New Book Releases / Spring 2026
“In a sense, cinema can’t lie, and every film can be considered a social documentary. As long as it satisfies the dream needs of the masses, it becomes its own dream.” This statement from André Bazin’s text “Every Film Is a Social Documentary” is emblematic of his thinking on cinema. This and many other writings by Bazin on documentary filmmaking are brought together in André Bazin on Documentary. Cinema’s Urge to Explore, a new book curated by Dudley Andrew, author of numerous important studies and compendiums on Bazin’s work. The English volume gathers sixty-two texts in which Bazin probes films devoted to geography, history, animals, painting, and, above all, distant lands and peoples. Writing about films by Robert Flaherty, Jean Rouch, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker, Bazin emerges as both advocate and critic of popular science films and exotic travelogues. He champions impure forms such as docu-fiction and the genre he famously baptized the “essay film,” all the while reflecting on the moral and aesthetic stakes of representing the world. At a moment when spectacles marketed as reality saturate our screens, these intricately beautiful yet playfully incisive writings retain a striking urgency. For those who can’t wait, several of the included essays, among them “Farrebique, the Paradox of Realism” and “Every Film Is a Social Documentary,” previously appeared in translation on Sabzian, alongside a recent issue devoted to Bazin and television.
We are also happy to announce a new collaboration. Each season, Sabzian will publish a text, interview, or excerpt from an upcoming or recently published film book by publishers whose work we hold dear or wish to highlight. For this spring edition we begin with Sticking Place Books and the forthcoming reprint of Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism, edited by Joseph McBride, originally published in 1968 in a very small print run by the Wisconsin Film Society and reissued on 30 March with a new introduction by the book’s editor. McBride, who is film historian, biographer, screenwriter, and Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, has long been one of the foremost chroniclers of Hollywood cinema, with influential books on directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Frank Capra, and Steven Spielberg. The original collection grew out of the cinephile culture surrounding the Wisconsin Film Society, where McBride and fellow students wrote and circulated their own film notes and criticism at screenings. As McBride recalls in the new introduction, the essays capture a moment when film criticism itself was still “feeling its way,” experimenting with new methods of writing about cinema. McBride also evokes the influence of Susan Sontag’s famous call in Against Interpretation to recover the sensuous experience of art: to “see more, hear more, feel more”. It is therefore with great pleasure that we will publish, this coming Wednesday, an excerpt from a rare interview by Daniel Stein with American filmmaker Robert Rossen, director of films such as Body and Soul (1947), All the King’s Men (1949), The Hustler (1961), and Lilith (1964).
Moving on to a series of local books, first a publication produced in the research context of KASK & Conservatorium School of Arts and published by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Jocelyne Saab: Inventory 1973–1983 documents the work of Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, one of the five filmmakers included in the Out of the Shadows issue we published together with Courtisane in 2021. The book is edited by Mohanad Yaqubi, filmmaker; producer; co-founder of Idioms Film, an arthouse production company based in Ramallah since 2004; member of the curatorial research collective Subversive Film, which is dedicated to researching and redistributing militant cinema from Palestine and beyond; and founding member of the Palestine Film Institute, which supports, promotes and preserves Palestinian cinema. The volume is co-edited by Elettra Bisogno, director of The Roller, the Life, the Fight (2024), who is currently collaborating with Yaqubi on the research project Aesthetics of Transnational Solidarity at KASK & Conservatorium. Together, the editors frame Saab’s work as both an archival and political project, mapping the emergence of militant filmmaking and leftist cultural movements across Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Western Sahara, and Iran through detailed technical documentation, image selections, and transcribed dialogues, alongside texts by Saab and contributions by writers and artists such as Etel Adnan and Roger Assaf.
