November Books

Last month, the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum launched a Kramer retrospective that runs through November 28, and the Museum has published Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer. The centerpiece is a series of interviews critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz conducted not long before Kramer died in 1999, and excerpts can be heard on the latest episode of the Film Comment Podcast. Edited by Volker Pantenburg, Starting Places includes three of Kramer’s essays as well as an updated bibliography and filmography.

Film Comment is also running Christopher Small’s conversation with Eisenschitz, who tells Small that Kramer “was able to develop a great political culture and film culture around himself, a culture that he built for himself. You characterized it another way when we spoke earlier: he changed emotions into physical action, which is, of course, a very good definition of what his filmmaking is about.”

This week brings a new issue of Senses of Cinema, featuring a dossier on the “Many Histories of the Melbourne Cinémathèque”; articles on Billy Wilder, Wang Bing, and Hayao Miyazaki; profiles of Mai Zetterling and Alain Delon; and, of course, book reviews. As it happens, all five titles address a separate body of work in film criticism: Béla Balázs’s Visible Man, Marguerite Duras’s My Cinema, Nicole Brenez’s On the Figure in Particular and the Body in Particular, Hannah Goodwin’s Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World, and Reverse Shot: Twenty Years of Film Criticism in Four Movements.

Kenneth Fearing “wrote for Time and for Newsweek; he wrote porn under a pseudonym; he reviewed films for New Masses, beating the drum for Fritz Lang and Raoul Walsh,” writes Patrick Preziosi at the Theater of the Matters. “Robert Polito is correct in slotting in Fearing with Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens as a preeminent modernist.”

John Bleasdale tells M. Sellers Johnson at Film International that readers will likely find “a lot of surprises” in his new book The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick. Johnson asks why it is that many on board with the Malick who made Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978) have disembarked after The Tree of Life (2011), for example, or one of Bleasdale’s favorites, To the Wonder (2012). “Michael Cimino called Malick the one true poet of cinema,” says Bleasdale, “and I think that is key to how his later films have been misunderstood. It’s like we’re reading Shelley or Blake and wondering where the story is and why the lines don’t go to the edge of the page.”

Vanity Fair’s Savannah Walsh talks with Ilana Kaplan about her new book Nora Ephron at the Movies, and in the New York Times, Celia McGee maps the influence of Ephron’s essays, novels, and films on contemporary storytelling and all across social media. “Underpinning the book,” writes McGee, “is a constant reminder that Ephron’s female characters could be imperfect, neurotic, irritating, and irrational—and that, in combining heartbreak with humor, Ephron continued to make good on her mother’s insistence that ‘everything is copy.’”

Tim Robey’s Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops is an “erudite and brilliantly entertaining chronicle of movie excess,” writes Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Guardian. This “five-star book” is “a colorful catalogue of disaster, chock-full of clashing egos, runaway budgets, and acts of God.”

In a piece for the Washington Post on Burt Kearns’s Shemp! The Biography of the Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard and Robert S. Bader’s Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother,Donald Liebenson talks with comedian Dana Gould. “Their roles were difficult,” says Gould. “Shemp, in my world, is like the Cramps; everybody who knows what is good knows that this is good. And Zeppo is crucial to the Marx Brothers. Zeppo brought something to the group that was missing when he left.”

In Richard Ayoade’s The Unfinished Harauld Hughes, a documentarian named Richard Ayoade sets out to make a film about O Bedlam! O Bedlam!, a never-completed movie by Harauld Hughes, a playwright and screenwriter who will remind many readers of Harold Pinter. Ayoade’s sixth book “joins a rich tradition of fake biographies—think of William Boyd’s Nat Tate—but Ayoade’s jeu d’esprit is more knockabout spoof than credible hoax,” writes Tristram Fane Saunders in the Telegraph. “It’s not always subtle, but it’s often very, very funny.”

