New Book Releases / Winter 2026
We start with a title that was already featured in our summer edition, but Michael Witt’s Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects (Bloomsbury, 2025) is such a fine achievement that it merits a second appearance. Witt’s study offers the first sustained exploration of the more than 380 unmade, unfinished, and abandoned projects that accompanied Godard’s career from the late 1940s to the 2020s. Although Godard is among the most written-about filmmakers of the post-war period, the largely invisible corpus of unrealised works – unmade films, videos, and television programmes, alongside unfinished plays, books, exhibitions, a CD, a camera, a journal, even an architectural maquette – has remained strikingly unexamined. Drawing on extensive archival work and private collections, Witt maps this vast phantom oeuvre and examines it through six interlinked perspectives: literature, cinema, theatre, television, politics, and history. The volume includes detailed case studies of major abandoned initiatives across France, the Middle East, the USA, Quebec, and Mozambique, tracing the continuities between these unrealised works and the completed films, illuminating Godard’s creative process, and culminating in a fully annotated list of the entire unrealised corpus. The book appears alongside the ongoing programme, curated by Witt, at the ICA in London, Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned (25 November 2025–21 June 2026), which brings to light a selection of Godard’s shelved film ideas, unmade television scripts, and other fragments.
Complementing Witt’s book in this section are two other publications on unfinished film projects. Out recently with Sticking Place Books, Charles Chaplin’s The Freak: The Story of an Unfinished Film sheds light on his final and perhaps most enigmatic film project, which came very close to being made. Conceived in 1968 when Chaplin was nearly eighty, the story follows Sarapha, a young woman with wings, both miraculous and vulnerable, who becomes a mirror for humanity’s fears, faiths, and cruelties. This volume, written by Chaplin’s official biographer David Robinson with contributions from the Cineteca di Bologna and members of the Chaplin family, publishes the complete script for the first time in English alongside previously unseen materials: storyboards, designs, production notes, photographs, and papers from producer Jerry Epstein.
Turning to unfinished work by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the screenplay of his film about St Paul got a new re-edition of the English translation at Verso Books. Written between Teorema and Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), the screenplay was deemed too risky for investors, blending Pasolini’s intellectual leftism with a Franciscan Catholic sensibility. In this kaleidoscopic vision, Paul’s story unfolds across Jerusalem, Wall Street, and Greenwich Village, intersecting with fascist movements, resistance fighters, and contemporary revolutions, each reflecting aspects of Pauline teaching. As French philosopher Alain Badiou observes in the foreword, “Pasolini’s wager, therefore, is that the truth of which St Paul is the divided bearer, the sacrificed militant, can make sense in the world of today, thus proving the latent universality of his thought […] This scenario should be read, not as the unfinished work that it was, but as the sacrificial manifesto of what constitutes, here as elsewhere, the real of any Idea.” You can read an excerpt of Badiou’s introduction on MUBI Notebook.
Rounding out this focus on unrealised cinema, and picking up a publication we missed this spring, Pilot Press published Derek Jarman’s The Assassination of Pier Paolo Pasolini in the Garden of Earthly Delights, the filmmaker’s unmade 1984 treatment that reframes Pasolini’s 1975 murder following the making of his last film Saló, or the 120 Days of Sodom. The film’s setting is inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Dutch Renaissance triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), a work portraying both the joys and dangers of temptation, which Jarman first encountered during a visit to Madrid’s Museo del Prado in the year he began developing the project. The final draft appears alongside pages from Jarman’s workbook, tracing his notes on structure, lighting, sound, and design. You can order it here.
From reflections on the unfinished, we turn to two new interesting books that explore the genesis of two completed films Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and the beautiful Le moindre geste (1971) by Jean-Pierre Daniel, Fernand Deligny, and Josée Manenti. 202 éditions – home to Witt’s earlier Godard volume Notre musique, c’est celle de tout le monde, based on a three-hour conversation with Godard in his studio in Rolle in April 2005 – has now added a new entry to its expanding Tarkovsky series. Tarkovski – Dans les pas de Stalker (1973-1979) by Vincent Amiel and Jacques Aumont traces the long and enigmatic creation of Stalker. “Inexplicable, the Zone into which three seasoned men venture for a single day,” the authors write, a place of threatening and mysterious rules, strewn with the remnants of a mechanical, violent world uncannily like our own. It is a difficult passage in which certainties collapse and the very sense of exploration dissolves. Through this terrain, Tarkovsky invents a form whose irony, audacity, and embrace of contradiction continue to unsettle both viewers and characters.
