New Book Releases / Spring 2025

If you would like to alert us to a recent or forthcoming film publication for the next round-up in summer, please contact us here. For notes on more books, see David Hudson’s monthly round-up at Criterion’s The Daily.

While our own Johan van der Keuken retrospective, Seeing, Looking, Filming – named after the eponymous Dutch book compiling many of his texts – came to an end, the Punto de Vista festival in Navarra, Spain, organised the first-ever international retrospective of Dutch filmmaker Frans van de Staak. Titled Frans van de Staak. The Word as Archipelago, the retrospective featured eleven of his twenty-five films and accompanied by a bilingual (Spanish and English) monograph – the first dedicated to his cinema. The publication arrives at a moment of growing interest in Van de Staak, who began his artistic journey as a self-taught painter and engraver in the early 1960s before becoming one of the most significant avant-garde filmmakers in the Netherlands. Hailed by Jean-Marie Straub as the “only true heir to Dziga Vertov,” Van de Staak (1943–2001) was a prolific underground figure with a singular place in Dutch cinema. To borrow Van der Keuken’s words: “Consider that there is no truer poet of the silver screen than this possibly critically modest and high-handed Van de Staak, who holds nothing back, not even a bomb, not even a conventional viewer with sodden sitting flesh, but who holds something open: a door.”

For our second book, we stay closer to home and turn to another key postwar avant-garde figure: poet, visual artist, and filmmaker Marcel Broodthaers. Marcel Broodthaers and Film. A Second of Eternity, edited by Steven Jacobs and Raf Wollaert, offers an in-depth exploration of Broodthaers’ filmmaking, covering well-known works such as Le corbeau et le renard (1967), La pluie (1969), and Une seconde d’éternité (1970), alongside lesser-known films. The essays in this volume examine his films as inseparable from his broader oeuvre, situating them within the history of experimental cinema. Additionally, the book delves into his experiments with cinepoetry and expanded cinema, his engagement with early cinema, and his fascination with signs and inscriptions. Marcel Broodthaers and Film features contributions from Andrew Chesher, Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Xavier García Bardón, Charlotte Friling, Steven Jacobs, Bruce Jenkins, Deborah Schultz, Christophe Wall-Romana, and Raf Wollaert.

What is a writing filmmaker? Johan van der Keuken and Frans van de Staak, in their distinct ways, fit the term, as does Marcel Broodthaers, whose poetic sensibility shaped his approach to film. Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, the subject of our next book, once stated: “I’m a director who writes, not a writer.” A new publication by Film Desk Books, That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, gathers thirty-three richly suggestive texts by Antonioni, ranging in length from a single paragraph to several pages. “These are not conventional stories but rather evocative sketches or ‘narrative nuclei,’ each a seed for a possible film.” Though not all of the texts were written for realised projects, reading them offers a rare insight into Antonioni’s creative process as a filmmaker.

Another filmmaker who has explored the intersection of writing and cinema is Érik Bullot, whose Cinéma vivant investigates film as a performative act – one that moves beyond the screen to exist in text, speech, and live experience. Cinéma vivant, published by Éditions Macula in January 2025, delves into the concept of an “imaginary cinema,” exploring the boundaries and essence of the cinematic medium. Bullot, a filmmaker and theorist known for his experimental approach, reflects on the evolving nature of cinema, especially in an era where traditional viewing experiences are being transformed by technological advancements. Cinéma vivant is complemented by Bullot’s exhibition Voyages en kaléidoscope, held at Les Tanneries Centre d’art contemporain from January to April 2025.

In April, Le Camion. Un film de Marguerite Duras, a new book by Catherine Ermakoff will be published by De l’Incidence Éditeur. Marguerite Duras’s Le camion (1977) stands as one of the boldest experiments in writing and filmmaking. Originally conceived as a conventionally shot film, Duras ultimately abandoned that plan in favour of an audacious alternative: the film would not be made but read aloud. She and actor Gérard Depardieu sit before a desk, reciting the screenplay, while footage of a lorry traversing a wintry Parisian suburb unfolds in the background. The film strips cinema down to its barest elements, rejecting traditional principles – characters, acting, set design – in favour of the spoken word’s raw, unembellished force.

