New Book Releases / Summer 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.

Sometimes, I seem to feel a gravity rise from the depths of the ages throughout the world. In myself and in others, I notice a tendency to flee from new problems, to take refuge in churches or counter-churches, to rely on what has been achieved, to be complacent, to kneel before myths, to deliberately close eyes to injustice and stupidity.
– Heiny Srour1

We start our summer overview with the wonderful news of a new publication with writing of Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour. It features Srour’s powerful feminist text “Femme, arabe et... cinéaste”, a compelling political manifesto and personal reflection. The text was penned two years after the release of her groundbreaking film L'heure de la libération a sonné (1974), which chronicled the Dhofar Rebellion in Oman. The new book is a collaboration between Éditions Motifs (Algiers), Archives Bouanani (Morocco) and Talitha (Rennes) and was printed in French, English and Arabic. The English translation by Sis Matthé included in the book was originally published on Sabzian as part of the 2021 Out of the Shadows issue, a collaboration with Courtisane.

Femme, arabe et... cinéaste forms part of Éditions Motifs’s new cinema collection Intilak/ إنطلاق, meaning “emancipation” or “beginning” in Arabic. The series is a research and publishing project dedicated to little-known film texts – manifestos, essays, interviews, screenplays, articles – by filmmakers and thinkers who have created their work in societies shaped by relations of domination. Also worth mentioning therefore is the first volume in the series, dedicated to Algerian writer Wassyla Tamzali, whose texts likewise featured in Out of the Shadows. Originally published in 1979, En attendant Omar Gatlato brings together documentation, reviews and interviews on the first Algerian and Tunisian films to appear in this legendary cinema, as curated by Tamzali. She captured the turning point in Algerian cinema and society marked by Merzak Allouache’s Omar Gatlato (1976). The reissue of this book is accompanied by “Sauvegarde”, a powerful text written by Tamzali in 2022. It reflects on the period between 1967 and 1979, when cinema from around the world reached the Cinémathèque d’Alger, and the author accompanied Algerian films to East and West Berlin, Kraków, Prague, Tunis, Pesaro, Cannes and Ouagadougou. It is also a text that speaks to contemporary Algeria and to the new generation of Algerian filmmakers.

Two new books by American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum have been published by Sticking Place books recently. The first, Travels in the Cities of Cinema, gathers his conversations with Ehsan Khoshbakht, chief curator of the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna. In this wide-ranging book, Rosenbaum reminisces about his childhood in Florence, Alabama, where his family ran a chain of cinemas, and follows that journey to New York, Paris, London and Chicago. Each city marks a chapter in his evolution as a critic, filled with encounters and experiences that together reveal the life of an indefatigable cinephile and cultural commentator.

In the second book, Camera Movements That Confound Us, Rosenbaum sees certain camera movements as mysterious pleasures to be explored through adventurous prose, rather than mere puzzles to be solved. In Camera Movements That Confound Us, an experimental investigation into a neglected yet essential part of moviegoing, this belief becomes a theme that invites both variations and speculations, ranging across the breadth of film history from the silent features of F. W. Murnau and Yasujirō Ozu, to the work of Robert Altman, Carl Dreyer, Alfred Hitchcock, Alain Resnais, Michael Snow and Orson Welles, including documentaries and essay films, and even moving beyond film history to take in both early live television dramas and contemporary TV news.

Nighttime – or rather, night as a cinematic presence – is the theme of our next selection of books. The Latin word nox, meaning “night” or “darkness”, is the title of a recent project by French director Philippe Grandrieux, combining film and the book form. NOX is a book-film composed of photograms from a sequence shot showing  a woman, Eleni Vergeti, screaming – her mouth, the matter that fills it, and what Grandrieux calls “the vertigo of emptiness.” Grandrieux invites the reader “to let themselves slip into the book and into the images,” as he explains in a conversation on France Culture. “The question of our relationship to the image is a crucial one; that’s why the size of the book matters. The book must fit in the hands, and the distance between the eyes and the image must allow one both to be inside the image and to see it fully.” The result is a story of the metamorphosis of a female form, suspended between ecstasy and extreme suffering, between possession and animal regression.