In Anatomie du cinéma, Belgian film director and writer Frédéric Sojcher offers an expansive reflection on film history, cinephilia, and pedagogy, structured around his own practice as filmmaker, historian, and teacher. Sojcher engages with pedagogical models described by Stéphane Goudet, who speaks of film education as a diagonal movement between teacher and student, balancing authority, experience, and exchange. As film critic and educator Wouter Hessels observes, “Sojcher takes his role as a film teacher seriously. ‘Passing things on? Yes, why not – but rather passing on what one is searching for, not what one knows […],’ a statement by Nicolas Philibert.” The book proposes a practical handbook for young filmmakers, insisting on persistence, experimentation, and emotional investment as central conditions for filmmaking and film culture.
The short film Images du monde visionnaire (1963) by Henri Michaux, made in collaboration with Éric Duvivier, occupies a singular place at the intersection of cinema, poetry, and psychedelic research. Commissioned by the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, the film attempts to translate the effects of psychotropic substances into moving images through a hypnotic sequence of abstract visual forms. A new publication, Images du monde visionnaire (1963): Henri Michaux & Film by Mats Antonissen and Steven Jacobs, accompanies an epynomous exhibition running through May 23 at the Vandenhove Centre for Architecture and Art in Ghent. The exhibition, also curated by Antonissen and Jacobs, includes various paintings, watercolours and drawings by Michaux, including several pieces from the Vandenhove collection as well as loans from public and private collections. Finally, the exhibition focuses on Michaux’s publications that are related to the film or to his pictorial and graphic experiments. The result is a multilingual and cross-media art book that reflects on Michaux’s persistent interest in translating inner psychological experience into moving images, while positioning Images du monde visionnaire as a key example of mid-century experiments at the intersection of cinema, art, and pharmaceutical science.
We close this section with a new book by Pieter Van Bogaert on Why Are You Angry?, a film by artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer in which they revisit the colonial and gendered gaze embedded in historical representations by retracing the travels of Paul Gauguin in Polynesia. The publication appears in the UpClose series initiated by S.M.A.K., which offers in-depth studies of individual works from the museum’s collection. Each volume invites close critical reflection through contributions by international authors; the series previously featured a reading of Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-Bête by John Welchman. Van Bogaert’s book situates Nashashibi and Skaer’s film within broader debates on colonial history, visual power, and contemporary artistic reenactment practices. The publication will be accompanied by a screening and a public lecture by Van Bogaert on 29 March at S.M.A.K.
The interplay between different art forms is also the focus of our next two publications. Satyajit Ray – Ce que j’ai toujours su, c’est dessiner assembles a wide range of visual and material documents: drawings, storyboards, costumes, set designs, posters, musical scores, photographs, and credits; revealing the multidisciplinary foundations of Satyajit Ray’s cinema. Ray is widely celebrated for works such as the celebrated Apu Trilogy, as well as films like Charulata and Jalsaghar [The Music Room], yet his output also includes documentaries, social melodramas, and genre films that remain less widely circulated. Beyond cinema, Ray was also a prolific graphic designer, writer, editor, photographer, and composer, embodying the idea of cinema as a total art form. As photographer Marc Riboud suggests in the book, Ray’s path to cinema was shaped by his training in calligraphy and graphic precision: the discipline of tracing beautiful signs became, in Ray’s own understanding, a model for cinematic storytelling itself.
The monograph Gus Van Sant: Paintings (Blue Moon Press) focuses on the visual art practice of Gus Van Sant, presenting the first comprehensive publication dedicated to his painting work. Best known as a filmmaker associated with independent American cinema, Van Sant has simultaneously developed a parallel practice in painting that mirrors and reframes the themes of his films. The book is organized in an achronological and associative sequence, allowing visual motifs to resonate across different periods and media. The volume includes an essay by RISD professor Dennis Congdon, Lightness in the Paintings of Gus Van Sant, alongside a new interview conducted by Leah Gudmundson, offering insight into Van Sant’s approach to painting as a complementary, reflective extension of his cinematic practice.