To conclude this section, the Cinemateca Portuguesa launched a new volume in its Folha da Cinemateca series dedicated to Iranian filmmaker and poet Abbas Kiarostami. Presented at the Cinemateca on 19 February, this latest compilation features writings on Kiarostami’s work by João Bénard da Costa, Luís Miguel Oliveira, Manuel Cintra Ferreira, and Maria João Madeira, who also curated the volume.

Last month, Sabzian and KASKcinema screened Bend of the River (1952) by Anthony Mann. Known in Hollywood as an exceptional “genre craftsman,” Mann was also highly esteemed by postwar film critics from Cahiers du Cinéma. André Bazin described him as a “true poet of the Western,” Jacques Rivette called him “one of the four great directors of postwar Hollywood,” and Jean-Luc Godard remarked that Mann rediscovered the Western as one might rediscover arithmetic in a basic math course. Author Scout Tafoya (But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper) examines every film in Mann’s oeuvre in his new book, The Black Book: An Anthony Mann Reader, published in January. He pays special attention to Mann’s 1949 guillotine opera, The Black Book (also known as Reign of Terror), which he describes as “the most gleefully black-hearted, erotically depraved achievement of ’40s low-budget cinema.” An excerpt on Winchester ‘73 can be read on RogerEbert.com.

As mentioned, Mann was greatly admired by the writers of Cahiers, particularly Jean-Luc Godard. It is a small leap, therefore, to some new publications on Godard, all three released by the publishing house Éditions de l’Œil. The first, Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, is an expanded edition of the original French book first published by Éditions de l’Albatros in 1980. In 1978, Jean-Luc Godard embarked on a series of fourteen lectures at Conservatoire d’Art Cinématographique de Montréal, invited by Serge Losique, the institution’s director. These sessions were part of a collaborative effort to develop a video series on the history of cinema – a project that would later evolve into Godard’s seminal work, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998). The original French transcription of these talks, published in 1980, omitted dialogues with Losique and contained transcription errors. A revised English edition, Introduction to a True History of Cinema and Television, translated and annotated by Timothy Barnard, was published by Caboose Books in 2014. The new French edition includes an editorial note and critical commentary by Nicole Brenez, an interview with Losique, as well as press releases, a chronology of the conferences, comments omitted from the 1980 edition, and interviews with Joël Farges, Line Gruyer, and Danielle Jaeggi. It also features illustrations from both the first and second editions and a review by Gérant Courant.

In addition to Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma, Editions de l’Œil has recently published two other books on Jean-Luc Godard. Godard/Averty: Petit et grand écran explores the connections between Godard and Jean-Christophe Averty, a pioneer of experimental television in France. Through a comparative analysis, the book examines their respective approaches to image-making and narrative construction across cinema and television. Vox JLG: Du plomb au film focuses on Godard’s use of language, voice, and sound in his films, highlighting how his cinematic discourse intertwines with political and poetic concerns.

Time to highlight two upcoming editions in the long-running BFI Film Classics book series. The first, set for release in June, is Vlad Dima’s study of Ousmane Sembène’s debut film La Noire de... (1966). Dima argues that the film helped shape the future of African cinema, situating it within its postcolonial context and examining its adaptation from Sembène’s 1962 short story. He analyses the performances of Mbissine Thérèse Diop (Diouana), Anne-Marie Jelinek (Madame), and Robert Fontaine (Monsieur), exploring how they embody or subvert postcolonial French archetypes. The book also delves into Sembène’s innovative use of framing and sound before tracing the film’s lasting influence on African cinema, from Sembène’s own Xala (1975) to Safi Faye’s Mossane (1996), Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï (2001), Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Saignantes (2005), and Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019).