We continue with a smaller publication: Sylvain George’s essay What the Night Sees, released as a prelude to a forthcoming book dedicated to his work. The A2-sized offset print was sold during the recent retrospective of George’s cinema at the ICA in London. The essay explores the political darkness of the Obscure Night trilogy, unveiling a cinema of the “Black Carnival”, where borders fracture and exiled bodies reinvent their presence: “In Obscure Night, the night is not just a physical darkness; it is a political darkness. It is the darkness of Fortress Europe, which hunts, repels, and erases; the darkness of security discourse, which reduces exiled bodies to statistics and strips them of any singular existence.” The forthcoming book will include original contributions from Jacques Rancière, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, John Gianvito, Leslie Kaplan, Radu Jude, Ben Rivers and others.

The emigrant’s dream had long since waned, buried in one of the shanty towns hastily erected with salvaged materials by these construction workers waiting for a future that would never come. It is impossible to bring the distinct bodies of a story back to life in flashbacks, to endow them with the colour of life. They have become shadows that slide into the night, all alike.
– Jacques Rancière2

Rancière, a close reader of George’s cinema, has also devoted considerable attention to the films of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. In his text on Vitalina Varela, “Two Eyes in the Night”, Rancière describes the film’s space as “a universe where day and night, inside and outside, are indistinguishable, where bodies pass each other in the half-light” only to be pierced by Vitalina’s gaze, “an implacable light”. Forthcoming next month, The Haunted Cinema of Pedro Costa offers the most comprehensive treatment of his work to date, covering everything from his early feature Blood to Vitalina Varela, and extending to his documentaries, short films, museum exhibitions, and the forthcoming Daughters of Fire. Authors James Naremore and Darlene J. Sadlier situate Costa’s oeuvre within the historical and cultural context of Portugal, while providing incisive close readings and stylistic analysis.

We close this nocturnal section with quite a feat: a substantial volume of interviews with the “prince of darkness” himself, John Carpenter, published by the eccentric, genre-loving house FAB Press. The title – Bringing Darkness Instead of Light – is a line from Carpenter’s film Prince of Darkness, which inspired the filmmaker’s nickname. Announced via a humorous YouTube short, the book is the culmination of over fifteen years of remarkably candid conversations between Carpenter and author Michael Doyle. In a trove of frank, often funny and revealing exchanges, we gain rare insight into the famously private filmmaker’s life and career, filled with amusing anecdotes and stories never before published. Beyond the making of his films, the book delves into Carpenter’s creative process and his unfiltered thoughts on politics, fear, drugs, the weird tales of H.P. Lovecraft, and his frequently colourful opinions on contemporaries in the industry. These conversations are further enriched by interviews with over a hundred of Carpenter’s collaborators, family, colleagues and friends.

“At last, the equivalent in images of Jean Epstein’s great texts,” exclaimed Nicole Brenez in her Rouge interview with Philippe Grandrieux – thus bringing us, briefly, back to him to introduce our next book. “Epstein is the one whose thought on what cinema can be and do went furthest – I mean in terms of completely reorganising our categories, in particular our perceptual categories. And his final texts, highly political, are as remarkable as they are unknown.” It’s no coincidence, then, that Brenez is one of the editors, alongside Joël Daire and Cyril Neyrat, of the latest addition to the collected writings of the French filmmaker and theorist. The seventh volume brings together several of his essays written between 1949 and 1952.

Also part of a larger series is the newest entry in the collection of books by éditions 202. They’ve published five books on Andrei Tarkovsky, each pertaining to one of his films. Previous editions featured Jacques Aumont on Solaris and three books by Maurice Darmon. The latest entry is by French critic Vincent Amiel and deals with Andrei Roublev.

Next up are three new books consisting of or reflecting on letters as a figure in the language of cinema. Correspondance avec des cinéastes, edited by Bernard Bastide and published by Gallimard, opens a remarkable window onto the life and mind of French filmmaker François Truffaut. From his early days as a critic to his final years as an acclaimed director, the collection assembles letters exchanged with a great array of correspondents: early cinema directors like Abel Gance and Max Ophüls, New Wave peers such as Rivette and Godard, and a wide circle of contemporaries and younger filmmakers, including Stanley Kubrick, Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda, and Bertrand Tavernier. What emerges is not just a portrait of Truffaut as cinephile, correspondent, and mentor, but of the intensely relational fabric of postwar cinema itself.

