New Book Releases / Autumn 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.
After Méandres Meanders Meanders (2024), a trilingual booklet featuring a text by Dutch filmmaker Johan van der Keuken, Sabzian is proud to present its second publication: WHO IS ME: Dichter van de as, a text by Pier Paolo Pasolini written in New York during the 1966 New York Film Festival. Discovered among his papers shortly after his death and only recently republished, the thirty-two typewritten pages reveal Pasolini’s paradoxical “bio-bibliographic poem,” composed “in the August sun of a deserted Manhattan.” Addressed to an unnamed American critic with what he calls an “unpleasant anti-communist grin,” the text is not a preparation for an interview but a lyrical, at times dark meditation, interweaving personal anecdotes, theoretical reflections and poetic fragments. Pasolini declares that he no longer wants to be read “as a poet,” choosing instead “the language of cinema and of life as it presents itself,” while nonetheless producing a highly literary composition with intertextual allusions. Written at a moment when he could already look back on four feature films, WHO IS ME also announces the narrative that would become Teorema (book and film, 1968). His turn to cinema, with its unfinished forms, jump cuts and deliberate roughness, marked both a new creative freedom and an act of resistance against “a state that does not criticise itself, as if it were the whole, pure, ordinary life.”
The text has appeared in various editions and translations, including Poeta delle Ceneri (Garzanti, 2023), Qui suis-je (Arléa, 2015), and Poet of Ashes (trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in Writing on Burning Paper [Berlin: Fireflies Press, 2022]). Published in Dutch translation with an introduction by Piet Joostens, the release coincides with a broader focus on Pasolini at RITCS School of Arts in Brussels, which included the screening of Teorema in collaboration with Cinema RITCS.
With Denken in het donker met Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, a new entry in the Belgian book series edited by Katrien Schaubroeck appears in October. The book gathers philosophical reflections on the oeuvre of the Belgian brothers, whose Rosetta (1999) made history: the film not only won the Palme d’Or and Best Actress in Cannes, it also inspired Belgium’s “Rosetta Plan” for youth employment. For decades, the Dardennes’ cinema has been steeped in philosophy, drawing in particular on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of responsibility and face-to-face encounter. Contributions by Anke Brouwers, Aurélie Duchateau, Ernest Mathijs, and Wouter Hessels probe these questions, situating the Dardennes’ work as a cinema of thought.
The same series earlier turned to Chantal Akerman, whose work also manages to inspire writers of poetry. Belgian poet Paul Demets recalls being captivated by Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit (1982) in the mid-1980s, an encounter that set in motion more than thirty years of writing with her work as a projection screen. His new collection Moederkoren (Poëziecentrum) brings together poems shaped by decades of returning to Akerman’s films – fiction, documentaries, installations – works that confront and unsettle, stirring layers of affect and memory. The book appears with a cover photograph by Bert Potvliege and will be presented at Film Fest Gent on October 13, 2025, following a screening of Toute une nuit. At the festival, Demets will be interviewed by film scholar Anke Brouwers.
Staying with the crossover between literature and film, Inpatient Press publishes Six Films, the first English translation of Marguerite Duras’s cycle of experimental texts. In the late 1970s, Duras set out to expand the boundaries of writing and cinema, refusing to see the former as mere words on a page or the latter as images on a screen. Six Films gathers narration, voiceovers, and dialogue from six of her films, reshaped into prose poems and monologues that grapple with selfhood, intimacy, colonialism, and expression.
Alongside this publication, a new Dutch translation appears of her landmark script Hiroshima mon amour, written for Alain Resnais’s 1959 film. Publisher Cosimo launched the book on Tuesday 16 September in collaboration with De Cinema in Antwerp, accompanied by a one-off screening of Resnais’s film on the big screen.
Continuing with a new publication by Film Desk Books, Hallelujah Now is the only novel by acclaimed filmmaker Terence Davies, appearing in a sewn-bound hardcover edition this September. The book also includes previously unpublished poetry, with an introduction by Michael Koresky and an afterword by James Dowling. Structured in three sections, the novel traces the life of Robert, from his Catholic upbringing in Liverpool to secret sexual adventures and his final reflections in a nursing home, blending memory, desire, isolation, and mortality. Koresky observes that Davies “fearlessly uses the novel form to give voice to anxieties that might have been otherwise unportrayable,” and that the work stands as a singular literary counterpart to his cinema – a pure emanation of self, beholden to nothing or no one. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens marked the release with an event on September 12, 2025.
Spektor Books announced yet another book by Alexander Kluge, Schattenrisse der Macht. Inspired by Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, Alexander Kluge reflects in Schattenrisse der Macht on forms of political power where authority is concentrated in an individual. Through stories, commentary, interviews, and short films, Kluge traces this “Caesarism” from late ancient Rome through medieval emperors and Russian tsars to contemporary authoritarian movements. The book explores how the distant mirror of antiquity allows recognition of present-day political structures. Born in 1932 in Halberstadt, Kluge – screenwriter, film and television producer, writer, and philosopher – remains one of the most influential figures of the New German Cinema, demonstrating the ongoing dialogue between cinematic practice and critical thought.