“What tips this from being a comic novel into something more like a conceptual art project,” writes Sam Leith in the Guardian, “is that, foolishly or heroically, Ayoade has actually written the complete works of Harauld Hughes, in three volumes—Four Films, Plays Prose Pieces Poetry, and The Models Trilogy—released, apparently, as limited editions, alongside the novel. So you can now read or even perform Platform, or The Awful Woman from Space. They come with straight-faced prefaces, timelines, deleted scenes, critical essays, the lot. That’s a degree of commitment to world-building George R. R. Martin could learn from.”

In Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon—where, by the way, you’ll find an excerpt from Film by Design: The Art of the Movie Poster—Stephen Galloway talks with Dan Bronson about Shout at the Devil, his second Hollywood mystery centering on Jack Shannon, an underemployed stuntman. Jack used to be a studio fixer, and he takes up an offer from a comely star to thwart a blackmail attempt and winds up becoming a prime suspect when the blackmailer is murdered.

Bronson is a literature professor who has worked as a story analyst at Universal, Fox, and Paramount, and he tells Galloway that he’s known Hollywood “intimately most of my life. For me, it embodies the title of one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s worst novels. It’s beautiful and it’s damned, an embodiment of one of the great literary themes: the chasm between appearance and reality. I used to think Shakespeare said it best—‘All that glitters is not gold,’ but I’ve come to believe that Hollywood says it better.”

City Journal contributing editor Jonathan Clarke goes long on Fitzgerald and the novel he was working on when he died in 1940 at the age of forty-four. The Last Tycoon is loosely based on the life of the “Boy Wonder” producer Irving Thalberg, and it “draws directly from Fitzgerald’s work as a screenwriter,” notes Clarke. “Fitzgerald saw how the industry manipulated symbols to forge the American unconscious. He also saw the studio system that divided and conquered its workers in the service of capital as broadly representative of contending forces in American life generally.”

In Esther Kinsky’s Seeing Further, the unnamed narrator renovates an abandoned movie theater she’s discovered in a village on the Hungarian plain near the Romanian border. “The privileged site for investigating ‘the how of seeing’ is the cinema, where images seen and things experienced are one and the same phenomenon,” writes Ben Libman in the New York Times. “The narrator’s own reminiscences of the last century, ‘the cinema century,’ unfurl a vast cultural memory of moviegoing as a lost form of community, even shelter-taking.”

Writing at Air Mail, Errol Morris lays out his quibbles with Salman Rushdie’s interpretation of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and then turns to the 1900 children’s novel it’s based on and the story of its author, L. Frank Baum. One of Baum’s early, self-published volumes was The Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows and Interiors. “In the hundreds and hundreds of books that have been written about Baum and his work,” writes Morris, “only a few appreciate this 300-plus-page, lavishly illustrated monograph for what it really is: the underpinning to Oz, a metaphysical scaffolding for what follows.”

In the Notebook, Alex Dueben recommends Blurry, the latest graphic novel from Dash Shaw, the director of two animated features, My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (2016) and Cryptozoo (2021). In Blurry, the narrative focus shifts from character to character, and its overall structure echoes “novels like A Visit from the Goon Squad or films like Magnolia (1999),” suggests Dueben, “ensemble narratives whose sense of ambling from one character to another belies their very tight structure.”

From 1962 to 1992, millions of American households capped off their evenings with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The congenial host’s “style—both sartorial and, at least on camera, interpersonal—represented a new kind of cool: relaxed but quick-witted, generous but judgmental, controlled but possessed of an anarchic streak that he could deploy whenever bored or presented with second-rate material,” writes Isaac Butler in the New Yorker.

Bill Zehme, the author of books on Frank Sinatra and Andy Kaufman and a frequent contributor to Esquire in its heyday, spent years working on Carson the Magnificent and passed away last year before he’d completed it. Mike Thomas, a collaborator who’s written a biography of Phil Hartman, drew on Zehme’s extensive notes to finish the job. Carson the Magnificent is “less a portrait of Carson than a portrait of Zehme’s obsession with Carson,” writes Butler. “This is not necessarily a bad thing. Writers’ obsessions can illuminate their subjects in ways that more dispassionate approaches can’t. But, in this instance, Zehme’s compulsive overwriting and anti-dramatic priorities settle over Carson like a fog.”

