New Book Releases / Winter 2025
If you would like to alert us to a recent or forthcoming film publication for the next round-up in winter, please contact us here. For notes on more books, see David Hudson’s monthly round-up at Criterion’s The Daily.
It’s always a pleasure to begin our seasonal round-up of book news with a publication of our own! To accompany the Johan van der Keuken retrospective that began in October, we launched the modest publication Méandres, featuring one of Van der Keuken’s seminal texts, in which he sketches his career in filmmaking in a manner akin to the way a river winds and turns. Van der Keuken wrote this text in 1994, when the international documentary festival Vue sur les Docs in Marseille organised a retrospective of his work. At the conclusion of the retrospective, the Dutch filmmaker and photographer (1938-2001) participated in a debate led by Marie-Christine Perrière and Bernard Favier. Subsequently, Van der Keuken reworked this conversation into a text he titled Meanders. “Because I am used to moving from one thing to another along an angular, winding path. This movement often defines the form of my films: I shoot in corners and I make turns.”In this twisting, winding course, the text provides a lucid account of the ideas and influences that shaped Johan van der Keuken’s work. The publication includes the original French text, Méandres, alongside Dutch and English translations. You can also find the text here.
On 22 January, Courtisane will proudly present a new publication dedicated to the cinema of Portuguese filmmakers António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, realised in collaboration with Sabzian. Following Courtisane’s multiple programmes dedicated to the filmmakers’ work, In the Midst of the End of the World: António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro gathers a selection of texts, many of which are available in English for the first time. It also includes interviews with Cordeiro and Reis conducted throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, which map the filmmakers’ conception of art, film, and their own practice. This archival record is complemented by more recent sources, which provide a distanced, historical assessment of their work, as well as newly commissioned critical texts and a smattering of poems and literary fragments featured in their films.
The following month, the itinerant film screening troupe The Theatre of the Matters will host Peasants of the Cinema: António Reis & Margarida Cordeiro, a programme featuring the three films made by Reis and Cordeiro. The programme will open at Metrograph (New York) and Doc Films (Chicago) on 21 and 22 February, respectively.
Staying on topic, the final months of 2024 were marked by fascinating retrospectives. At the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for instance, filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul was invited to be the guest of honour for its 2024–2025 season. The Centre hosted a comprehensive retrospective and exhibition on the work of the Thai filmmaker. Éditions de l’Œil, in partnership with the Centre Pompidou, published an accompanying exhibition catalogue titled Homes, a new collective volume edited by Antoine Thirion. During Apichatpong’s earlier visit to Brussels, Sabzian also published two collections dedicated to his work. Following the Apichatpong retrospective, the focus shifted to Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. In addition to a retrospective, Lucrecia Martel – La circulation, the first French-language publication on her work was released, also by Éditions de l’Œil and edited by Luc Chessel and Amélie Galli. The book includes an in-depth interview, production notes, and on-set photographs, tracing Martel’s oeuvre from La ciénaga (2001) to Zama (2017) and beyond.
The list of past and upcoming publications on individual filmmakers is extensive in this round-up, even without including the aforementioned books on Apichatpong and Martel. It ranges from a new book on Marco Ferreri, also from the catalogue of Éditions de l’Œil, to a new Blu-ray box set and booklet on Otar Iosseliani, and an 800-page (!) addition to the Format Bible series on Federico Fellini, both by Carlotta Films. Other highlights include a new book on Ernie Gehr by the Cinemateca Portuguesa and two volumes dedicated to towering figures of classical Hollywood: King Vidor in Focus (McFarland, 2024) and a study of acting under director George Cukor (Columbia University Press), to name but a few.
Two publications, however, merit closer attention. The first, from Belgian publishing house Éditions Yellow Now, is a book-length essay by filmmaker and writer Olivier Smolders on the cinema of Edmond Bernhard. “A film by Edmond Bernhard is an important thing, not an object of consumption or art shaped more or less carefully according to current fashions,” wrote another maverick Belgian filmmaker, Boris Lehman, about Bernhard on the occasion of Seuls: Short Work 1 in 2021. Bernhard’s total filmography barely exceeds two hours, consisting primarily of five major short films, all made between 1954 and 1972. Smolders’s new book, Dimanche et autres essais d’Edmond Bernhard, offers an erudite and meticulous analysis of each of Bernhard’s works. At the same time, it doubles as a heartfelt biographical investigation, seeking to illuminate the paradox of “Edmond Bernhard” while scrupulously ensuring it remains unresolved – thereby paying him the highest tribute.