Next is Le moindre geste de Fernand Deligny et Jo Manenti, a remarkable account by editor Jean-Pierre Daniel, who is credited as co-director of the eponymous film alongside Manenti and Deligny. Shot between 1962 and 1964 in the Cévennes under extraordinary circumstances – a tiny, largely untrained crew and a handful of villagers as actors – the film’s footage reached Daniel in a trunk four years later, “like a message in a bottle.” Until then, he had worked only as a camera operator. Between 1968 and 1971, he assumed editing duties, organizing the raw images and sound into the version that exists today. Chronicled month by month, the book recounts the film’s improbable production, tracing references from Chaplin to Chris Marker, and situating it within the social and cultural upheavals of May ’68, psychotherapy, and popular education. The book is available for pre-order here.
There is no lack of books on individual directors this winter season, so we begin with several new studies and memoirs devoted to some of Hollywood’s greatest. The first is John Ford at Work: Production Histories 1927-1939, which traces the evolution of Ford’s early career in the studio system during the transformative years of the 1930s. Based on a decade of archival research in the files of 20th Century Fox, RKO, and Samuel Goldwyn, the book examines Ford’s collaborations with key producers, screenwriters, actors, and cinematographers, as well as the literary, musical, and cinematic sources that shaped his style. It considers how technological changes, including the advent of sound, were incorporated into his work, and provides detailed analyses of films such as Stagecoach, The Informer, Wee Willie Winkie, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Lost Patrol, mapping both the artistic and industrial contours of his career.
Moving on to Scene, a new memoire by Abel Ferrara, director of Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, and Dangerous Game. From his upbringing in the Bronx to his early independent filmmaking in Manhattan and his experience directing episodes of Miami Vice, Ferrara reflects on the often-chaotic processes behind his films. Beyond autobiography, the book is a manifesto on the demands of uncompromising artistry, detailing the struggles with addiction, studio pressures, and controversy that have accompanied a career defined by its refusal to compromise. Ferrara commented on his new memoir on an episode of the Intermission podcast on YouTube.
The ongoing Orson Welles retrospective at the Cinémathèque française (running from 8 October 2025 to 11 January 2026) is accompanied by two major publications. My Name Is Orson Welles, published by Éditions de la Table Ronde, collects archival texts, essays by leading scholars, and previously unpublished interludes to explore the paradoxes of Welles’s prodigious but often troubled career. From his theatrical and radio beginnings to the ground-breaking Citizen Kane, and onward to later works such as Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, and his unfinished projects, the volume offers a richly illustrated critical catalogue, framing Welles as both a global star and a figure of persistent artistic struggle. Complementing this is Moi, Orson Welles – Entretiens avec Peter Bogdanovich, a newly produced republication of the classic book of interviews between Welles and Bogdanovich. First published in French in the early 1990s (following the 1992 English edition This Is Orson Welles), these conversations – recorded from 1968 onward across Beverly Hills, Mexico, Rome, and New York – return here in a new edition. In them, Welles reflects on his life in theatre, radio, cinema, and television, his unfinished projects, and his relationships with producers, directors, and performers.
We continue with a batch of books on individual filmmakers. Robert Kramer, une quête incandescente, a new book by David Yon, traces the trajectory from one of America’s maverick filmmakers, studying his early work in the politically charged US underground of the late 1960s to his later experimental films made in France in the 1990s. Kramer’s cinema was inseparable from his activism, and his works were conceived as what he called “campfires in the night,” moments of engagement and reflection in turbulent times. Yon situates Kramer’s films within their historical, social, and political contexts, showing how his life, beliefs, and art were intertwined, and how his relentless experimentation in form and content sought to awaken audiences to questions of responsibility, solidarity, and the possibilities of cinema itself.
Taking a very different approach, Diagramme Monteiro maps the singular, iconoclastic cinema of João César Monteiro through the lens of the “diagram,” understood in a Deleuzian sense as a form-generating force that translates and transforms cinematic space. Monteiro’s more than twenty films, ranging from poetic reflections to sharply ironic and tragic narratives, are explored here through a combination of textual analysis and visual cartography. Pascale Cassagnau traces thematic and narrative lines across Monteiro’s oeuvre, while Hugues Decointet highlights recurring visual structures and motifs, all organized into four intricate “diagrammes.” With graphic interventions by Manon Bruet that are sensitive to montage, subtitles, and translation, the book functions as both an atlas and a meditation on Monteiro’s cinematic imagination. You can get your copy here.
In I Only Believe in Myself: Conversation with Murielle Joudet, filmmaker Catherine Breillat opens up in a long-form interview spanning six months (September 2022–March 2023). She and critic Murielle Joudet discuss every one of her films in chronological order, from Une vraie jeune fille (1975) to L’été dernier (2023), weaving in reflections on her life, her work, and the writers, thinkers, and desires that have shaped her. Breillat’s voice is framed as a cinema master class and a lesson in survival. As Alice Blackhurst notes in New Left Review Sidecar: “I Only Believe in Myself explores in greater detail the director’s worldview, in which the ‘only passion there is to experience’ is with the self.”
