February Books

Writing for n+1 and drawing on Andrei Gorzo and Veronica Lazăr’s Beyond the New Romanian Cinema: Romanian Culture, History, and the Films of Radu Jude, Alan Dean presents a thoroughgoing primer on one of the most vital filmmakers working today. “A half generation younger than New Romanian Cinema’s original luminaries, Jude is at once their artistic peer and inheritor,” writes Dean. “He has made films firmly within the tradition and films that transgress nearly every axiom that defines it.” Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) “affirms what Gorzo, Lazăr, and other critics have already argued: that Jude’s oeuvre simultaneously makes a claim on the legacy of one of the great film traditions of the twenty-first century and points to something radically new, for Romanian and world cinema alike.”

Hollywood Men

Reviewing Kenneth Turan’s Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation for the Los Angeles Times, Charles Arrowsmith writes that Mayer was “the platonic ideal of a movie mogul, once described as ‘a shark that killed when it wasn’t hungry,’” while Thalberg was “a sickly but energetic man” whose “brilliance was obvious.” Working together in the 1920s and ’30s, they “made MGM the most successful movie studio in Hollywood,” and Turan’s book is “an entertaining, literate and beautifully crafted contribution to Hollywood history.”

In an excerpt from The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader at RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya writes about Winchester ’73 (1950), starring James Stewart as a sharpshooter whose rifle is stolen. “He wants satisfaction bad,” writes Tafoya. “When he erupts into violence, you’d almost convinced yourself he wasn’t like that, that the man who instinctively grabbed a gun was responding to conditioning, not the direction of his twisted heart. Stewart would continue to let self-loathing and fury and persecution seep into his characters for Mann as the ’50s wore on, allowing himself, he who stood in for veterans on the home front, to become a lacerating object, a cancer in the saddle.”

Iconoclastic Performers

In Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance, Florence Jacobowitz “argues that Huppert’s artistic career represents a form of cultural resistance, using her art to challenge social norms and redefine what it means to be an actress in contemporary modernist cinema,” writes Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo for Film International. Jacobowitz “places Huppert within the tradition of modernist cinema, influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s theater, Robert Bresson’s films, and the nouveau roman movement.”

Jeff Copeland met and was immediately entranced by Holly Woodlawn when he first saw her at a party in Los Angeles in 1989. They hit it off, and Copeland helped Woodlawn write her 1991 autobiography, A Low Life in High Heels. “On the heels of Cynthia Carr’s acclaimed 2024 biography of Candy Darling, and the recent death of Paul Morrissey, we’re overdue for a reappraisal of Woodlawn’s life and career, too,” writes Graham Russell in Interview. Russell then talks with Copeland, whose new book is Love You Madly, Holly Woodlawn: A Walk on the Wild Side with Andy Warhol's Most Fabulous Superstar.

Moviegoers’ Memoirs

Introducing his exchange at Slant with Doug Dibbern, the author of Alone in the Dark: Cinephilia and the Heroic Imagination, Richard Scott Larson describes his own memoir, The Long Hallway, as “a coming-out and coming-of-age story told through the lens of my childhood obsession with John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween, specifically the masked character of Michael Myers as an embodiment of my closeted and—at least to my mind at the time—dangerous and insidious self.” The two then discuss “how writing about the movies ultimately led us back to writing about ourselves.”

Ryan Gilbey, who has most recently written for us about Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970), will have a memoir out in June. It Used to Be Witches: Under the Spell of Queer Cinema blends personal recollections with criticism and conversations with such directors as Andrew Haigh, Cheryl Dunye, Isabel Sandoval, and Bruce LaBruce.

Interviews

IndieWire is running an excerpt from Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words, and for Comicon.com, Rachel Bellwoar talks with Marya E. Gates about her collection of interviews with nineteen filmmakers including Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Miranda July, Karyn Kusama, Mira Nair, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Susan Seidelman. “There is this idea that only men are auteurs, or that only a few women have made enough films to warrant a study of their body of work and that is simply not true,” says Gates. “I believe that the more people who know that many women have robust bodies of work, the more likely it will be that all women will get a chance to make a second, third, fourth, or even more films.”