A retrospective dedicated to Fritz Lang has been running at the CINEMATEK over the past months, returning to the monumental architecture and dark romanticism of his silent films and the Mabuse cycle. That programme resonates strongly with the publication of Éclats du romantisme (published in November), the new book by Raymond Bellour. A major French scholar, writer, and curator, Bellour is the author of influential works such as L’analyse du film, Le corps du cinéma, and Pensées du cinéma. Emeritus Research Professor at the CNRS in Paris and co-founder of the journal Trafic alongside Serge Daney and Jean-Claude Biette, Bellour also edited the complete works of Henri Michaux, a link that echoes the previous section’s focus on Michaux’s cinematic experiment. In Éclats du romantisme, Bellour assembles a constellation of studies spanning romantic literature and classical American cinema, including Lang’s late silent films and the Mabuse series, to reflect on what he calls “the romantic condition.” Moving between aesthetics and anthropology, the book traces how sexual difference operates as motif and structuring principle, from literary couples such as Michelet and Athénaïs or the Brontë siblings to the symbolic distribution of male and female positions within cinematic form. As Gabriel Bortzmeyer writes in Débordements, Éclats du romantisme is “a truly written book, written freely. Its pages vibrate with a prose that moves by additions and subtle shifts, with all the elegance befitting a syntax at once robust and supple, rich in commas and subordinate clauses.” He notes how the care of demonstration never burdens itself with heavy scholarly apparatus; once freed from academic constraints, the style feels light despite the complexity of its sentences.
A small step sideways leads to P.O.L étendu – Écrire entre les arts : scènes, textes, images, which explores the intermedial potential of literature beyond the confines of the book. Published in and around the catalogue of the publishing house P.O.L., which also released Bellour’s study, the volume examines how writing circulates between visual arts, theatre, performance, cinema, and music. Edited by Stéphane Bikialo, Maryline Heck, and Dominique Rabaté, and featuring contributions by writers, artists, and filmmakers including Alain Guiraudie, the book maps a field in which literature becomes a site of crossings and expansions, echoing Bellour’s own long-standing engagement with the spaces between text and image.
To close this section, Film, In Theory: The BFI Education Department and Film Culture by Colm McAuliffe reconstructs the formation of modern film studies in Britain through the history of the British Film Institute’s education department. Drawing on unpublished archival materials and interviews with key figures such as Laura Mulvey, Colin MacArthur, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Williamson, the book recounts the pioneering programme spearheaded by Paddy Whannel and the influential work of Screen journal, including the writing and editing of Mulvey’s seminal essay on visual pleasure and narrative cinema. McAuliffe situates this moment within a broader cultural upheaval in which the films of Jean-Luc Godard, the rediscovery of Hollywood, the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the semiology of Roland Barthes, and the politics of the New Left collided to shape the theoretical foundations of film studies as an academic discipline.
The title of the next book, Far From the Masters. Experimentations in Post-New Wave French Cinema, takes its point of departure from a reflection by Jean-Luc Godard in Scénario du film Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979), where he remarks: “We’re in the kitchen, far from the masters – and that’s already something.” The book revisits the legacy of the French New Wave not as a nostalgic cinematic style but as an open field of experimentation. As the movement gradually became absorbed into cinephile mythology and cultural branding, a new generation of filmmakers emerged in its wake, working through both its political disappointments and its aesthetic possibilities. Figures such as Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, and Maurice Pialat explored forms of cinematic “return to zero,” working with minimal means while developing new political and ethical relationships to the image. The New Wave opened two possible paths: one transforming its youthful energy into a reproducible style, and another extending its experimental, reflexive spirit into more radical political and aesthetic inquiries. Far From the Masters follows this second path, presenting a series of essays that rethink post-New Wave cinema as a space of collective thinking, cinephilic community, and artistic experimentation, echoing the idea that cinema can be reinvented through critique itself. Australian critic Adrian Martin calls the book “an indispensable assemblage of superbly written, inquisitive, and trail-blazing essays.”