Just out this month, published by Light Cone, is Jean-Michel Bouhours’s study Quand l'œil tremble – Le cinéma de Paolo Gioli (French/English), an anthology of texts on photographer and filmmaker Paolo Gioli, a key figure of the Italian avant-garde of the 1970s. Paolo Gioli (1942-2023) built on his initial training as a painter to create a body of over thirty films between 1969 and 2017, complementing an internationally acclaimed photographic oeuvre. Through a distinctly “wild” cinematic approach developed with minimal means, Gioli offers a composite visual universe of fragments, as well as “cinema effects” in their raw state – latent phenomena that challenge and reshape the historiography of media technologies. The book comprises three essays written between 1995 and 2024, a long, previously unpublished 2014 interview with the artist, and a catalogue raisonné of his filmography. The volume is introduced by a new essay from Georges Didi-Huberman, serving as a preface.
The next wave of books focuses on the horror genre, with two particular highlights dedicated to “masters” of the field. The first, Claire Cronin’s Les Écrans sanglants” – Cinéma d'horreur, mysticisme & regard féminin, was initially conceived as a reflection on an unusually strong attraction to horror films but soon evolved into a personal and philosophical journey – a hybrid essay tinged with non-fiction, transcending formats by linking the intimate and the collective. In this work, Cronin asks herself: What do we seek in these cinematic experiences when surrounded by screens projecting images of monsters, ghosts, possessions, and unexplained phenomena? How can we navigate between reality and fiction without losing ourselves entirely? Can mysticism and spirituality help us overcome sadness and depression, offering deeper self-understanding? From the American Gothic South to the streets of Los Angeles, Cronin explores her cultural heritage, religious roots, and fascination with horror cinema in all its diversity of subgenres and aesthetics, from the most commercial to the most underground. She brings a feminine, poignant, and poetic perspective to the subject. Les Écrans sanglants is “a diary of theories for the spaces of the mind where theory no longer belongs.”
As promised, a new book on the “master of the horror genre” John Carpenter is set to appear in February. In Back to the Bone: John Carpenter, critic and filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Thoret explores the enigmatic work of this legendary director. Thoret began his career as an author by co-writing the first monograph on Carpenter in 1998 (with Luc Lagier), Mythes et Masques. Twenty-seven years and fifteen books later, the director of We Blew It and a towering figure in contemporary cinephilia revisits one of his formative icons: John Carpenter, a foundational passion and a subject that remains vital. How does one revisit, in 2025, the films of a director who shaped one’s youth? Do they reveal something new, or only what was always there? And what if the films themselves evolve as our perspectives shift? In this essay, Thoret reflects on the origins of his cinephilia and delves into the filmography of an enduring mythmaker, inviting us to see – and see again – a filmmaker whose legacy continues to shape the history of cinematic form.
The illustrated monograph David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, by Violet Lucca, celebrates another master, only this time of “body horror.” This handsome book explores both familiar and lesser-known aspects of iconic films such as Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Crash. While the book is divided into two halves, suggesting a binary structure, its Jungian-inspired chapters reveal a perpetually shifting world, with recurrent narrative, cultural, and visual themes looping back and intersecting. Featuring a foreword by Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen, it also includes interviews with composer Howard Shore, production designer Carol Spier, cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, and producer and playwright/screenwriter Jeremy Thomas.
Suspense, one of the key ingredients of the horror genre, is the focus of Rick Warner’s The Rebirth of Suspense (Columbia University Press). Typically, films are suspenseful when they keep us on the edge of our seats, when glimpses of a turning doorknob, a ticking clock, or a looming silhouette quicken our pulses. Exemplified by Alfred Hitchcock’s masterworks and the countless thrillers they influenced, such films captivate viewers with propulsive plots that spur emotional investment in the fates of protagonists. Suspense might therefore seem an unusual concept to associate with art films featuring muted characters, serene landscapes, and unrushed rhythms, where plot takes a backseat to mood and tone. Yet this ambitious and wide-ranging book redefines suspense by considering its unlikely incarnations in contemporary films often described as “slow cinema.” Warner focuses on works where suspense arises as the boundaries blur between art cinema and popular genres such as horror, thriller, science fiction, and gothic melodrama. Films analysed include Chantal Akerman’s La captive, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Warner investigates the pivotal role of sound in generating suspense and traces how the experience of suspense has evolved in the era of digital streaming.