Soleil Rouge. Une histoire du cinéma rebelle japonais takes readers inside the explosive Japanese cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, where the polished conventions of studio filmmaking gave way to a feverish, unruly wave of sabre epics, yakuza thrillers, feminist gang films, and surreal fantasies. Stéphane du Mesnildot, journalist, critic, and former member of Cahiers du cinéma specialising in Asian cinema, traces how this rebellious cinema – at once commercial and avant-garde, anarchic and conservative – mirrored a society in upheaval while redefining the line between art and exploitation. Abundantly illustrated and graphically daring, this edition pays homage to the visual energy of the period, its orange-and-blue palette and collage style evoking the look of 1970s Japanese film magazines.
In Ed Wood: Made in Hollywood USA, Will Sloan revisits the so-called “worst director of all time” to argue for a richer appreciation of his work. From the cult rediscovery of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda to the strange beauty of Wood’s neglected scripts and late-career obscurities, Sloan reframes Wood as a stubbornly independent filmmaker whose camp sensibility, gender play, and eccentric style anticipated later conversations around cinema and outsider art. Writing on his Substack, Sloan explains that the book aims to provide “a lens through which to better appreciate” Wood, whether you are encountering him for the first time or already lost in the “murky waters” of his deeper cuts. Neither hagiography nor dismissal, the study positions Wood as a quintessential Hollywood maverick.
A. S. Hamrah’s Last Week in End Times Cinema captures a different kind of revolt: the act of chronicling cinema’s own collapse. Compiled from his newsletter, this almanac lists, week by week, the industry’s self-inflicted disasters between March 2024 and March 2025: streaming implosions, climate emergencies, AI delusions, and the dreary churn of IP franchises. Presented in terse, unadorned bulletins, Hamrah’s archive channels both satire and despair, offering a ledger of folly that reads like Félix Fénéon rewritten for Hollywood’s terminal phase. In its stark accumulation of bad news, the book turns documentation itself into a rebellious gesture, stripping away the illusions of an industry lost in its own tinsel.
We continue this Autumn overview with two new books by Belgian scholars, both also past contributors to Sabzian. In Barge Life: On Jean Vigo's “L'Atalante”, Florian Deroo looks at a mythical classic of French cinema: Jean Vigo’s 1934 film L’Atalante.A work brimming with the energies of surrealism and anarchism, L’Atalante follows a young couple, two shipmates, and a clowder of cats who dwell in the belly of a river barge. Deroo offers a wide-ranging essay on the film, revealing how it lovingly delineates a small group that withdraws from the rhythms of modern life to establish a different kind of existence elsewhere. In L’Atalante, the river barge becomes a vehicle for a powerful fantasy: a supple and mobile collective life, lived in sensuous interdependence. Combining film criticism, philosophy, and biography, Deroo’s Barge Life reconsiders an important forerunner to the French New Wave and the early death of its director. Drawing readers into the intimately cramped living spaces of L’Atalante, Deroo explores the allure of retreating into a self-sufficient shelter, along with its intractable problems.
Karel Pletinck’s Revelationist Aesthetics in Contemporary Cinema. An Intellectual History (1950s-2000s) investigates the notion of art as revelation of reality in film aesthetics and criticism. Where did this seemingly naive belief in the vocation of art originate, what sustained it, and how did it shape the work of filmmakers, as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Abbas Kiarostami? These questions launch the book’s exploration of the revelationist tradition from the 1950s to the early 2000s, revisiting a formative period in film history – from Italian Neorealism and the Nouvelle Vague to political modernism – and assessing its lasting impact on contemporary cinema. With the passing of its last major figures, Godard and Straub, in 2022, a critical reassessment of this tradition is timely.
We continue with a batch of French publications. The first, Radu Jude – La fin du cinéma peut attendre, seems to refute the idea the idea of an “end time” for cinema or so the title suggests. Edited by Cyril Neyrat and part of FID Marseille’s One, Two, Many collection, it gathers essays and testimonies on the work of the Romanian filmmaker whose restless, protean cinema insists on probing history, politics, and the untapped possibilities of the medium. Published in co-edition with FID and in partnership with the Centre Pompidou, the book follows a retrospective of the same name at FIDMarseille, and collects a polyphony of voices – critics, philosophers, filmmakers, and Jude himself – while also offering readers a singular bonus: hidden within its pages is a QR code giving access to Sleep #2 (2024), Jude’s homage to Andy Warhol. “It is very difficult for a film to be subversive today,” Jude remarks, “but cinema still has the capacity to see and think differently.”
In Bertrand Bonello, des stratégies obliques, Pascale Cassagnau devises a playful yet rigorous method of entering the filmmaker’s work, borrowing the principle of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s 1975 card deck Oblique Strategies. Bonello himself has used the deck to reorient his creative process, and here, through Cassagnau’s abecedary protocol, he responds to prompts that become new ways of traversing his films. The result is less a systematic survey than a game of chance: fragments, names, and notions reshuffled to suggest fresh constellations. The book is complemented by 160 pages of archival material, including working documents, and a previously unpublished interview with Cassagnau.