Arriving in May, the second book is film scholar and critic Elena Gorfinkel’s new study of Wanda (1970), the only film directed by actress Barbara Loden and a landmark of American independent cinema. Drawing on archival sources – including scripts, interviews, production records, and previously unseen ephemera – Gorfinkel examines Loden’s unconventional approach to filmmaking, marked by a rejection of Hollywood’s “slickness.” She explores Wanda’s de-dramatised aesthetic, its use of narrative ellipsis, non-professional actors, and location shooting, as well as Loden’s distinctive framing of time, gesture, voice, and posture. The book also traces Wanda’s reception history and its enduring feminist legacy, highlighting its influence on contemporary filmmakers, artists, and writers. In a happy coincidence, Sabzian will be screening Wanda on 13 May at Cinema RITCS in Brussels!

From the modernist acting in Wanda, we turn to a book that slipped under our radar last autumn: Isabelle Huppert, Modernist Performance by scholar and film critic Florence Jacobowitz, a founding editor and contributor to CineAction magazine. Published by Wayne State University Press, with a foreword by Serge Toubiana, the book examines Huppert’s distinctive modernist performance style through detailed analyses of key films. Jacobowitz highlights autonomy – what she terms the “anti-victim” – as a defining aspect of Huppert’s persona. “Huppert’s refusal to surrender herself to the viewer through a character one fully knows disrupts the expectations of identification, inviting a distinctive approach to her characters,” she argues. “By creating a character informed by who she is, Huppert signals a process usually kept invisible. Huppert’s performances invite an active form of critical reading, directing one to fill in gaps and consider the character in relation to the social world.”

Curiously, Huppert never played Jeanne d’Arc on screen, though she famously took on the role in a stage production of Paul Claudel’s Jeanne au bûcher. On the INA website, she reflects on the role and her connection to the figure of Joan of Arc. A new addition to the Côté Cinéma / Motifs series at Yellow Now Books – curated by Dominique Païni, which explores recurring motifs in cinema – examines precisely this figure. L’attrait de Jeanne d’Arc, by writer Maurice Darmon, traces her mute presence from the earliest days of cinema, from Lumière actualités and Méliès’ fantasy films to Cecil B. DeMille’s historical epics. Darmon explores how Dreyer nearly made the first sound film with La passion de Jeanne d’Arc, before the Nazis robbed her of her voice and Hollywood recast her as a warrior legend. He follows her journey through cinema history – from Rossellini’s luminous Italian take to Preminger, Bresson, and the New European Cinema, before modern auteurs like Gleb Panfilov, Alain Cavalier, Jacques Rivette, Marcel Hanoun, and Bruno Dumont reimagined her anew.

The final book in this section takes a different turn: an idiosyncratic ode to Hollywood star Maria Montez by experimental filmmaker Jack Smith, best known for Flaming Creatures (1963). Smith, a key figure in New York’s underground cinema, had an unparalleled admiration for Montez, the ‘Queen of Technicolor’ and star of six extravagant ‘Neverland Movies’ produced by Universal in the 1940s. He celebrated her in a manifesto of artifice and ‘good bad taste’ – a foundational text for Camp aesthetics. For Smith, Montez – despite her limited acting skills – was the flamboyant embodiment of subversive imagination within a Hollywood system mired in convention. Published in a limited edition of just eighty-eight copies, Bagdad-Hollywood: Jack Smith & Maria Montez presents Smith’s essay “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez,” which was originally published in Film Culture, for the first time in French.

Next, we turn to a selection of books on experimental cinema. The first, Écouter Jonas Mekas. Diaries, Notes and Voices by film historian Cécile Tourneur, follows in the wake of Jonas Mekas et le cinéma, which we featured in our autumn edition. With a foreword by Daniel Deshays, this book takes an in-depth look at Mekas’s Diaries, Notes and Sketches (Walden), his first ‘film-journal’, completed in 1969. This film initiated an autobiographical practice that would continue until the end of his life. For half a century, Mekas recorded film and sound notes, using the editing room as a space for reflection. Addressing the viewer, he shares thoughts, quotes from his written diaries, and develops stories freely inspired by mythology. His voice – marked by the accent of a man “who never wanted to leave home,” carrying the sounds of rural Lithuania mixed with those of New York – blurs the line between personal and collective history.