In November, a new book by Australian critic Adrian Martin was released. Filmmakers Thinking begins from a simple premise: that we do not take the ongoing reflections of filmmakers about their medium, their art, and their craft seriously enough. Every day, everywhere, filmmakers are asked to talk primarily about themselves and their own works. Yet their vocation springs from a deep engagement with the history and possibilities of cinema as a whole. Going beyond the usual, oft-cited sources, Filmmakers Thinking delves into a vast archive of writings (public and private), interviews, talks, and anecdotes to uncover what filmmakers think about how to create cinema – and what cinema is, or could be. The book includes a foreword by Radu Jude.
Described by Adrian Martin as “one of the best film books of the year,” our next title, Escritos Repartidos, collects the writings of Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. It gathers articles, speeches, lectures, and prefaces of the most diverse kinds, offering an invaluable insight into the prolific filmmaker’s ideas on cinema, his creative processes, and the work of other artists such as Glauber Rocha, Violeta Parra, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Shitao. Ruiz demonstrates that culture is, above all, “the ability to apply different, interchangeable, and mobile frameworks to the same problem,” as he notes in one of the texts. The title of the volume refers to the popular poetic figure of the “dispersed body,” which Ruiz admired wholeheartedly. This concept signifies both the scattered nature of these writings and the cosmopolitan character of his work, conceived primarily in exile.
On a final note, Bernard Eisenschitz’s seminal book Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer has been published by the Austrian Film Museum. Originally released in French in 2001 as Points de départ, this illuminating account of a “mid-Atlantic” filmmaker is now available in its original language for the first time. The book is complemented by three of Kramer’s essays from the 1980s and 1990s, along with an updated bibliography and filmography.
Famous for his explorations of filmmakers’ thoughts through the interview form, notably in his A Critical Cinema series – a lifelong project of interviewing independent filmmakers – Scott MacDonald has released a new book titled Publication as Autobiography. The subjects of the essays collected in the volume vary widely. They include the betrayal of a canonical Hemingway short story, Erskine Caldwell’s experiments with dialogue, and a range of films by Larry Gottheim, J. J. Murphy, Peter Watkins, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Robert Nelson, Taka Iimura, Shiho Kano, James Benning, Gustav Deutsch, Peter Hutton, and the team of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. The book also explores multimedia works by Patrick Clancy and Robert Huot. Among its other highlights are the catalogue essay for Frames of Mind, a breakthrough 1986 Munson exhibition of filmic and photographic works by Central New York artists (Hollis Frampton, Marion Faller, Bill Brand, Alan Berliner, John Knecht, and others); a survey of North American pilgrimage sites where generations of cinephiles accessed independent cinema; and examinations of books by Fluxus artist Emmett Williams and subversive-cinema curator/writer Amos Vogel. The collection even includes reflections on the remarkable one-season television series My So-Called Life and an interview with media scholar Max Tohline, focusing on the recent emergence of the video essay and the “supercut.”
In Écrits sur le cinéma, the writings of Pauline Kael (1919-2001) – arguably the most famous and controversial film critic in the United States – are brought together in French for the first time in a single volume. Nicknamed “Lady Vinegar” by Norman Mailer and “General Kael” by George Lucas, Kael wrote for nearly four decades, primarily in the pages of The New Yorker. She played a pivotal role in championing European auteurs such as Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci, as well as the rise of New Hollywood filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and Martin Scorsese. Her scathing critiques of the studio system and its commercial excesses, along with her blistering takedowns of directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Clint Eastwood, and Federico Fellini, remain legendary.
Another recent publication celebrates another grand dame of film criticism: Lotte Eisner, author of The Haunted Screen and co-founder and long-time chief curator of the Cinémathèque Française alongside Henri Langlois. This new book is accompanied by a DVD featuring Lotte Eisner – Un lieu, nulle part, a documentary by Koulmasis, along with bonus material including Sur le chemin des glaces, Werner Herzog’s tale of his journey on foot in the autumn of 1974 after learning that his dear friend Eisner was gravely ill.
Next up are the first publications of brand-new book series that draw inspiration from a film’s structure to shape their writing guidelines. Belgian publishing house Flaneur Publishers is now accepting pre-orders for its debut book: Belgische cinema in 24 frames. This publication inaugurates a series that explores the richness of film through carefully selected stills and concise, incisive essays. The 24 Frames series focuses on the essence of cinema: still images – 24 of them, to be precise. That’s just enough to fill one second of film or to playfully encapsulate an entire career or genre. Each book in the series selects a theme and brings it to life through 24 images accompanied by as many texts. For the first volume, the focus remains close to home, featuring 24 frames from Belgium’s diverse film history. The official book launch is scheduled to take place during Film Festival Ostend 2025.