Serge Toubiana’s Ne connaît du film que la scène des adieux (Calmann-Lévy) picks up from where Truffaut’s correspondence trails off. Composed of elegiac portraits written over the course of nearly four decades, the book begins with Truffaut’s obituary in 1984 and follows, in a loosely chronological but emotionally charged order, a procession of farewells: Simone Signoret, Jacques Demy, Orson Welles, Michel Piccoli, Marguerite Duras, and many others, including most recently David Lynch. As a longtime editor of Cahiers du cinéma and director of the Cinémathèque Française, Toubiana has been both observer and participant in the life of French cinema. His memorial texts – simultaneously tributes, letters, and critical essays – are written with great clarity and quiet emotion. The title, taken from Jean Eustache’s observation that we only truly remember the last scene, underscores Toubiana’s central concern: how cinema helps us stage the act of saying goodbye.

In Desconhecido na Morada. A carta no cinema, Clara Rowland moves from epistolary content to epistolary form. Through a broad and nuanced inquiry, she investigates the figure of the letter as both a narrative device and a conceptual framework in film. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Rowland analyses how letters function as objects of communication and delay, as structuring metaphors, and as sites where literature and cinema confront each other across media boundaries. Published by the Lisbon-based imprint Documenta, known for its contributions to hauntology, cinema, and intermedial aesthetics, the book resonates with other titles in their catalogue, such as Espectros do Cinema. Manoel de Oliveira e João Pedro Rodrigues and A Escrita do Cinema: Ensaios. Like those works, Rowland’s study is attuned to the spectral nature of cinema: the letter as unreceived message, as ghostly presence.

The year 2025 marks the anniversary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death. In the wake of his brutal murder, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a fierce defence of the Italian filmmaker, warning against the posthumous moralising and simplifications that threatened to obscure the radical complexity of his work and person: “Do not put Pasolini on trial,” he urged, “do not render harmless what was never meant to be.” Nearly fifty years later, his complex writing continues to provoke and inspire, as evidenced by two new publications, released in Spanish and Italian respectively.

Los guiones no filmados gathers three of Pasolini’s unfilmed screenplays, each nearly ready for production. Structured as journeys through diverse geographical and socio-cultural landscapes, their agile rhythm allows us to see the films the director envisioned, while also offering a pleasant reading experience. As in all of Pasolini’s work, these scripts assign the reader an active role in fleshing out the scenes and challenge them to interpret the underlying issues for themselves. Without presupposing a specific reading order, it is the journey itself that matters. 

I film degli altri, meanwhile, collects Pasolini’s film reviews written between 1959 and 1974 for various publications, from Il Reporter to Playboy. These writings, though sporadic and shaped more by impulse than by profession, reflect a deep passion and a unique sensibility for the work of others – particularly Italian auteurs – offering what amounts to a fragmentary yet rich history of postwar Italian cinema. As Pasolini himself stated, “Cinema is not an entity unto itself, existing by its own autonomous force: it is culture, it is society, it is history itself that shapes it.”

Only available for pre-order but certainly worth mentioning already is Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, the first comprehensive study of the vast corpus of over 380 unrealised works by the French-Swiss filmmaker. Spanning the late 1940s to the 2020s, this invisible body of work includes unmade films, videos, and television programmes, as well as unfinished plays, books, exhibitions, a CD, a film journal, a camera, and even an architectural maquette. Despite Godard’s towering influence on postwar cinema, this dimension of his creative life has remained largely unexamined. Drawing on extensive archival research, Michael Witt’s study maps the contours of these abandoned ventures across six thematic lenses – literature, cinema, theatre, television, politics, and history –offering in-depth case studies that reveal Godard’s working methods and the global scope of his imagination, from France to Mozambique. The book sheds light not only on what was left unfinished, but on how these projects resonate with and refract his completed oeuvre, inviting a radical rethinking of Godard’s legacy. An annotated list of all known unrealised works is included as an appendix.