Concluding the section is the eighth issue of the TEXTUR series (Viennale), dedicated to Lucrecia Martel. Her latest documentary, Nuestra Tierra [Landmarks], premiered at Venice 2025. TEXTUR #8 includes a long interview with Martel, a conversation between actress-director María Alché and cinematographer Ernesto de Carvalho, two new translations of short stories by Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, and essays by Kleber Mendonça Filho, Athina Rachel Tsangari, Ramón Zürcher, Mercedes Halfron, and J. Hoberman. Notably, Film at Lincoln Center selected her as the 2025 Amos Vogel Lecturer during the New York Film Festival.
From the margins and back rooms of cinema culture come three new books that look at the forms, methods, and communities that have thrived outside the usual circuits. George and Mike Kuchar’s Reflections from a Cinematic Cesspool (Inpatient Press, due end of January) collects memories and notes from two central figures of American underground filmmaking. Long associated with a strain of low-budget, handmade cinema that bypassed convention altogether, the Kuchar brothers revisit the making of works such as Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I’m Naked, and The Devil’s Cleavage. With an introduction by John Waters, the book offers a look at their working methods, their collaborations, and the peculiar mixture of discipline and improvisation that sustained their practice.
Larry Cohen’s I Killed Bette Davis turns to another independent path through the industry. A screenwriter, director, and producer who often operated on the fringes of Hollywood, Cohen recounts a career shaped by speed, resourcefulness, and a willingness to shoot wherever he could find space. From early television work to the guerrilla tactics behind films like Q and The Stuff, the memoir traces a filmmaking life defined by invention under pressure and a constant negotiation with the limits of budget, location, and studio tolerance.
Finally, BOOM! The Exploding Cinema Book offers a substantial reconstruction of the thirty-year history of London’s Exploding Cinema collective, one of the longest-running experiments in open-access exhibition and collective cultural organisation in the UK. Compiled by founding member Duncan Reekie, the book assembles archive photographs, artwork, posters, internal documents, and first-hand accounts to trace how a shifting group of filmmakers and activists built monthly DIY screening nights in pubs, clubs, and squats across London. These events, often put together with minimal resources, created temporary social spaces marked by multiple projections, improvised setups, and an open invitation to anyone who wanted to show work. By following the collective from its origins in the Brixton art squats of the early 1990s through its later international reach and eventual move into online forms, BOOM! also sketches a broader map of London’s underground film culture, touching on groups such as MyEyesMyEyes, Omsk, the Halloween Society, Undercurrents, the Volcano! Film Festival, Kaos Filmgruppe, and others. It is both an internal history and a document of the wider networks that sustained DIY moving-image practice over three decades.
Continuing our overview with four English-language books dedicated to important film theorists, we begin with No Place Press’s ambitious three-volume series The Collected Writings (1991–2024) of a Mortal to Death by Jalal Toufic. Volume 1 (2025) gathers revised editions of Toufic’s first three books – Distracted (1991/2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993/2003), and Over-Sensitivity (1996/2009) – together with his script Jouissance in Postwar Beirut (2014) and the new The Unreviewed Writings of a Peerless Thinker (2024). Spanning more than six hundred pages, the volume offers both an introduction for new readers and a comprehensive overview for longtime followers, presenting Toufic’s central concepts such as the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster, radical closure, silence-over, the 180-degree over-turn, and the dancer’s two bodies. Organized by the author himself, the series situates his writings in the ongoing suspension of messianic and Mahdist temporality and reflects his practice of untimely collaboration with future artists, thinkers, and filmmakers. The collected works, while comprehensive, also preserve Toufic’s characteristic openness to forthcoming thought, marking a sustained engagement with three decades of inquiry in aesthetics, philosophy, and the cinematic imagination.
Bodies and Things: Selected Writings by Lesley Stern gathers four essays that trace her engagement with bodies, animism, and thing theory in cinema, alongside commentary by Tracy Cox-Stanton and Bill Brown. Stern, who passed away in 2021, developed her approach over the course of more than a decade, from her 2012 essay Dead and Alive: The Body as Cinematic Thing to later contributions such as “‘Once I’ve Devoured Your Soul We Are Neither Animal nor Human’: The Cinema as an Animist Universe,” and an extensive interview with Cox-Stanton. Across these texts, Stern interrogates the ways bodies – living, dead, and transitional – function as cinematic objects, exploring their material presence and performative potential. Bringing into dialogue films and filmmakers ranging from John Ford and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea to Jean-Luc Godard, and focusing in detail on works such as Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment, Japanese Story, and Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, Stern demonstrates how corporeal presence indexes cinematic temporality and engages with philosophical thought, from Heidegger to Latour.
