September Books

The book he’s writing is “ostensibly about directing and uses as its spine an analysis of the making of Jaws day-to-day,” says Soderbergh. And it’s “not for general consumption. This is for people who are interested in films, either as moviegoers or [who] want to do this job. Because if you’re going to do this job, you need to understand the job. This is the job.” But as Etan Vlessing notes in the Hollywood Reporter, Soderbergh warned that he may never actually finish writing this book.

Pedro Almodóvar has finished his, though, and it will hit shelves in the U.S. next week. Translated by Frank Wynne, The Last Dream gathers short pieces Almodóvar has been stashing away in blue folders since the late 1960s. In the Guardian, Guy Lodge writes that “the book’s dozen selections mingle elaborately fantastical fictions with candid personal essays and the odd self-reflexive curio piece that sits somewhere in between. A tight, tidy foray into literature was never to be expected from the seventy-four-year-old, whose utterly singular cinema thrives on chaotic melodrama and billowing, sensual abandon. If The Last Dream’s unruliness comes as no surprise—it’s a mixed bag both in its form and its rewards—its occasional crystalline terseness very much does.”

Discussing the book with Almodóvar for the New York Times, Nicholas Casey finds him a bit preoccupied with the subject of his latest film, The Room Next Door, which won the Golden Lion in Venice and will be the Centerpiece presentation at the New York Film Festival. “I have a problem with death now, with mortality,” says Almodóvar. “I don’t think ‘I’ve just lived another day,’ but instead, ‘I’ve got one less day to live.’”

Casey notes that the title story in The Last Dream is “a memorial to his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999. It was Caballero, Almodóvar said, who first introduced him to the ‘fabulist’ style of storytelling in their village, where she read letters for her neighbors who couldn’t read. Quite often, she would embellish the writing with fictions that Almodóvar said were frequently better than the truth.”

Three more books to look forward to will be out at the end of next month. Violet Lucca’s David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials will feature new interviews and a foreword by Viggo Mortensen. In i shall sing these songs beautifully, Yorgos Lanthimos presents photos he shot while making Kinds of Kindness. And Homes, coming out in France from Les éditions de l’Œil, features texts by and interviews with Apichatpong Weerasethakul as well as essays by Kong Rithdee, Leo Goldsmith, and other contributors.

And then there’s Cher: The Memoir, Part One, slated for a release on November 19. The winner of an Oscar, three Golden Globes, a Grammy, and an Emmy who has sold more than a hundred million records and is the only solo artist to have a number-one single on the Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, from the 1960s through the 2020s, will tell a story that takes her from a chaotic childhood through her marriage and breakup with Sonny Bono. As her publisher, HarperCollins, puts it: “It is a life too immense for only one book.”

Al Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy, will be out on October 15, and the New Yorker has an excerpt that begins with a rough-and-tumble childhood in the South Bronx and ends with Pacino in his early twenties, mourning the death of his mother and taking odd jobs—occasionally at the side of Martin Sheen—while acting in poorly attended plays staged in basements.

As a boy, Pacino recalls, he’d come home from movies and reenact sequences he’d seen. “I had a little silent routine I did for my relatives from The Lost Weekend—starring Ray Milland as a self‐destructive alcoholic—in which I pretended to ransack an apartment, looking for booze,” he writes. “The grownups seemed to find it amusing. Even at five years old, I would think, What are they laughing at? This man is fighting for his life.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books is running an excerpt from Ingrid Caven: I Am a Fiction, which features a new interview and contributions from Bertrand Bonello, Rachel Kushner, and several others. Born Ingrid Schmidt eighty-six years ago, Caven is a singer known to cinephiles primarily for her appearances in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Claire Denis, and Luca Guadagnino.

“In multiple ways,” writes Erika Balsom, “her allure is entangled with the sense that she somehow comes from another place or time. Casting doubt on the desirability of belonging and puncturing the boredom of the norm, she intrudes with the promise of something less ordinary. Nothing like the banal, ‘relatable’ celebrities of today, Ingrid Caven is a celestial creature of glorious artifice and terrible glamour: a rupture, a fantasy, a visitant.”

Sticking Place Books has just published Mexico: The Aztec Account of the Conquest, a screenplay that Werner Herzog wrote in the early 1990s. Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope expressed interest in helping Herzog shoot the film, but the costs proved prohibitively high. In the foreword, Herzog writes: “I have spent not one sleepless night over the fact that I could not realize this project.”

“Screenplays can make for dry reading,” writes Ryan Gilbey in the Guardian, “but Mexico fully evokes an entire civilization, as well as the bonkers movie that might have been. Fleets of ships burn on the coast, and there are stage directions for frogs, goats, and ocelots. When a bridge collapses under the weight of thousands of people, one character makes a gruesome escape across the carnage: ‘Incredibly, his very long lance clutched horizontally before him, Alvarado reaches the breach at top speed, impales the wriggling mass of bodies, and pole vaults himself to safety,’ writes Herzog.”

In the New York Review of Books, Andrew Katzenstein writes about Rob Kozlowski’s “brisk dual biography” Becoming Nick and Nora: The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy and Stuart Klawans’s “incisive collection of essays” Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges. The backbone of his piece, though, is a response to Grégoire Halbout’s Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals, “perhaps the most ambitious attempt to define the genre and catalog its examples. It is a dense academic work that’s full of jargon and that assumes readers know the difference between a typical MGM couple and a Warners Bros. one, but it’s carefully argued, contains a wealth of insight, and is refreshingly broad-minded.”

