January Books

Sheryl Lee in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992)

“People are like radios,” David Lynch once said, “they pick up signals.” Mike Miley, whose book David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema will be out on February 6, tells Emma Spector in Vogue that nearly fifteen years ago, he began wondering, “Okay, what are the signals that are in his work? Like, what are the frequencies that he’s tuning into, that we’re tuning into, and how would being aware of those things make the work richer and deeper and more moving?”

Miley’s book delves into resonances between Lynch’s work and strains of American music ranging from folk songs and tragic ballads to mixtapes and Lana Del Rey. Literary touchstones include children’s books, the novels of Nathanael West and Cormac McCarthy, and the immeasurably influential writing of David Foster Wallace. Miley has cut a nifty trailer that serves as an introduction to his project.

Looking ahead to more forthcoming releases, The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City, the latest in a series of handsome companions to Anderson’s films from Matt Zoller Seitz, will be out this week. This new volume features behind-the-scenes ephemera, interviews with Anderson and Jason Schwartzman, and contributions from Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Bryan Cranston, and others. RogerEbert.com is running the foreword by the late David Bordwell. “To put it cryptically,” writes Bordwell in an illuminating deep dive, in Anderson’s eleventh feature, “a television version of an imaginary play’s production is supplemented by an unmade film of the play.”

On March 13 in London, Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes will be joined by Joanna Hogg for a screening of a 35 mm print of Douglas Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). Afterward, there will be a discussion of their book, The Prop, a study of “the material—often literal—furniture of cinema’s diegetic reality.”

April will see the release of James Miller’s The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films, and in May, Verso Books will publish J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, and Radical Pop. When Hoberman’s The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties came out in 2003, it came with a blurb from the great writer and activist Mike Davis: “J. Hoberman is simply the best historian of that hallucinatory decade when politics imitated celluloid and movies invaded reality.”

Midcentury Glamor and Grit

In the Observer, Dalya Alberge tantalizes us with snippets of tales from Hollywood on the Tiber, a memoir of Rome in the 1950s and ’60s written by American talent agents Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner in the 1970s, published in Italy in 1982, and only now coming out in English from Sticking Place Books. Marlon Brando flees a movie theater and Ava Gardner, Anita Ekberg, and Shelley Winters all deal with troublesome men. “The myth, the legend, but also the abyss and its squalor, one full of drug addiction, unrealized dreams, and sexual favors,” writes producer Sandy Lieberson in the foreword, “Hollywood on the Tiber is all these things together. It is heaven and hell.” And Lieberson’s a recent guest on John Bleasdale’s Writers on Film podcast.

At Air Mail, Jason Colavito, the author of Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean, credits Walter Ross’s 1958 novel The Immortal with opening “a surprising window into how openly the ‘secret’ of James Dean’s queerness circulated within the entertainment industry in the 1950s, and how assiduously the mainstream press covered it up in a homophobic era.” Colavito’s research “culminated in the first systematic evaluation of more than 400 pages of Dean’s long-secret correspondence and personal and business records, which had remained hidden until 2023, when they were made public ahead of their auction.”

Marilyn Monroe, a collection of photographs by Eve Arnold, was originally published in 1987 and has now been reissued in a revised edition with newly mastered prints. “It is not special pleading on Arnold’s part when she claims that Monroe took still photography as seriously, if not more so, than film,” writes John Banville in the Guardian. “There are some wonderfully intimate, tender, and witty photographs in this big sumptuous volume, as well as ones that capture, as only the still camera can, the insecurity and pain behind the ever-smiling facade.”

For the Los Angeles Times, Gary Goldstein talks with writer and journalist Lou Mathews about Hollywoodski, “a novelized collection of short stories that takes a colorful, satirical, and darkly affectionate look at LA through the eyes of fictional Hollywood screenwriter Dale Davis, a onetime success now hovering on the fringes of show business.” Goldstein notes that “the title story alone references dialogue from 1948’s Joan of Arc, 1961’s The Hustler, and 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, with other random shout-outs to such pictures as Easy Rider, the 1976 King Kong remake, Kansas City Bomber, and Two-Lane Blacktop. To repeat: that’s all in one chapter.”

Directors Reading and Writing

Before Lee Chang-dong, the director of Secret Sunshine (2007) and Burning (2018), began making films in the 1990s, he was known as a writer. Several short works of fiction first published in South Korea in the 1980s have been collected in Snowy Day and Other Stories, translated by Yoosup Chang and Heinz Insu Fenkl. The New Yorker is running one of them, “The Leper,” in which the narrator learns that his father is under arrest, having confessed to spying for North Korea.

During the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, “I was a writer,” Lee tells Cressida Leyshon, “who believed in William Faulkner’s idea that literature should be for the souls of the suffering people—‘the problem of the human heart in conflict with itself’—but in the face of the regime’s violence, my words felt less powerful than a single line of a slogan at a protest.” Lee and Leyshon also discuss the current perilous state of democracy in South Korea, and Lee mentions that he’s working on a screenplay and hopes to shoot a new feature this year.

