Film Desk Books – förlag

Three dialogues between Marguerite Duras and Jean-Luc Godard from 1979, 1980 and 1987.Introduction, afterword and footnotes by Cyril Béghin.Translation by Nicholas Elliott.“The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech.”—Cyril Béghin

“I’m woken by unbearable pain and since I can’t sleep or pace back and forth, I relieve myself by taking this notebook and attempting to cry out my pain to the unknown friends who will read these lines. They exist. I know them without knowing them. I can just see them in the shadows.” —Jean CocteauBeginning on August 26, 1945, the day before shooting began, until June 1, 1946, the day after the film was first screened, Jean Cocteau kept a diary of the making of his masterpiece Beauty and the Beast. Throughout he details every stage of production, as he faces and surmounts numerous obstacles including severe problems with his health, and ultimately the great pleasures of camaraderie with his remarkable collaborators: Jean Marais, Henri Alekan, and Christian Bérard, amongst others.New English translation by Nicholas Elliott.“I wonder if these hard days might be the sweetest of my life. Full of friendship, affectionate arguments, laughter, and control over fleeting time.” —Jean Cocteau

“What’s most remarkable about this volume is its transparency. Throughout, in new, rewritten and republished pieces, you can see Godfrey’s questing and questioning mind latching onto a subject for which he has a deep affinity, learning as much as he can about it—by pondering the works themselves, talking to their creators, and absorbing the culture that birthed the scene—and then figuring out a way to transmit his enthusiasm to the widest American audience possible.”—Matt Zoller Seitz“I admire Godfrey for his strong support of Iranian cinema and his efforts to introduce Iranian films to American audiences. Although movies are shown by distributors and exhibitors, it’s really the critics who bring the audience. Godfrey’s reviews also help us in Iran by providing critical support against those who attempt to suppress us and keep us from working.”—Jafar Panahi, filmmaker

Time Tells is a grand study of time, technology, performance, the attention economy, and comedy. Using the cinematic time-jump, "a numerical shorthand for a fated intermission," to weave a narrative of chronopolitics, memoir, and cultural study, Masha Tupitsyn constructs a unique literary and visual phenomenology on the loss of time, presence, and attention in the digital age. Structured into two interlocked inquiries—Time and Acting—Time Tells focuses on the internet to talk about the ethics of presence and attention, comedy to talk about timing and the language of critique, and lying masculinity, the double, and acting to talk about performance and the reign of falsehood. Both volumes intersect to examine our inability to experience coherence and integration in the post-truth era.In the first volume, Time, Tupitsyn covers wide-ranging cultural touchstones such as the ’90s TV show Felicity, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Pretty Woman, Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, David Fincher’s Zodiac, Jean-Luc Godard, the Beastie Boys, Wim Wenders, the art of style, memory and music in the post-internet age, and the lost ontology of cinema. Using what Tupitsyn terms “screen-shot criticism,” Time Tells makes innovative critical thinking accessible to anyone interested in American culture today.Afterword by Felix Bernstein.

Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (20th Century Fox, 1971) is the ultimate analog car chase movie with that hard-to-pin-down something extra. Written by renowned Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante under a pseudonym (Guillermo Cain), it’s nominally the saga of a speedaddled Vietnam vet existentially on the lam in a Dodge Challenger. It’s also a modern Western, a dystopian allegory of our surveillance society, and a love letter to the muscle car, all rolled into one. No surprise it’s become a cult classic, adored and paid homage to by Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Bruce Springsteen, Richard Prince, Alberto Moravia, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Primal Scream, Audioslave, and countless others. In the fifty-plus years since the film’s release, the lore and legends around it have grown like Topsy. Now, Robert M. Rubin’s Vanishing Point Forever brings together everything there is to know in one lavishly illustrated volume.A monumental treat for anyone who loves film culture, Vanishing Point Forever explores the movie’s profound impact across popular media, the arts, and the car world in obsessive detail. Nearly 600 pages include a complete reproduction of the film’s final shooting script, pages from Cabrera Infante’s early drafts, his own location scouting photos (never seen before), and a gold mine of production and publicity stills, ephemera, excerpts, reflections and essays. Rubin details how the movie came to life — from stars Barry Newman, Cleavon Little, and Charlotte Rampling (so enigmatic she was cut from the main release); to the groundbreaking stunts coordinated by Hollywood legend Carey Loftin; to its unique, remarkable half-life. In the words of Sarafian, the film just “wouldn’t die.”Rubin’s tribute also includes assembled insights, interviews and quotes from a broad range of essential voices, including Cabrera Infante, Prince, Moravia, J. Hoberman, cinematographer and director Janusz Kaminski, Raymond Chandler, Jean Baudrillard, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Lucy Sante, race driver Sam Posey, and many more. Designed by COMA Amsterdam | New York, this is the latest graphic treat in a long collaboration with Rubin, including their most recent, the award-winning Richard Prince: Cowboy (Prestel, 2020).