At RogerEbert.com, Donald Liebenson talks with Andrew Buss about his new book, I Am McLovin: How Superbad Became the Biggest Comedy Hit of Its Generation.“Like a lot of the great high school movies, [Superbad] is defining for a generation, but universal in its appeal,” says Buss. “Dazed and Confused is set in the ’70s, The Breakfast Club defines what it means to be a kid in the ’80s, and Clueless is very ’90s. But each still holds up today. Superbad is set in 2007. I saw it with my father, who belongs to Gen-X, and my grandfather, who was born in the 1930s. We were all able to laugh and relate . . . Everyone’s had a best friend that they’ve drifted away from.”

Buss is a guest on the Writers on Film podcast, where host John Bleasdale has also recently spoken with David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film), Robert Sellers (The Search for Bond: How the 007 Role Was Won and Lost), Christopher Frayling (Sergio Leone by Himself), Geoff Dyer (Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy: On Where Eagles Dare), and Matt Zoller Seitz, who discusses A Hidden Life (2019) as part of Bleasdale’s ongoing series expanding on his biography, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick.

Chapters in History

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas’s The Cinema Coven: Witches, Witchcraft and Women’s Filmmaking “provides a remarkable deconstruction of the heterosexist witch fantasies, examining how contemporary women cinema auteurs have liberated the demonic and sexually autonomous enchantress from the captivity of the male gaze,” writes Dávid Szőke for Film International. “Unfolding the tensions between the gender politics embedded in male-directed feature films from the past and the empowering visual narratives by women in the present, Heller’s book explores how alternative modes of representation might rearrange the frontiers of filmic witch depictions.”

John Baxter, the author of books on Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, and Ken Russell, has written and presented three series for Australian television, Filmstruck, First Take, and The Cutting Room. At Film Alert 101, he introduces his latest book, Secret Cinema: The Rise and Fall of the Blue Movie: “Living in Los Angeles in the late ’80s, I was fortunate enough to fall in with the wrong crowd.”

Updates

Beginning on March 1, all six features Lee Chang-dong has directed, from Green Fish (1997) through Burning (2018), will be viewable on the Criterion Channel. In last month’s books roundup, we flagged an interview with Lee that ran in the New Yorker alongside one of his short works of fiction translated by Yoosup Chang and Heinz Insu Fenkl and collected in Snowy Day and Other Stories. These “vivid, realist stories depict 1980s South Korea during the oppressive military dictatorship of President Chun Doo-hwan,” writes Camille Bromley in the New York Times. “In the Korea of these pages, threats to youthful idealism and ambition—the military, police, and other institutional enforcers of the political regime—are unambiguous and in plain sight.”

Violet Lucca conducted several interviews while writing David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, but not every exchange made the final edit. So she’s begun posting those cut sections, beginning with one taken from her conversation with composer Howard Shore about Dead Ringers (1988). “I wrote that score in a dream,” says Shore.

Writing about Carrie Courogen’s Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius in the new Bookforum, Lizzy Harding notes that for Courogen, “May’s unserious attitude toward publicity and straight facts is evidence of her preference ‘for selective participation in the real world.’ But seen another way, May’s terms of engagement perfectly represent the woman who once told an audience, ‘To actually make something that isn’t boring is kind of hard to do.’”

Endnotes

In a brief note on A Shared Cinema, a collection of interviews conducted by N. T. Binh with the renowned critic Michel Ciment, Jonathan Rosenbaum notes that Travels in the Cities of Cinema, in which he is the interviewee and Il Cinema Ritrovato codirector Ehsan Khoshbakht is the interviewer, will be out next month. There’s also a lot to look forward to in June: Michael Koresky’s Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness, Scott Ryan’s Always Music in the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks, and Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark, a collection edited by Robert Shail and Sheldon Hall. And October will see the release of Abel Ferrara’s memoir, Scene. For more recommendations, see Christopher Schobert’s latest roundup at the Film Stage.

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