The New Yorker has also asked Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Queer) to discuss a few of his favorite books, and he manages to weave connections between The Complete Bocuse, a cookbook by the renowned chef Paul Bocuse; Masha Gessen’s The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin; and Thomas Mann’s classic 1901 novel Buddenbrooks. “Mann was interested in the decadence of the bourgeoisie,” writes Guadagnino, “and he cast the kernel of repression as the bomb at its center.”

The recent publications of a handful of works by Pier Paolo Pasolini—his first novel, Boys Alive, translated by Tim Parks; his fourth novel, Theorem, translated by Stuart Hood; and Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting, a collection edited by Alessandro Giammei and Ara H. Merjian—have Barry Schwabsky wondering in the Point: “In the long run, will Pasolini the novelist ever attain the canonical status accorded to Pasolini the filmmaker? Could it be that, if we read the novels at all, we mostly do so to better understand the cineaste—just as the photographs of Andrei Tarkovsky or Wim Wenders belong more to the history of cinema than of photography? . . . Nobody was ever so much of his time by being so much against it.”

European Perspectives

Published by Courtisane in collaboration with Sabzian, In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro is a collection of interviews and essays, most of them appearing for the first time in English: “Made between 1974 and 1989, their films deal with rural communities, rituals, and landscapes, blending reality, fiction, ethnography, and poetry into a lyrical evocation of the northeastern Portuguese region of Trás-os-Montes.”

Sabzian is running a 1997 interview with Cordeiro conducted by Anabela Moutinho and translated by Raquel Morais. And with an Ulrike Ottinger retrospective running through February 23 at the Cinematek in Brussels, Sabzian has also posted pages from Ottinger’s workbooks for her 2020 film Paris Calligrammes.

Serge Daney, the founder of the quarterly review Trafic, a former editor at Cahiers du cinéma, and a regular contributor to Libération, passed away in 1992. A little less than a year later, Jean-Claude Biette and Emmanuel Crimail put together a collection of unpublished writing—notes, lists, fragments—that appeared as L’exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (The Exercise Was Beneficial, Sir). Laurent Kretzschmar and Andy Rector have translated “roughly the first sixteen pages” in which Daney’s thoughts were focused on the state of moviegoing, cinephilia, and “the reign of television.”

Updates

Occasionally in these roundups, we update our notes on books so significant that they’re discussed and written about for longer—sometimes a lot longer—than a month after they appear. John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is one example. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody calls it “a rapturously detailed, sensitively observed, critically insightful account, in which the filmmaker emerges as someone whose presence, long kept out of public view, appears to have entranced more or less everyone with whom he crossed paths—and whose personal life stands in peculiar and powerful relation to his artistry.”

“With her lavishly illustrated book,” David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, Violet Lucca “has given us the most rigorous critical analysis of the director’s work to date, reframing Cronenberg’s career as something more than the work of a master of ‘body horror,’ a term that she regards as reductive and dismissive,” writes Marc Weingarten in the Los Angeles Times. “Instead of a facile thrill-seeker, Lucca locates in Cronenberg’s work the mind of a moralist and social critic with a taste for blood, writing that his films can be approached through various critical entry points: as cautionary tales about demagoguery in the age of scientific progress, or the dissolution of the self when confronted by a world thrown out of whack by money and desire.”

Port has an excerpt from Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay in which artist Theaster Gates writes about a crucial scene in Jordan Peele’s 2019 film, a “turn of events” that “forces me to think about the nature versus nurture debates and the ways the simulacrum within the Black filmic milieu creates its own horror and self-awareness.”

With John Joseph Adams, Peele has coedited Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, and for El Pais, Borja Bas talks with one of the contributors, P. Djèlí Clark, and with Robin R. Means Coleman, coauthor with Mark H. Harris of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar. The book addresses tropes such as the “sacrificial Black man” and the “Magical Negro,” but as Means Coleman emphasizes, “there’s no cliché more harmful than systematically erasing the presence of Black people: it’s been the most effective way of silencing us historically.”

Screen Slate has a transcript of Jonathan Mackris’s recent conversation with Jonathan Rosenbaum about In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, a collection of his writing on film, literature, and jazz. Ultimately, “a critic should not have the first word or the last word about any film,” says Rosenbaum. “A critic who’s doing a good job is improving the level and the terms of the discussion, so that there’s a wider sense of options.”

Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar is “generous but refuses to make its subject a saint,” writes Nicole Flattery in the London Review of Books, “and it’s in her bad behavior that Darling seems most alive. ‘When Darling entered a room, men stood,’ the playwright Robert Patrick said. ‘They instinctively stood in the presence of the goddess. Before she opened her mouth and started the Candy craziness, she projected a real movie star effect. Aristocratic. Ladylike.’ It would be naive to think that a woman who spent time at the library researching Jean Harlow didn’t know how to use her allure.”

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