How to Do Things with VALIE EXPORT, published by Spector Books in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum, zooms in on one of the most radical and significant audiovisual artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Valie Export. This book examines Export’s cinematic work as an expansive field of action – a visionary space for challenging and reshaping patriarchal structures. Contributors respond to the editors’ invitation to revisit specific works, reflecting on their political potential and relevance today. With texts by Katharina Müller, Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Erika Balsom, Sabeth Buchmann, Elfriede Jelinek, Gertrud Koch, Sophie Lewis, Hedwig Saxenhuber, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and others.

Also anticipated is Urthworks, an artist book by filmmaker Ben Rivers. Expanding on a trilogy of films that imagine Earth’s future at three stages after environmental collapse, Urthworks interweaves observational 16 mm and digital imagery from real locations – Japan, Tuvalu, Lanzarote, Arizona, the Mendip Hills, and Somerset – with fabricated environments and fantastically costumed characters. The book takes the form of a visual novel, enriched with texts by acclaimed sci-fi author Mark von Schlegell, who expands upon the film’s worlds and characters. The title Urthworks references both Urth, the Norse goddess of fate, and Brian Aldiss’s 1965 dystopian novel Earthworks.

We conclude this section with Shirley Clarke: Thinking Through Movement, the first film-philosophy study dedicated to the pioneering filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Drawing on film analysis, archival research, dance and film theory, and creative practice methodologies, the book examines Clarke’s evolution from a dancer to a multi-award-winning editor and director across dance films, fiction, documentary, and video art. The book’s author, Karen Pearlman – known for her influential book Cutting Rhythms – also began her career as a professional dancer before transitioning to film editing and directing, making her uniquely attuned to Clarke’s rhythmic and kinetic approach to cinema.

As an annex to the previous section, two recent publications deal with German filmmaker Harun Farocki. The first is a new book by Volker Pantenburg, Einfachheit ohne Vereinfachung: Zur Praxis Harun Farockis, which delves into his multifaceted practices. The study encompasses Farocki’s cinematic works like Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988), lesser-known television productions such as Erzählen (1975, co-directed with Ingemo Engström), and numerous video installations exhibited in galleries and museums since 1995. Pantenburg analyzes Farocki’s working processes, focusing on the relationship between archives and creative work, pedagogical approaches, and the operational nature of images. The book also explores unfinished projects like the educational series AUVICO (1970, with Hartmut Bitomsky) and the project Zur Geschichte der Arbeit (1987), as well as Farocki’s collaboration with director Christian Petzold and his teaching tenure at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie (DFFB).

Edited by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, Engström and Farocki – About Narration (1975): Materials, Comments, Interventions centers specifically on the 1975 essay film Erzählen [About Narration], co-directed by Engström and Farocki. The book includes the film’s script, historical documents related to its production, and Farocki’s previously unpublished theoretical essay on the film. It also features a retrospective essay by Engström discussing the film’s political and artistic background, a detailed analysis by Volker Pantenburg on its creation, and an interview with Cathy Porter about Larisa Reisner, a revolutionary writer who inspired the film. Designed by Ott Kagovere and published in collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institut, the 130-page book is available through Rab-Rab Press.

A book on Engström and Farocki’s Erzählen – a film made for television – opens the way for a section on television and video art. The New Television: Video After Television (no place press), edited by Rachel Churner, Rebecca Cleman, and Tyler Maxin, explores the history of video art, revisiting the landmark Open Circuits conference held at MoMA in 1974 and its ongoing significance for contemporary artistic and critical practices. Open Circuits played a crucial role in establishing video art in American museums and articulated a range of possible futures for the medium – some of which materialised (such as local cable television), while others remain unrealised. The conference proceedings were published in 1977 as The New Television: A Public/Private Art, a book whose radical design reflected the conference’s utopian ambitions. This two-part publication includes a facsimile of the long-out-of-print conference proceedings alongside new essays and discussions by over a dozen scholars and artists.