Similar in its structured approach, Bloomsbury is launching a new book series titled Timecodes. Each volume will focus on one film, examining it minute by minute, starting with the opening scene and concluding with the final minute before the closing credits. By embracing constraint and limits as a creative framework – akin to the principles of the Dogme 95 movement – the series invites authors to make the most of each cinematic minute.
Promising news has emerged in recent months from the film magazine landscape, with several new publications making their debut. Starting with a new print magazine that has been launched by the editors behind the Gospel zine. Titled Amateur·e, this publication will place a stronger emphasis on cinema and the image. Staying true to the spirit of Gospel’s ethos, each issue of Amateur·e will explore a specific theme, favouring instinctive exploration, literary and subjective writing, and in-depth engagement with alternative productions. Following a pilot issue released at the end of the summer, the first official issue of Amateur·e launched this month. It examines the construction of obsessions and the fictions we create as viewers and cinema enthusiasts, while also reflecting on transformations that have shaped the film world from the first half of the twentieth century to today. The issue includes profiles of actors, directors, micro-genres, themes, and media narratives. The first issue can be ordered here.
In New York, art-house theatre Metrograph introduced a new biannual magazine of the same name in December. The magazine’s inaugural issue features an in-depth interview with Clint Eastwood, a critical appraisal of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, an essay on Filipino action movies, and an analysis of a single shot of Maggie Cheung from the 1996 film Irma Vep. “This magazine is meant to be an extension of what happens at Metrograph, and everything about Metrograph is intended to enhance moviegoing and the seductiveness of cinema,” said Annabel Brady-Brown, the magazine’s editor. “We want this magazine to evoke that feeling you get when you go to Metrograph on a Saturday afternoon with a friend or on a date.”
In October, Marseille-based film festival FIDMarseille launched Fidback, their new annual print magazine. Published every spring, Fidback reflects on the past year, offering a review of the latest edition of FIDMarseille, a perspective on current global cinema developments, and a retrospective of a filmmaker closely associated with the festival – unbound by current trends. Each issue highlights around ten films through texts, interviews, documents, and unpublished materials. The inaugural issue, Fidback #0, was published in October 2024 and features contributions from Ignacio Agüero, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, Maria Aparicio, Wang Bing, Caroline Champetier, Laura Citarella, Selma Doborac, Mathilde Girard, Patrick Holzapfel, Claire Lasolle, James Lattimer, Annick Leroy, Julie Morel, Giovanni Marchini Camia, Adrian Martin, Louise Martin Papasian, Maxime Martinot, Martha Mechow, Cyril Neyrat, Jacques Rivette, Tina Satter, and Laura Staab. The issue was published in French, with the original versions of non-French texts included in a booklet at the end of the volume.
Staying within the realm of film magazines and wrapping up our book releases overview, two new compilations deserve special mention. The first is Helke Sander: I like chaos, but I don’t know, whether chaos likes me (Archive Books), which features texts by filmmaker and critic Helke Sander that were originally published in Frauen und Film, the first feminist German-language film journal, which Sander founded in 1974 and subsequently edited. The reprints of these texts are complemented by a conversation between Helke Sander and film scholar Elena Meilicke, exploring the origins and context of the journal’s creation. The publication is available in both print and digital formats.
Following O Cinema Não Morreu: Crítica e Cinefilia À pala de Walsh, Portuguese online magazine À pala de Walsh has teamed up once again with publisher and bookshop Linha de Sombra for a new book. Titled O Cinema das Palavras: Entrevistas À pala de Walsh, the latest publication focuses exclusively on interviews and conversations, celebrating the spoken word – the utterances that resonate and “go viral” among the most attentive audiences. Edited by Carlos Natálio, João Araújo, Luís Mendonça, and Ricardo Vieira Lisboa, the book also includes photographic portraits by Mariana Castro. It features interviews with international filmmakers such as the Safdie Brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, and Mia Hansen-Løve, alongside national figures like Miguel Gomes, Vasco Pimentel, and Rita Azevedo Gomes. Additionally, the book includes conversations with renowned film critics and thinkers, including Adrian Martin, Alain Bergala, Mark Cousins, and Sylvie Pierre.