July Books

Recalling the late David Bordwell’s many visits to Hong Kong, Li Cheuk-to, writing at Observations on Film Art, notes that in one of his most popular books, Planet Hong Kong, Bordwell “embodies a dual identity of a small fan and a distinguished professor, yet he neither falls into the fanaticism of a fanboy nor keeps a distance with the subject of study like most scholars. Instead, he maintains a clear-headed, heartfelt love for these films.”

Paul Cuff, the author of Abel Gance and the End of Silent Cinema: Sounding Out Utopia and A Revolution for the Screen: Abel Gance's Napoleon, takes a deep dive into Napoléon vu par Abel Gance, “a very pleasing book to look through and an exceedingly interesting text to read.” Cuff has his reservations, but overall, he’s pleased to find that the new volume, edited by Frédéric Bonnaud and Joël Daire, “provides both a history of the film and a context for the new restoration.”

Reviewing The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film for the London Review of Books, David Trotter points out that the “charge David Thomson lays against war films is the obvious one: they make it all too easy to experience the thrill of battle while remaining safely out of harm’s way, to relish the violence, to gorge or feast ourselves on it (he does like a culinary metaphor). People have always found ways to do that. Thomson, however, is prepared to put the blame on a particular institution. The ‘onset of the movies,’ he argues, may well have proved the ‘most influential’ of all innovations in the ‘process’ of modern warfare.”

Designer and writer John Coulthart has seen just about all of the three hundred movies listed in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, a “heavyweight guide” edited by Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward and first published in 1979. Coulthart has now drawn up an annotated list of his own, writing about the dream and nightmare sequences he’s picked up on these films: “Beleaguered, paranoid characters are liable to find the Expressionist roots of noir cinema lurking behind their closed eyelids, ready to tip them into an unstable world of blurred vortices and looming, underlit faces.”

Keith Phipps’s conversation at the Reveal with Alonso Duralde about his new book, Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film, begins with the silent era and sweeps all the way up to what Duralde sees as “kind of a trans New Queer Cinema right now, which is very exciting.” And reading What Makes Sammy Jr. Run? Classic Celebrity Journalism Volume 1 (1960s and 1970s), a collection of eighteen profiles edited by Alex Belth, “is like a walk through a delightful museum of postwar America, with all its bright spots and faults,” writes Tom Zoellner in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Belth has a sharp eye for good writing, and he understands the inner ghoul of curiosity that makes these profiles tick.”

Martin Woessner’s Terrence Malick and the Examined Life offers “heavy contextualization of the state of philosophy both in general in the mid-to-late twentieth century and specifically at Harvard around Malick’s time there in the 1960s, as well as detailed information about the AFI’s inaugural film school and Malick’s activities there,” finds Collin Brinkmann, who also appreciates the “deeply researched accounting of Malick’s wide and disparate influences both artistic and otherwise.” But Brinkmann also notes that Woessner “can’t quite hide his skepticism of the theological forwardness” of films such as Song to Song (2017) and A Hidden Life (2019).

For AnOther Magazine, Alex Denney talks with Albert Serra about his new book, A Toast to St Martirià. The centerpiece is a transcription of an improvised speech “on his filmmaking philosophy and Catalan heritage” delivered at the St Martirià fiesta in his hometown, Banyoles. Denney and Serra also discuss the filmmaker’s fascination with right-wing populists and the projects he’s been working on: Afternoons of Solitude, a documentary on bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey, and Out of This World, “a film about an American diplomat traveling to Russia in the midst of the Ukraine war.” Kristen Stewart may or may not star in that one.

The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane has clearly had a good time reading Chris Nashawaty’s The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, and he seems to have had an even better time riffing in this week’s issue on the eight movies Nashawaty has selected to write about: Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Lisberger’s Tron, Nicholas Meyer’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and George Miller’s The Road Warrior.

Lane gets a kick out of the “bundle of details” Nashawaty offers on the making of each of these movies, but he doesn’t entirely buy into the argument that Nashawaty neatly lays out in a single sentence: “During the eight weeks spanning between May 16 and July 9, Hollywood’s major studios would release eight sci-fi/fantasy films that would not only go on to become cornerstones in the pop culture canon four-plus decades on, they would also radically transform the way that the movie industry did—and continues to do—business, paving the way for our current all-blockbusters-all-the-time era.”

The bold claim has Lane looking back a few years to Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977), and Scott’s Alien (1979). “Clamp the three together,” writes Lane, “top them with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), which bore the imprint of Lucas and Spielberg, and there, I suggest, you have the precursor of 1982, and a more compelling template for so much that has blazed and crawled across our screens ever since.”

In the London Review of Books, Dennis Duncan offers a primer on Raymond Queneau, the writer best known to cinephiles for Zazie dans le métro, the 1959 novel that Louis Malle adapted in 1960. “Queneau’s life, he once observed, began at the same time as the cinema era,” writes Duncan. “He watched the earliest classics—Fantômas, Les vampires, Le voyage dans la lune—when they were fresh, catching them with his father in the movie theaters of Le Havre: the Pathé, the Kursaal. Looking back, he recalled the raucous disruptiveness of the audience, the groaning mass of sailors and harbour prowlers, and The Skin of Dreams captures the idea of the cinema as both an attentive and a distracted experience.” In that 1948 novel, a daydreamer drifts off to Hollywood and becomes a star.