Unconscious/Television is a new book by Lucas Ferraço Nassif, whose cine-poem Missing Links: A Book in Ten Sessions we featured in our Summer 2024 edition. Nassif intertwines references to TV shows and anime with theoretical frameworks from Lacan, Freud, Deleuze, Guattari, and Thomas Lamarre, to whom the book is dedicated. Lamarre, known for his two influential books on anime, inspired Nassif to break out of Western psychoanalytic discourse by studying Japanese animated television. “Television is different from cinema because it is in the middle of everything – it has a body, it emits warmth,” Nassif reminds his readers, recalling the image of Godard embracing his television set. The book itself takes an experimental form: its six texts have been cut up and reordered, then divided into four sections with three dynamic intersections, creating a reading experience that mirrors its theoretical concerns.

No discussion of television would be complete without acknowledging the recent passing of one of its greatest visionaries, David Lynch. Two new books explore what many consider the most significant television series ever made: Twin Peaks. First, The Mystery of Twin Peaks: Signs – Worlds – References is an upcoming anthology that brings together diverse perspectives on the series, examining its unique production and reception aesthetics. The contributions cover a broad range of topics, including genre hybridity, transactuality, complex narrative structures, dream logic, gender and identity, extreme fan culture, visual aesthetics, acoustic dimensions, postmodern intertextuality, and the influence of Twin Peaks on subsequent prestige television. Meanwhile, Always Music in the Air: The Sounds of Twin Peaks by Scott Ryan offers a deep dive into the series’ iconic music. Ryan traces the history of Twin Peaks’s haunting soundscape, from Julee Cruise’s 1989 album Floating into the Night through all Twin Peaks soundtracks, including the elusive Twin Peaks Archives (released online in 2011) and the music of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Through interviews with band members, music editors, and directors, as well as excerpts from archival interviews with Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise, Ryan reconstructs the story of the series’ music.

As always, we conclude our overview with some noteworthy film magazine related news and releases. A highly anticipated follow-up to Found Footage & Collage Films: Selected Works (2022) arrives with Found Footage & Collage Films: The Artist’s Voice, both edited by César Ustarroz and published by Found Footage Magazine. This limited-edition book gathers forty original writings by visual artists and filmmakers who integrate archival materials into their artistic practices, including figures like Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, Bill Morrison, Peter Tscherkassky; and contemporary essayists like Radu Jude, Fiona Tan, and Soda Jerk. Dutch filmmaker and writer Peter Delpeut also contributed a piece to the volume.

Meanwhile, the 720th issue of L’avant scène magazine focuses on Sambizanga (1972), the landmark film by Sarah Maldoror, selected by Alice Diop for her 2023 State of Cinema. The edition includes a reflection by Martin Scorsese, who highlights Sambizanga as a pivotal work. Filmmakers and crew members – including set photographer Suzanne Lipinska, assistant and make-up artist Christine Lipinska, and cameraman Jean-François Robin – share their memories from the production. The issue also features an interview with critic Charles Tesson, press reviews, a complete filmography of Maldoror, and an illustrated film dossier featuring technical details, the original script, and French dialogue transcripts. In April, Centre Pompidou dedicates a retrospective to Maldoror, as an extension of the Paris noir exhibition.

Finally, we return to the BFI with news on Chantal Akerman. Coinciding with the retrospective at BFI Southbank, BFI also launched a new DVD/Blu-ray series, and Sight & Sound has introduced a new edition of their “auteur series” dedicated to Akerman’s cinema. The new publication revisits material from the Sight and Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin archive and also features new exclusive texts and images from the Fondation Chantal Akerman archive. You can read an introductory text to Akerman’s work by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin on BFI’s website.