La Nouvelle Vague, un cinéma au masculin singulier by Geneviève Sellier offers a critical re-evaluation of the New Wave by shifting attention away from the mythology of the auteur toward questions of gender, production, and reception. Sellier argues that the dominant legacy of the New Wave has been the consolidation of the “cinéma d’auteur,” a model of authorship dependent on critical, institutional, and cinephile validation. While the movement is often celebrated for liberating mise-en-scène, dialogue, and editing practices, Sellier demonstrates how its cultural revolution was also marked by profound limitations, particularly in its representation of women. Female characters often remain secondary, stereotyped, or symbolically associated with political regression when linked to forms of emancipation. Through close analysis of filmic and social contexts, Sellier reconstructs the New Wave as a contested historical moment, revealing how women struggled to establish themselves as creators within a largely masculine cinematic culture.
Rosso sangue. Le cinéma italien des années de plomb, finally, written by critic and programmer Jean-François Rauger, examines Italian cinema of the 1970s as a mirror of the political and social turbulence of the so-called “years of lead.” The period was marked by intense ideological conflict, terrorism, and attempts at political destabilization from both far-right and far-left movements, and cinema became a privileged site for registering this violence. From auteur cinema to popular genre production, Italian films of the decade reflect the anxieties and contradictions of a society caught between revolutionary hopes and authoritarian threats. Illustrated with much archival material from institutions such as the Cinémathèque française, the book also emphasizes the visual and graphic dimension of this cinema culture.
Good news for Spanish speaking readers, Chantal Akerman’s Autoportrait en cinéaste has been translated by Macarena Bravo Cox and supervised by Vicente Braithwaite for Bastante Ediciones and launches their 2026 programme. Originally written as a commissioned autobiography around a retrospective of her work at Centre Pompidou and the release of Demain on déménage (2004), the text is a very personal reflection on Akerman’s cinema and artistic life. In the past months, her novel Ma mère rit has also been translated into more and more languages, already available in English, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, German, Romanian, Italian, and Russian, with brand-new editions now also available in Danish, Slovenian, Catalan, and Greek.
Meanwhile, Écouter voir Anne-Marie Miéville, a new volume by Maurice Darmon for 202 éditions, is devoted to the work of Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Miéville, known for films such as Le livre de Marie (1985), Mon cher sujet (1988), Lou n’a pas dit non (1994) and her various collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard. “The trajectory of Anne-Marie Miéville is the infinite attempt to give form to the difficulties and contradictions, struggles, hopes, and responsibilities of women in their public and personal lives, from childhood to the grave.” On Sabzian, you can also find a related collection titled To Try and Live Together, which gathers several texts on Miéville’s filmmaking. In other related recent news, the Jean-Luc Godard Foundation was established on January 16, 2026, in Rolle, Switzerland, at Godard’s last residence, to inventory, preserve, promote, and disseminate his work.
We continue with a batch of French books, starting with two new Carlotta publications. Tous les visages de Bergman gathers 85 texts by Ingmar Bergman, revealing a less familiar dimension of the director: Bergman as critic, polemicist, and public intellectual. Known primarily for his films and his autobiographical writing, particularly Laterna Magica (1987), Bergman also maintained a long parallel career as a cultural commentator, writing for Swedish newspapers from the 1930s to the 1990s. The volume shows how, alongside his work in cinema and theatre, he consistently wrote about his artistic influences, notably William Shakespeare and August Strindberg, while also engaging in contemporary cultural debates. He often practised self-interviewing, adopting the role of both journalist and interviewee under pseudonyms, allowing him to critically assess his own films with humour and self-irony. Rather than reinforcing the myth of the isolated artist living on the island of Fårö, these texts present Bergman as an active participant in public cultural life, defending, for example, children’s theatre and television while opposing elitism in film culture.
Carlotta also publishes Une semaine avec Jean Douchet et Jacques Lassalle, edited by Pierre-Alexandre Schwab and available for purchase in two days, which is structured around a week-long dialogue in June 2014 where film critic and historian Jean Douchet and theatre director Jacques Lassalle reflect on cinema, theatre, and friendship through a series of informal conversations. The book devotes significant space to the French New Wave and American independent cinema, examining how filmmakers such as Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, John Cassavetes, and others redefined the relationship between theatre, performance, and cinema.