Katzenstein takes on Halbout’s claim that “screwball romances point the way toward a more democratic society with greater gender and economic equality: they bridge class divides, humble the proud, and give the timid courage to fight for what they deserve and to overcome the obstacles put up by disapproving snobs and elders.” Halbout “calls a couple ‘the smallest possible democratic unit,’ and screwball couples, with their inclusiveness and ‘logic of mutual consent,’ offer a ‘model for society’—nothing less than a ‘Screwball New Deal’ to aid ‘the construction and defense of America’s democratic regime.’” For Katzenstein, this notion that “romantic love can lead to economic and political regeneration” is “a pleasing one, but it’s overwrought and overdetermined.”

Herman G. Weinberg was a critic and filmmaker who, as Zach Campbell points out, was on friendly terms with Erich von Stroheim, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Flaherty, and Fritz Lang, who wrote the preface for Weinberg’s 1970 collection Saint Cinema: Selected Writings (1929–1970). “Weinberg’s enthusiasms, anecdotes, and insights are charming,” writes Campbell, “but more than that, they’re testaments to a distinct temperament and attitude toward film, toward the arts, toward life and culture. The know-it-all cinephile might flip through a few pages of the book and dismiss Weinberg as a cobwebbed aesthetic conservative from times past, and little more. But to do so would be a mistake, if we are interested in film and if we are curious about the past as more than a carcass to be scavenged for looks and vibes.”

For Documentary Magazine, Arta Barzanji talks with Nora M. Alter about her new book, Harun Farocki: Forms of Intelligence, a study of the late filmmaker and critic who edited the journal Filmkritik for a decade, taught at Berkeley, and collaborated with Christian Petzold. Alter has written books on both the essay film and German culture, and in 2002, she “team-taught” a course with Farocki at the University of Florida. For Barzanji, Forms of Intelligence is “the most comprehensive English language study of one of the essay film’s most prominent practitioners,” and when he asks Alter if she might sum up Farocki’s creative practice, she replies, “Yes—how to think with and through images.”

In an excerpt from The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema in the Notebook, Laure Astourian focuses on Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963) and Resnais’s intention “to accurately portray contemporary French society in 1962, in the immediate aftermath of the [Algerian War]. As in the films examined throughout this book, Resnais’s ethnographic focus on urban, bourgeois France—its tics, habits, and rituals—is articulated in relation to the end of the colonial empire.”

In need of an absorbing tale? The Guardian has two recommendations. Navid Sinaki’s “unflinching and bold debut explores the chilling reality for his gay compatriots in Iran,” writes Lucy Popescu. “Threaded throughout Medusa of the Roses are references to old Hollywood films—The Postman Always Rings Twice is particularly relevant—as well as allusions to Persian folklore and classical mythology.” And for Rachel Cooke, Charles Burns’s new graphic novel Final Cut is “wraparound wonderful, as close to immersive as any comic could be. Here are crimson, squid-like figures falling from an azure sky; here are delicately monochrome evocations of the B-movies of the past.”

In the New York Times, Sadie Stein compares and contrasts Boileau-Narcejac’s 1956 novel The Living and the Dead, which is set in 1940s Paris, and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 adaptation, Vertigo, set in San Francisco and filmed “in dazzling VistaVision. Boileau-Narcejac (the pen name of the powerhouse writing team Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac) would define a particularly French form of noir that allowed for the possibility of the uncanny and was all the more unnerving for it. While both the novel and the film deal in ideas of fixation and play with reality and perception, the settings affect both the moods and the very different endings.”

Stein’s also recently picked up a copy of Cameron Crowe’s 1981 book Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a chronicle of the year he spent as a twenty-two-year-old gone undercover as a high-school student in San Diego. “Can you really call this nonfiction?” wonders Stein. The story has “the pacing, characterizations, and suspiciously well-remembered dialogue of another era’s gonzo journalism.”

The book was optioned before it was released, Crowe wrote the screenplay, and Amy Heckerling directed the 1982 sleeper hit—which became, as Dana Stevens writes, “a heavy-rotation staple on cable, a movie my siblings and I and all of our friends could and did quote liberally from memory. Now, with a few decades of distance, it seems obvious that Fast Times is one of the most distinctive directorial debuts of its era, and one of the most influential high-school movies ever made.”

Let’s flag a couple of new reviews of books recently featured in these monthly roundups. “I can hardly imagine a more complete biography of an artist who, by just about everyone’s account, deserves the label ‘genius,’” writes Todd Berliner in his review for Cineaste of Carrie Courogen’s “illuminating new biography,” Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius. At Hyperallergic, Sophie Monks Kaufman finds Carrie Rickey’s A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda to be “a scrupulous, affectionate, and occasionally vivid chronicle,” and Keith Phipps interviews Rickey at the Reveal.

Every now and then, we’ll remind you that New Books Network offers recordings of conversations with writers of books on films, including, for example, Miranda Melcher’s interview with Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, whose new book, Movies Under the Influence—as Bruno Guaraná writes, introducing his interview for the new Film Quarterly—“convincingly argues that moviegoing and substance use occupy the same corner of American cultural history.”

To wrap with a list, at Shepherd, Rosemarie and Vince Keenan, who write together as Renee Patrick, recommend five of the “best film books that are biographies of a single movie,” beginning with Lillian Ross’s Picture, “the 1952 book that essentially invented this format.” As a New Yorker staff writer, Ross followed the making of John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951) “from start to finish, explaining how the two-hour version that Huston regarded as his best work became a sixty-nine-minute afterthought.”