Filmmaker Terence Davies’s only published novel. Includes a selection of Davies’s original poetry, much of it never before published, along with an introduction by Michael Koresky and an afterword by James Dowling.“Hallelujah Now fearlessly uses the novel form to give voice to anxieties that might have been otherwise unportrayable. Many artists who work in other mediums carry literary aspirations; few pull it off with such provocation and undaunted individuality. Davies’s cinema had no comparison, it was a subgenre unto itself, and similarly Davies’s novel feels like nothing less than a pure emanation of the self, beholden to nothing and no one else.” —Michael Koresky, from his introduction.From Robert’s birth into a Catholic family in Liverpool, to his surreptitious sexual escapades and sadomasochistic fantasies, and his final, evocative journey to a nursing home, his life unfolds in a sensational and explicit stream of consciousness. Skillfully depicted in three sections, Hallelujah Now is a synthesis of memory, of vividly recaptured moments of childhood, of isolation, lust, and adventure. Time past and time present combine to paint a startling picture of a man fighting to accept his sexuality—and his mortality.

The Hunger assembles the best of Melissa Anderson’s film writing from, among other outlets, Bookforum, Artforum, the Village Voice, and 4Columns, where she has been the film editor and lead film critic since 2017. Including not only reviews of contemporary and older movies but also essays devoted to the work of a single performer (such as Candy Darling and Shelley Duvall), The Hunger showcases an exceptional voice in criticism—one that is queer but undoctrinaire, homophilic yet heterodox. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion between Anderson and the critic and scholar Erika Balsom about the role of pleasure and sexuality in writing, assessing stardom in the 21st century, covering repertory cinema in New York City, and the exhilarations that the movies still provide.

Conversations with Kiarostami collects for the first time a far ranging series of interviews with the celebrated director Abbas Kiarostami by film critic, and Iranian cinema expert, Godfrey Cheshire.Conducted in the 1990s, these in-depth conversations offer a film-by-film account of Kiarostami’s views of his artistic development from his first short “Bread and Alley” in 1970 to the 1999 feature The Wind Will Carry Us, covering his lesser known, and seldom written about, shorts from earlier in his career, along with the masterworks that made him world famous, such as the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees), Close-Up and Taste of Cherry. The book includes a Foreword by Ahmad Kiarostami, the director’s son, as well as an introduction from Cheshire that contextualizes the interviews and discusses his relationship with the director.

Named 3rd best book of 2021 in Sight & SoundA comprehensive look at the work of Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke by celebrated critic Jean-Michel Frodon. Includes an extensive in-depth interview with Jia, essays on each of his films, conversations with his main collaborators, including Zhao Tao, and a selection of his own writings.Translated from the French by Sally Shafto. Foreword by Dudley Andrew. Afterword by Walter Salles.“The World of Jia Zhangke is a rarity, for it comes from a sustained encounter of one of our greatest critics with one of our greatest directors. Thankfully both are still working at full tilt.”—Dudley Andrew

Amos Vogel’s seminal book Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974 and, in Vogel’s own words, detailed, “the accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored.” It is now available again in this newly restored edition, in which hundreds of errors have been corrected. Accompanied by over three hundred rare film stills, newly sourced and re-scanned for this edition.This revised edition of the book edited by Jim Colvill and Herb Shellenberger. New foreword by Herb Shellenberger.Amos Vogel (1921–2012) was born in Vienna and emigrated to the United States in 1938, eventually ending up in New York City. From 1947 to 1963 Vogel and his wife Marcia ran Cinema 16, the most successful and influential membership film society in North American history. In 1963 Vogel founded the Lincoln Center Film Department and was co-founder of the New York Film Festival, which he ran until 1968. He was a longtime faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School and a regular contributor to The Village Voice and Film Comment.

Introduction by Richard Brody.Lillian Ross was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, and wrote on filmmakers regularly over the course of her extraordinary career. Beginning with “Come In, Lassie!”, a 1948 report on Hollywood’s reaction to HUAC through a 2001 visit to the set of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, Ross covered the people who make the movies with singular insight and humor. Ross’ lengthiest pieces, about Otto Preminger fighting against the television broadcast of Anatomy of a Murder in 1966, and Francis Ford Coppola preparing for the release of One from the Heart in 1982, are legendary portraits of the larger than life personalities that Ross rendered human on the page.Also features pieces on: Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Oliver Stone, John Huston, Jacques Tati, Charles Chaplin, Mag Bodard, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, Anjelica Huston, Gene Kelly, Donald Shebib, and John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara & Peter Falk"The recognition, from early in her career, that the center of gravity in the world of movies is indeed the director puts Ross . . . at the forefront of film-centric writers of her generation. The pieces in Film Business reflect her attunement to the art of movies—an attunement that’s also something of a philosophy of life, as befits the work of a writer who, self-consciously approached nonfiction writing as an essentially literary, novelistic venture—and who made that discovery while working on her first major piece about movies.”—Richard Brody, from his Introduction.“While reporting a story, I find myself automatically translating what I see and hear into film-like scenes.”—Lillian Ross

Thirty-three richly suggestive stories by Antonioni, that range in length from a single paragraph to several pages. Not stories in the usual sense, these are instead a series of evocative sketches or “narrative nuclei,” each the genesis for a possible future film. Although he ultimately didn’t develop most of these ideas further, encountering them now provides a unique glimpse into Antonioni’s mind and cinematic point of view.