Un Suédois à Hollywood by Vilgot Sjöman offers an outsider’s perspective on the transformation of the Hollywood studio system. Written after Sjöman’s stay in Los Angeles in 1956, the book combines travel narrative, sociological observation, and film reportage, structured around interviews with Hollywood actors and directors such as Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Robert Ryan, and Robert Aldrich. Sjöman’s observations capture a film industry increasingly shaped by advertising, commercial logic, and censorship pressures, contrasting sharply with European cinephile ideals of authorship and artistic freedom. The book resonates with Sjöman’s own later work as a filmmaker, particularly his controversial diptych I Am Curious – Yellow (1967) and I Am Curious – Blue (1968).
Finally, Ozu et son double by Clélia Zernik, preceded by a preface by Antoine de Baecque, proposes a dual reading of the cinema of Yasujirō Ozu. Rather than offering a unified interpretation, Zernik approaches Ozu’s films through a system of doubling: calm and turmoil, tradition and modernity, Zen aesthetics and social subversion. The beauty of Ozu’s cinema is described as both geometric and emotional, constructing visual compositions based on parallel lines, recurring narrative structures, and mirrored destinies. As Zernik suggests, Ozu’s images function like musical chords: parallel visual lines resonate like strings, producing emotional harmonies that reveal the intimate tensions of everyday life, where greetings can simultaneously carry the resonance of farewells. The book is also situated within broader philosophical reflections on perception and cinematic form developed in Zernik’s teaching and research on art and cinema.
On Monday 11 May, Art Cinema OFFoff invited William Rose to Ghent to present his new book I Walked Into My Shortcomings: A Ken Jacobs Compendium. They will present a yet-to-be-announced diptych on the work of Ken Jacobs (1933-2025) and Flo Jacobs (1941–2025), in collaboration with Cinema Parenthèse. I Walked Into My Shortcomings brings together decades of writings, interviews, and pedagogical reflections by Ken Jacobs, one of the central figures of American experimental and expanded cinema. Edited by Rose and published by The Visible Press in association with Anthology Film Archives, the book traces Jacobs’s seven-decade artistic trajectory, ranging from underground narrative experiments to found-footage reworkings and expanded cinema performances that radically challenge conventional cinematic perception. Jacobs writes with a mixture of autobiography, theory, and social critique, addressing American capitalism, race, and media representation with characteristic wit and urgency. His practice continually seeks to destabilise habitual ways of seeing, transforming cinema into a perceptual and political laboratory. In London, Open City Documentary Festival also presents the retrospective Seeing Through Film, dedicated to the filmmakers duo.
Vers une nouvelle conscience filmique – Le cinéma de Gregory J. Markopoulos examines the experimental work of Gregory J. Markopoulos, another key figure of the New American Cinema movement. Markopoulos developed a radical conception of “film as film,” working with both fixed sequence shots and autonomous photograms to explore cinema’s material and perceptual dimensions. His films often combine portraiture, landscape, and Hellenic mythological references. His monumental cycle Eniaios (1948–1990), lasting approximately eighty hours, reassembles earlier works with newly shot material into a vast cyclical structure. Since 2004, restored versions of Eniaios have been screened every four years at Temenos Projection Space, reinforcing Markopoulos’s utopian vision of cinema as ritual, memory, and communal experience beyond commercial exhibition.