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Anna Marie Cain talks with Paul Tremblay about his new novel, Horror Movie, which “feels like a reclamation not only of the genre but also of its various forms—books, movies, even audio.” Profiling writer Patrick Nathan for the Los Angeles Times, Lorraine Berry calls his new book, The Future Was Color, “a riveting novel that explores basic existential questions.” In the 1950s, as McCarthyites prowl Hollywood in search of suspected communists and closeted homosexuals, George Curtis, a Hungarian war émigré, pounds out screenplays for cheap monster movies. Then a famous actress offers him a residency at her home in Malibu where he’ll be able to get some serious writing done. Literary Hub has an excerpt, and Nathan discusses the novel on the LARB Radio Hour.

Emily Nussbaum’sCue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV is “a smart, thorough, often skeptical history of the genre,” finds Bruce Handy at Air Mail. A. S. Hamrah, writing in the new issue of Bookforum, would beg to differ. Hamrah worked for eight years as a cultural analyst for a company whose clients were television networks. “Seeing the sausage get made at the C-suite level of television production,” writes Hamrah, “and then analyzing the fandom of the sausage, made me realize that every negative thing ever written about TV was true, the concurrent rise of quality television notwithstanding. Newton Minow’s ‘vast wasteland’ speech, Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Harlan Ellison’s The Glass Teat, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death—they were 100-percent correct.” Hamrah addresses “the question Nussbaum’s book doesn’t answer: Would we be better off if The Bachelor, or Cops, or The Apprentice had never been made? The answer is yes.”

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, where Nussbaum is a guest on the LARB Radio Hour, Olivia Stowell isn’t nearly as dismissive. “When reality TV is written off as only cheap or trashy, we miss the ways that its contrivances and its semi-fictionality enable representations that are complex, complicated, and ambivalent, as scholars like Racquel J. Gates and Kristen J. Warner have demonstrated,” writes Stowell. “Encounters with reality TV can also be encounters with difference . . . As Nussbaum puts it, the CBS executives who picked up Survivor and changed the TV landscape forever were ‘fascinated by its radical approach to TV demographics. CBS would be able to cast a contestant to represent every type of person—rural, urban, Black, white, rich, poor, young, old—pulling in youthful viewers without alienating the AARP crowd.’”

Phillip Lopate, whose new book is My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews, is on the podcast A Very Good Year, talking about such great films of 1959 as François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu. “My most exalted movie experience occurred not in a movie theater at all,” wrote Lopate for Metrograph Journal in 2016. The story involves the late Pacific Film Archives director Tom Luddy and the first—and at the time, only—print in America of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943).

In Los Angeles, the Academy Museum series Tellers of Tales: The Films of Powell & Pressburger opens on Thursday, and on the New Books Network, Miranda Melcher talks with Pamela Hutchinson about her book on The Red Shoes. Another recent guest on the Network is 4Columns film editor Melissa Anderson, who chats with Tyler Thier about her 2021 monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Writing for the UW Cinematheque, Josh Martin calls Vanishing Point Forever, Robert M. Rubin’s new book on Richard C. Sarafian’s 1971 cult classic, “a mammoth, 500-page volume that assembles production documents, marketing materials, and essays from critics such as J. Hoberman, all serving as proof of the idiosyncratic film’s enduring popularity.” UW Cinematheque Director of Programming Jim Healy interviews Rubin on the Cinematalk Podcast.

De Palma on De Palma, a collection of interviews conducted by Samuel Blumenfeld and Laurent Vachaud and newly translated by Paul Cronin, will be out on August 1. Dear Orson Welles & Other Essays, a collection from Mark Cousins (A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things), will hit shelves two weeks later. September will see the release ofIngrid Caven: I Am a Fiction, a monograph with contributions from Erika Balsom, Bertrand Bonello, and Rachel Kushner.

In the Guardian, Dalya Alberge talks with J. E. Smyth, whose Mary C. McCall Jr.: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter will also be out in September. McCall was the first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild and the writer behind a hit series of films starring Ann Sothern as Maisie, a fiercely independent showgirl. McCall led “a fight to unionize the industry’s writers and secure the first contract guaranteeing a minimum wage, credit protection, and pay raises, as well as the right to strike,” says Smyth. “She was a power player. To studio heads she was, in the words of Jack Warner, ‘the meanest bitch in town.’”

Anyone interested in the cinema of Chantal Akerman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jia Zhangke, Chris Marker, Wang Bing, Andy Warhol, and/or Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler must not miss out on Ruben Demasure’s latest books roundup for Sabzian. Farran Smith Nehme has a few summer reading recommendations as well, including Glenn Kenny’s The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface.

At the Film Stage, Christopher Schobert has notes on new books about George Miller’s Mad Max saga, baseball movies, Michael Mann, Albert Brooks, and Harry Dean Stanton. And for Time, Shannon Carlin writes up an annotated list of what she considers to be the thirty-six best celebrity memoirs.