In the Washington Post, though, James Wolcott finds that Carson the Magnificent “delivers the man in full while keeping the mystery of what made him tick alive.” Revisit Carson’s Tonight Show now, suggests Wolcott, and we’ll discover that “each episode [is] a time capsule whose topical references may require annotation, but Carson himself hasn’t acquired a speck of rust, his flair for phrasing the equal of Sinatra’s.”

Emily Nussbaum’s Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV is “a sometimes grim, occasionally gleeful account of the way that television can not just mirror but also create real life,” wrote Philip Maciak in the New Republic this summer. Last week, Topic Studios, the company behind such films as Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny and David Lowery’s forthcoming Mother Mary, announced that it was developing a docuseries based on Nussbaum’s book.

Passing along a few quick notes on books featured in previous monthly roundups, we should mention that on November 26, Tone Glow will celebrate the publication of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities: A Jonathan Rosenbaum Reader with an evening of short films by Michael Snow, Owen Land, and Peter Bull and a Q&A with Rosenbaum. For the Chicago Reader, where Rosenbaum was the chief film critic from 1987 to 2008, Joshua Minsoo Kim talks with him about growing up in the Jim Crow South, championing Jacques Rivette in London, and distinguishing the difference between criticism and advertising.

The latest issue of Bookforum offers Hannah Gold on Al Pacino’s memoir, Sonny Boy, and A. S. Hamrah on Carrie Rickey’s “compact, complete, and highly enjoyable” A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda. Rickey’s book is “moving because Varda’s life was moving,” writes Hamrah, “and because its existence made me realize I’d been waiting for it.” For Jim Hemphill at IndieWire, it’s “one of the best books ever written about the intersection between a director’s personal life and their work.”

They’re not books, but two periodicals testify to the tenacious endurance of print. The seventh edition of Textur is dedicated to Roberto Minervini (The Other Side, The Damned) and features contributions from former Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson and All We Imagine as Light director Payal Kapadia. The Notebook is running an excerpt in which Jessica Sarah Rinland writes about a passage from Low Tide (2012), Minervini’s portrait of a neglected boy in a small Texas town.

New York’s Metrograph, in the meantime, is launching a biannual magazine. For the New York Times, Alex Vadukul talks with the editorial team headed up by Annabel Brady-Brown about the inaugural issue of the Metrograph, which will hit shelves next month and feature Nick Pinkerton’s interview with Clint Eastwood, a conversation between Ari Aster and Daniel Clowes, and contributions from Steve Martin, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Amalia Ulman.

Scott MacDonald, who has written nearly two dozen books on independent, experimental, and documentary cinema, has a new one out today, Publication as Autobiography. The collection from Sticking Place Books gathers essays on filmmakers Peter Watkins, James Benning, and Peter Hutton, writers Ernest Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell, curator Amos Poe, and more. Next week, Sticking Place will release Adrian Martin’s Filmmakers Thinking, which gathers directors’ writings on cinema and serves, as Martin puts it, as “a kind of ‘taste sampler’ or a smorgasbord spread—selected quotations interspersed with my own notations.”

On Thursday, the publication of Lucrecia Martel: La circulation will mark the opening of a retrospective at Centre Pompidou, and then later this month, Gallimard will publish the screenplay for Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) with commentary from writers Justine Triet and Arthur Harari. Even if you don’t read French, the drawing by David Lynch for this special edition might be tempting.

December will see the release of Joseph McBride’s George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director and Violet Lucca’s David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials. Brace yourself, then, for February. Biographer Patrick McGilligan has written books on Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Orson Welles, and his Clint: The Life and Legend so infuriated Eastwood that he sued. McGilligan’s next book will not likely go unnoticed. Eight hundred and thirty-two pages and hitting shelves on February 4: Woody Allen: Life and Legacy: A Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham.

Looking further ahead into 2025, we see Marya E. Gates’s Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words heading our way in March. Interviewees include Jane Campion, Susan Seidelman, and Mira Nair. Jason Bailey’s Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend will be out in April, and May will bring Stephen Broomer’s Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett, a critical biography of “a visionary force and a holy fool.”