We continue with a new book on British filmmaker Peter Watkins, who sadly passed away recently. Peter Watkins: No Shortcuts, presented by the Turkish initiative Görültü. In collaboration with Sinematek/Sinemaevi, Görültü organised the country’s first retrospective dedicated to Watkins, presenting eleven of his films from February through April. The publication responds to the systematic critical neglect of Watkins’s cinema by assembling contributions from writers, scholars, and filmmakers from Turkey and internationally, including Umut Tümay Arslan, Senem Aytaç, Burak Delier, Emma Claire Foley, Dónal Foreman, Leo Goldsmith, Victor Guimarães, Alyssandra Maxine, Nando Salva, Merve Şen, and others. The book also foregrounds Watkins’s own writing, particularly “The Dark Side of the Moon. The Global Media Crisis,” which can also be read on Sabzian, in which he critiques the dominant language of mass audiovisual media, which he terms the “Monoform,” arguing that standardized media grammar limits political, aesthetic, and social possibilities within global screen culture. In his afterword, Patrick Watkins writes that while many people around the world have been deeply moved by his father’s films and while numerous retrospectives, tributes, and homages are taking place, “the cultural battle… is, for the moment, being totally lost.” He concludes that although the battle is not over, “for the moment, the future looks bleak, the Monoform seems to have won,” and that Peter Watkins’s “look of anger, bitterness and despair” at the direction of society will likely linger on.
To end this spring overview on a more festive note, the launch of the second issue of Narrow Margin took place on 4 March at the Sint-Lukas library in Brussels, focusing on the French production house and film collective Diagonale, founded by director Paul Vecchiali. The issue explores Diagonale’s distinctive model of independent cultural production, which combined filmmaking, collective artistic practices, and broader cultural initiatives. The evening opened with a conversation between the Narrow Margin editorial team and film scholar Tessel Veneboer, followed by a screening of Vecchiali’s Once More (1988).
As Metrograph launched its retrospective Boris Barnet, A Soviet Poet (13 March - 11 April 2026), organised in collaboration with The Theater of the Matters, the magazine Outskirts has made the first issue of its now out-of-print publication freely available online as a downloadable PDF. Conceived around an extensive dossier on Barnet’s films, the issue brings together a wealth of materials, including Maksim Selezniov’s overview “The Number One Ethnologist in Soviet Society,” the conversation “The Cine-Tailor: Pierre Léon on Boris Barnet and His Films,” and Barnet’s own essay “Remarks on Film Comedy,” recently republished by The Theater of the Matters. Alongside these texts are numerous short contributions by the Outskirts editorial team and guest writers, as well as interviews and essays that extend beyond Barnet, featuring figures such as Kazuo Hara and Rita Azevedo Gomes.
Finally, two remarkable comebacks have stirred the film magazine landscape recently. The first comes from Jonathan Rosenbaum, who resumes his activity at The Chicago Reader, where he served as head film critic from 1987 to 2008, with a new monthly column titled Moving Places. In the opening piece, Rosenbaum reflects on the increasingly polarised nature of contemporary film discourse, warning against the reductive logic of “targeting” that flattens aesthetic and political differences alike. Writing on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025), he notes how the film risks flattering viewers “as radicals rather than provoking [them] into activism,” while the label of “woke folks” reduces spectators to caricatures of themselves as “freethinking individuals.” For Rosenbaum, such simplifications obscure more substantive questions, ultimately leading to “a spiteful collapse into factional scorn rather than any sort of expansion.”
Another Gaze journal also returned after a period of hiatus with a newly launched website and a fresh set of twelve texts spanning essays and interviews. Founded in 2016 out of a desire for more nuanced engagements with women’s cinema and feminist theory, the journal re-emerges with renewed urgency, reflecting on its own trajectory and the challenges facing contemporary criticism. As the editors note, the task remains “to construct other objects and subjects of vision,” revisiting the question of how feminist criticism can move beyond questions of representation to attend more closely to form, history, and the conditions of spectatorship. The new issue includes writing on Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights (Georgie Carr), Robina Rose’s Nightshift (Sophia Satchell-Baeza), and Tang Shu Shuen’s The Arch (Genevieve Yue), alongside a conversation with Brazilian filmmaker Paula Gaitán, whose film lygiapape (1991) is currently available to watch on Another Screen until 25 March.
