Editions Roundup: March Picks
Editions Roundup: March Picks
A hand selected round-up of our latest coveted offerings.
Welcome to the first Metrograph Editions Picks. This month Nick Pinkerton, Annabel Brady-Brown, Gabriel Jandali Appel and Matt Folden have gone deep on some of their favorite in and out of print books, all available for purchase by Metrograph members.
A lovely little artist’s book that’s a companion piece and making-of document of Rivers’s 2015 installation The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers, made up of all sort of ephemera pertaining to that work, filmed in Morocco. Rivers is a guy whose film projects tend to generate all sorts of incidental art objects, made by himself and others—a couple of months ago I saw a gallery show he had up at Jeux de Paume in Paris consisting of mock-up models and preliminary sketches for a movie he hasn’t even made yet. He’s tremendously prolific and talented, which of course I resent. This slender volume includes crude storyboards, maps of the shooting terrain, lovely production photographs courtesy of Yuki Yamamoto, and facsimile reprints of stories that informed Rivers’s film: Paul Bowles’s short story ’A Distant Episode’ and three pieces by Bowles’s close associate, the painter Mohammed Mrabet, whose orally transmitted tales Bowles transcribed. I like the book a lot, particularly because the burgundy leatherette binding reminds me of this series of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition supplements from the ‘90s.—Nick Pinkerton
Condition notes: New, printed in an edition of 1,500 copies
5.25" x 7.5"
128 pages
Ben Rivers
Artangel / Whitworth Art Gallery
2015
Price: $25
One hundred and twenty full color stills, all taken from the incandescent and underseen picture, shot by Hélène Louvart, and printed on heavy paper stock. Perfectly framed in a 5.5 by 8 inch oblong binding and out of print since it’s initial publication, a run of only 250 copies. Reads as both a discreet bedside companion to the film and a stunning photo book in its own right.—Matt Folden
Condition notes: Out of Print, in like new condition.
8" x 5.5"
216 pages
Larry Clark
Cameron + Brown
2014
Price: $100
Incredibly, and happily, still-in-print dual language semi-facsimile of Mancini and Perrella’s Pasolini examination. Originally produced in Rome in 1980, five years after Ostia, and the same year as the Bologna Massacre.
Mancini and Perrella categorize and compile over 600 pages of depth-charged research and mechanically reproduced images, which in bound form create a curiously gorgeous, still contemporary, view of Pasolini’s body, beliefs, and country. An indispensable slab of a book.—Matt Folden
Condition notes: New
8.75″ x 8.75″
640 pages
Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella
Edition Patrick Frey
2017
Price: $70
If, like me, you have an interest in Japanese Pink Film but are too bashful to google such matters, Zahlten’s book is just the thing. Essentially a version of soft-core pornography, the genre is given both an encompassing historical contextualization as well as a critical analysis—the sort of inquiry you won’t feel embarrassed to be caught reading on the subway. That said, for all its evident research (both primary sources and theory are excerpted liberally), the book isn’t overly academic. It’s not quite “reading Playboy for the interviews,” but it also won’t put you to sleep. Tracing Japanese Cinema from the 1960s to (roughly) the present, Zahlten identifies three of what he calls “industrial genres” to lead us from then, until now: the aforementioned Pink Film, Kadokawa Films (big budget affairs with various other media tie-ins), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video fare). The lineage is easy enough to follow, and includes delights like a brief biography of Haruki Kadokawa, the flamboyant architect of the genre that led to films like Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (apparently Akira Kurosawa once refused to shake his hand).—Gabriel Jandali Appel
Condition notes: New.
6″ x 9"
305 pages
Alexander Zahlten
Duke University Press
2017
Price: $27.95
An absolutely gorgeous bilingual (English-French) survey of Chaplin’s career through graphic representations of the Tramp through five decades, primarily told through movie posters from around the world, with a decided emphasis on the French poster. (Primarily, but not exclusively—you can also see, for example, “Charlot” as he appears in the art of Fernand Leger and Jean Epstein, and the influence of American film posters on Cubist and Surrealist circles is discussed at some length.) A study in Chaplin as icon and prototype for 20th-century celebrity, it’s also a history of the art of the movie poster, which grew to maturity alongside Chaplin’s rise to fame and Hollywood’s ascendance growth to become the planet’s dominant moviemaking center. —Nick Pinkerton
Condition notes: Out of print, and in like-new condition.
11.75″ x 13"
127 pages
Israel Perry / Jean-Louis Capitaine
Queen Art Publishers
2005
Price: $80
“Some movies are harder to bury than others,” writes Rosenbaum in his first book, a recounting of his private cinematic awakening that doubles as a rich social history, laced with bittersweet memories of a departed world. His childhood was spent in 1940s and ’50s Alabama, where his family ran a small chain of cinemas, and Rosenbaum conjures the whiff of grandad’s cigar smoke, waterfalls installed in theater lobbies, a traumatic screening of Freaks (1932), and the Florence Times Sunday column in which the week’s theatrical highlights were spruiked (where Rosenbaum made his critical debut, age 14). Shapeshifting and formally experimental, this memoir—published in 1980 and driven by countercultural zeal—slides sharp-shooting analyses up alongside personal anecdotes (bad drug trips, Civil Rights marches, an undescended testicle), making the case that the appreciation of movies is inextricably bound up in the context in which those movies are seen.—Annabel Brady-Brown
6″ x 9"
202 pages
Jonathan Rosenbaum
University of California Press
1995
Price: $31.95