman a sense of betrayal over her alleged appearance in the book is in fact enacting the very projection and storytelling that the book is thinking about, and is critiquing as kind of dehumanizing.”

Writing for the New Left Review, Ryan Ruby notes that in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord “describes celebrities as ‘spectacular representations of human beings’ and ‘specialists in apparent life.’ Their function is to ‘act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner.’ In doing so, they serve as objects of identification and as compensatory mechanisms for those who spend their leisure time consuming images of and stories about them while being deprived of the power to lead free lives of their own. This, at any rate, is the function M serves for the narrator . . . M is at once the narrator’s ego-ideal, an object of envy, and a screen on which to project the fantasy of living in a culture in which being a successful writer of literary fiction comes with the same privileges as being a successful actor. The we-narrator claims not to care about social recognition, but, then, they are unreliable.”

“Life of M is a narrative hall of mirrors that only a fool would confuse with a thinly veiled roman à clef about a celebrity,” writes Slate’s Laura Miller. “To my mind, only one true mystery remains: Was Portman in on it? Is she just pretending to be offended for a lark, or in a bid to drive interest in her friend’s book? As of this writing, neither woman has made a public statement on the matter, but I’m not sure if we can believe either one of them when they do.”

Hollywood, Ending promises to be a less prickly affair. Arriving at the end of September, the latest novel by John Green—best known for The Fault in Our Stars,the 2012 novel that became a 2014 film starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort—will be the story of two rising actors cast in a movie with a tell-me-more title: Andy Warhol Never Gets Old.

The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture, a new collection from Erika Balsom, one of the most incisive and rewarding critics writing today, will be out next month. “Assembling a selection of essays and reviews written between 2014 and 2025 about experimental moving-image practices that depart from industrial norms and established conventions,” writes Balsom in her introduction, “this book argues that what has been a period of panic in the mainstream has been a time of growth, renewal, and buoyancy on the liminal fringe.”

Each contributor to the recent issue of Projections dedicated to the work of the late David Bordwell “addresses fundamental assumptions and questions underpinning Bordwell’s research,” writes Colin Burnett at Observations on Film Art. “In doing so, the authors get at something more. They implicitly highlight two sides of Bordwell’s questioning approach, his pluralism—the more questions we pursue, the richer the field—and his heurism—our methods matter to the extent that they promote and answer questions. Admittedly the second aspect isn’t as widely appreciated as the first.” December will see the publication of another collection, Observing Film Art: Themes from the Work of David Bordwell.

Writers on Film host John Bleasdale, in the meantime, talks with David Thomson about his new book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies.

Andreas Halskov’s Directed by Miloš Forman: An Oral History of His Life and Films—featuring more than seventy interviews with such collaborators as Michael Douglas, Courtney Love, Annette Bening, Woody Harrelson, Stellan Skarsgård, Louise Fletcher, F. Murray Abraham, Oliver Stone, Mike Leigh, Mia Farrow, Michael Stipe, Bo Goldman, and Twyla Tharp—is out now.

A revised and expanded edition of David Sterritt’s The Films of Alfred Hitchcock will be released this month, and the second edition of Whitney Crothers Dilley’s The Cinema of Wes Anderson: Bringing Nostalgia to Life will hit shelves on September 1. Debra Levine will be talking about her new book, Jazzed: Jack Cole and Twentieth-Century American Dance—an appreciation of the choreographer who worked on such films as Gilda (1946), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)—in Los Angeles on September 6.

Documentary is running an excerpt from Persheng Vaziri’s Documenting Iran: Filmmakers and Social Change, which arrives this week. And in an excerpt from his new book The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans up at RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya traces a line influence from Andrei Tarkovsky through video games to the French director’s work.

In the MIT Press Reader, Joshua M. Greenberg gives us a taste of his forthcoming book, From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video. “The traditional story told about home video is that its sudden appearance fragmented the moviegoing audience into individuals,” writes Greenberg. “What this argument misses, however, is the shared practice of acquiring those tapes and then watching them at home—in its early years, the video store became a third place where customers, retailers, and clerks met, talked, and shared a common experience of movies on videocassette.”

In October, OR Books will begin rolling out a series of six “short, elegant” volumes, and one of them will be Voice Over: The Language of Chris Marker, Sasha Frere-Jones’s guide to the work of “filmmaker, writer, photographer, historian, orange cat, internet enthusiast, narrator, CD-ROM advocate, [and] fugitive,” Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve.

Looking way ahead to May 2027, Jason Bailey, the author of books on James Gandolfini and New York in the movies, will have a new one out, Yippee Ki-Yay: Die Hard, Bruce Willis, and the Reinvention of the Action Movie.