With Au travail avec Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Rivette et quelques autres, Luc Béraud, longtime assistant director, looks back on his formative years alongside French cinema figures like Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jacques Rivette, and Alain Cuny. Béraud recounts encounters both comic and revelatory. Following his earlier volumes on Jean Eustache and Pierre Lhomme, this new book paints an affectionate portrait of the 1970s as a decade of audacity and experimentation, where modern cinema was being invented on set, often in chaotic and unexpected ways.
Appearing in the L’œil du cinéma series by Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, edited by Antoine de Baecque and Aurélie Ledoux, Le cinéma de Susan Sontag examines Susan Sontag’s complex and enduring engagement with cinema, both as a thinker and as a filmmaker. The book is structured in four parts, beginning with Sontag’s work as a filmmaker, including explorations of modernity, silence, and gender, and reflecting on her cinematic dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir and her own film Promised Lands (1974). The second part considers her cinephilia and critical thought, addressing Sontag’s sensuous approach to cognition, her ambivalent relationship to fantasy and reality, and the often-overlooked dimensions of her cinematic thinking. The third part situates cinema between memory and history, from her reflections on German cinema and the politics of images to her engagement with directors like Syberberg and the resonances of trauma in her films. The final part documents Sontag’s encounters with other intellectuals and artists, including Godard, John Berger, and Lisa Ta, alongside discussions of feminist film criticism. Contributions come from leading scholars such as E. Ann Kaplan, Béatrice Mousli, Corinne Rondeau, Sylvain Louet, and Dork Zabunyan, among others. The publication arrives as Sontag’s work on film has also recently begun to receive attention in English: Sontag on Film, edited by David Thomson and Tom Luddy, will be published in June 2026. To be continued!
With Gold and Ashes, filmmaker and visual artist Salomé Lamas inaugurates a special vinyl-book edition that merges sound and text into a hybrid form. The publication reimagines the soundtrack, dialogues, and images from her 2025 film Ouro e Cinza [Gold and Ashes], with contributions from Frédéric Neyrat, Isabel Pettermann, Isabel Ramos, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, and Lamas herself. The result is an intimate, meditative experience, resonating between sound and silence, the said and the unsaid. Known for her cross-disciplinary practice that interrogates parafictions, postcolonialism, migration, and capitalism, Lamas has long blurred the lines between cinema and contemporary art. Here, her pluridisciplinary ethos finds a new material form.
Semi-Nomadic Debt-Ridden Bedouins offers the first comprehensive survey of nearly two decades of work by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Basma al-Sharif. Tracing her films and installations from the present back to her earliest experiments, the monograph charts the evolution of a visual language shaped by displacement, colonialism, and the ongoing realities of occupation. Through curatorial essays and a rich selection of images, the book highlights the political and aesthetic frameworks that anchor al-Sharif’s practice, while new literary contributions extend its reach: a fictional text by Karim Kattan explores estrangement and belonging, and a dialogue with Diego Marcon reflects on shared affinities and creative processes. Bridging the personal and the political, the real and the imagined, this book captures the urgency and complexity of al-Sharif’s practice.
Published as an appendix to Terrassen’s Yvonne Rainer retrospective in Copenhagen (November 2024), Privilege: An Yvonne Rainer Filmography brings renewed attention to Rainer’s remarkable body of seven films made between the early 1970s and mid-1990s. Long inaccessible and often relegated to marginal museum displays, these works – now newly restored in 4K – resist categorisation, weaving together performance, documentary, fiction, and the avant-garde. Contributions from Babette Mangolte, Ursula Andkjær Olsen, Emily Wardill, Valérie Massadian, and Rainer herself situate the films in dialogue with both contemporary and historical debates. Terrassen is a roving cinema in Copenhagen dedicated to the social life of film. Over the past five years, Terrassen has screened works by filmmakers from Mati Diop to Chris Marker, organised retrospectives on Trinh T. Minh-ha and the Ogawa Productions Collective, and convened a congress of nomadic cinemas. All screenings are free (!), with more information available at terrassen.bio.
As always, we end our overview with news (when we can find it) about film magazines. Hailing from New York and from the borderless country of cinephilia, Narrow Margin is a new quarterly magazine dedicated to exploring the great artists, critics, and works of an under- and mis-appreciated cinema. Narrow Margin’s inaugural issue focuses on Luc Moullet and Vittorio Cottafavi, filmmakers whose work exemplifies the dignity and inventiveness of creation outside mainstream frameworks. Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s dictum that “Culture is the rule, and art is the exception,” the magazine seeks to revive what remains of serious film criticism, gathering contributors around interviews, previously untranslated texts, essays, and roundtable discussions. Complementing the issue, screenings at Anthology Film Archives in New York showcased selections from both directors.