Three recent titles offer distinct yet complementary perspectives on the history and contemporary relevance of the moving image in avant-garde and experimental practice. The Attractions of the Moving Image gathers twenty-six essays by influential film scholar Tom Gunning, including four previously unpublished pieces. Best known for his seminal 1986 essay “The Cinema of Attractions”, Gunning has profoundly shaped the fields of early cinema studies and avant-garde film theory. This collection spans his expansive engagement with moving-image media – from film and photography to digital art – while drawing on a rich array of cultural references, from stage melodrama and magic lantern shows to world’s fairs and Spiritualism. Gunning’s writing insists on cinema’s embeddedness in the technological, psychological, and aesthetic discourses of its time, opening up a dynamic and historically attuned model for thinking about the medium.

A more subversive lineage is traced in Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works, newly reissued in a revised and expanded edition. The book brings together meticulously translated scripts of Debord’s six fiercely anti-spectacular films, accompanied by illustrations, annotations, and contextual documents. As a founding figure of the Situationist International and author of The Society of the Spectacle, Debord created films that function less as artworks than as critical detonations – attacking not only modern capitalist alienation but the passivity of cinematic spectatorship itself.

Lastly, Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art offers an expansive survey of the medium’s most inventive uses over the past decade. Featuring over 100 artists nominated by an international panel, and containing more than 850 images, the volume encompasses everything from live-action and animation to game-based and algorithmic works. The introduction by Erika Balsom provides a valuable historical overview of video art’s evolution since the 1960s.

Balsom also plays a key role, alongside Genevieve Yue, in Cutaways, a growing book series from Fordham University Press dedicated to short, sharp interventions in contemporary film and media theory. Each volume focuses on a single theme, film, or phenomenon, encouraging concise yet imaginative scholarship. The latest entry, Hotels by Jules O’Dwyer, joins previous titles by Elena Gorfinkel and others.

Spring always ushers in the bustling circuit of film festivals, with Cannes at its centre. For over fifty years, the Directors’ Fortnight has stood as Cannes’ most adventurous sidebar, spotlighting filmmakers who push the boundaries of form and politics. Les Carnets de la Quinzaine (Notes from the Directors’ Fortnight) gives this legacy a new shape in book form, presenting twenty-two interviews from the 2024 selection, an in-depth conversation with Quentin Tarantino, and rare working visuals provided by the directors themselves. The book also features contributions from critics Jérôme Dittmar, Guillaume Orignac and Yal Sadat, a preface by Bertrand Mandico, and a foreword by the Fortnight’s current artistic director Julien Rejl.

Shifting focus away from the Côte d’Azur, Destination: Tashkent – Experiences of Cinematic Internationalism, published by Archive Books, revisits the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African and Latin American Cinema (1968–1988). Once a major arena for anti-colonial and South-South solidarity, the festival is here explored through essays and conversations with researchers, filmmakers and festival organisers. The volume reflects on Tashkent’s legacy not only as a site of cinematic diplomacy but also as a framework for contemporary transnational filmmaking, particularly from the diasporic communities of Berlin. In a moment when the politics of internationalism are being re-evaluated, this book opens a critical space to consider cinema’s potential as a tool for global alliances beyond dominant Western circuits.

Finally, A Seat at the Table: Reflections and Recipes from Sarah Maldoror’s Un Dessert Pour Constance, published by the small but thoughtful Éditions Atlas, revisits Un Dessert Pour Constance (1979), a rare comedic work by pioneering filmmaker Sarah Maldoror. Set in Paris and featuring two Senegalese street sweepers, the film departs from her more militant work while still carrying the anti-hierarchical spirit of her broader oeuvre. This pocket-sized volume, published in collaboration with the London Migration Film Festival, combines reflections from Elhum Shakerifar, June Givanni, and Phuong Le with recipes and an introduction by Abiba Coulibaly, founder of Brixton Community Cinema. A heartfelt and multi-sensory tribute, it brings together cinema, memory, and food as a way of honouring Maldoror’s radical tenderness.

• 1Heiny Srour, “Woman, Arab and... Filmmaker,” Sabzian, 28 April 2021.
• 2Jacques Rancière, “Two Eyes in the Night,” Sabzian, 14 October 2020.