Adding to this section is My Life is the Cinema, which brings to English readers for the first time the memoirs and selected writings of Esfir Shub, the pioneering Soviet filmmaker whose archival works reshaped documentary practice. A comrade of Eisenstein and Vertov, Shub was among the first to recognize montage as both an artistic and historiographic tool, capable of revealing political and emotional truths. This volume, translated and edited by Keith Sanborn, includes her autobiographical text “In Close Up,” articles, unrealized projects, correspondence, and theoretical reflections on editing, authorship, and the ethics of representation. Landmark works like The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927) established the compilation documentary as a distinct genre, and Shub’s writings illuminate her methods, her advocacy for fact-based cinema, and her lasting influence on debates around montage, archival practice, and feminist film historiography. As Stuart Liebman notes, this meticulously annotated edition restores Shub to her rightful place as a “sorceress of the editing table”.
“The history of cinema is, like that of revolution in our time, a chronicle of hopes and expectations, aroused and suspended, tested and deceived,” reads the first sentence of Annette Michelson’s famous essay “Film and the Radical Aspiration”. Annette Michelson and the Radical Aspiration in American Avant-Garde Cinema, finally, is a new critical anthology, edited by Luis A. Recoder and Kenneth White, of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars that examines the work and legacy of Annette Michelson (1922–2018), pioneering critic and theorist of avant-garde cinema. Michelson’s insights transformed our understanding of cinema through her provocative and profoundly original analyses. As a contributor and editor for Artforum in the 1960s and early 1970s, and later as founding editor of the journal October, Michelson defined the terms of moving-image art and its relation to painting, sculpture, and performance.
The seven-disc Blu-ray collection Cinema and State offers a view of Nagisa Oshima’s most important films, presenting a wide-angle look at radical Japanese cinema from the 1960s and early 1970s. The limited-edition box set features 4K restorations and high-definition transfers, extensive audio commentaries, archival interviews with Oshima and his collaborators, and visual essays by scholars such as Julian Ross. A 160-page booklet accompanies the set, offering new essays by Rea Amit and Espen Bale, archival articles by Donald Richie and Alexander Jacoby, and interviews with Oshima himself.
In a similar spirit, Nick Deocampo’s book Une traversée du cinéma philippin : entre répression et subversion explores independent Filipino cinema as a site of resistance and invention. Drawing on decades of research, Deocampo examines how filmmakers navigate state censorship while asserting creative and political freedom. He situates these films within a broader cultural and historical context, showing how they challenge dominant narratives and expand the expressive possibilities of cinema.
Nearing the end of our winter overview, with two books that collect more contemporary criticism. First, from Film Desk Books, Melissa Anderson’s The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012-2024 gathers her criticism from outlets including Bookforum, Artforum, The Village Voice, and 4Columns, where she has served as film editor and lead critic since 2017. The volume presents reviews, essays on individual performers such as Candy Darling and Shelley Duvall, and wide-ranging reflections on contemporary cinema. Concluding with a conversation with critic Erika Balsom on pleasure, sexuality, and stardom in the twenty-first century, The Hunger highlights Anderson’s distinctive voice: queer but undogmatic, homophilic yet heterodox. The book was launched with events in New York, including a screening of Arthur J. Bressan Jr.’s Gay USA at Light Industry on December 2.
Following The Earth Dies Streaming, a collection of writing from 2002 to 2018, A. S. Hamrah returns with Algorithm of the Night (n+1 books). This volume collects his essays and aphoristic reviews from 2019 to 2025 for n+1, The Baffler, the New York Review of Books, the Criterion Collection, and other publications. Praised for its wit, irreverence, and incisive cultural critique, Hamrah’s writing charts cinema’s encounters with contemporary crises – from AI to The Zone of Interest – and presents an alternative to the conventions and commodification of corporate entertainment, delivering criticism that is both literary and, at times, prophetic.
Finally, a new French art magazine, objet trouvé, recently emerged as a new publication devoted to images. Printed on handmade 80 g bulk paper with an initial run of 100 copies, issue 1 features a never-before-published French interview with Michael Snow, an excerpt from Charlotte Auricombe’s photographic work, and an extensive interview with Antoni Pinent accompanied by numerous colour and black-and-white photographs. For now, the magazine is available at institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo and the Jeu de Paume in Paris, but more venues may follow soon!
