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Cover of Tale of cinema

Fireflies Press

Tale of cinema

Dennis Lim

€14.50

In the fourth title of the acclaimed DecadentEditions series, Dennis Lim explores the oeuvre of South Korean auteur Hong Sangsoo via his 2005 film. Forty minutes in, we realise we’ve been watching a film within the film. The ‘real’ characters leave the cinema and find themselves reenacting what they just saw, as a chance encounter invites a suicide pact. Is it life imitating art, or the other way around? Dennis Lim is a film curator, teacher, and writer. He is currently the Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.

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Cover of Inland Empire

Fireflies Press

Inland Empire

Melissa Anderson

Essays €15.00

‘Inland Empire’ is a film by David Lynch about a once-feted Hollywood actress who is cast in a movie that is rumoured to be cursed. From a queer, feminist perspective, film critic Melissa Anderson examines how Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful “acteurs” are in the creation of dreamlike cinema. Laura Dern’s astonishing performance, as the film’s realities splinter and identities multiply, is elucidated by Anderson through her deep affection and respect for Lynch. The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.

Cover of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper

Fireflies Press

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper

Annabel Brady-Brown, Giovanni Marchini Camia

Published on the centenary year of Pasolini’s birth, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper is a dual edition that stages a dialogue between cinema today and Pasolini’s timeless films and words.

The two complementary volumes slide into one another, forming a unique set that evokes and celebrates Pasolini’s enduring influence. The smaller book features his epic autobiographical poem ‘Poet of the Ashes’, in a revised translation by esteemed poet Stephen Sartarelli; the larger book comprises original tributes by vital filmmakers from across the contemporary cinema landscape.

Twenty filmmakers shared personal reflections in the form of essays, poems, photographs, drawings and more: Catherine Breillat, Luise Donschen & Helena Wittmann, Jia Zhangke, Radu Jude, Payal Kapadia, Alexandre Koberidze, Dane Komljen, Mike Leigh, Mariano Llinás, Roberto Minervini, Valérie Massadian, Luc Moullet, Ben Rivers, Angela Schanelec, Ulrich Seidl, Basma al-Sharif, Deborah Stratman, Anocha Suwichakornpong and Gustavo Vinagre.

Cover of Ten Skies

Fireflies Press

Ten Skies

Erika Balsom

Essays €14.50

Ten shots of the sky, each ten minutes long. That’s all it takes to describe James Benning’s film from 2004. And yet, this simplicity conceals a rich and absorbing drama, one of the great works of the American avant-garde. Scholar and critic Erika Balsom unfolds its hidden intricacies of meaning, extending its lessons with crystalline prose, a comparable sense of depths, and an exhilarating, maximalist intimation of what criticism can do and become. She brings you from the film itself into the mind of the artist, through philosophical musings and art historical scholarship. The book is part of a Decadent Editions series of 10 books about 10 films.

Cover of The Autobiography of a Language

Futurepoem

The Autobiography of a Language

Mirene Arsanios

Poetry €22.00

Here the mirror image of the almost hallucinatory, heart-rending loss of the familiar is literary defamiliarization. Arsanios both mourns and blasts apart the notion of the mother tongue, reminding us that for each “mother tongue” at least another tongue is silenced. Desire propels her genre-defying writing, which grief notwithstanding still manages to tongue languages, and that is her genius. — Mónica de la Torre

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017–19.

Cover of Flare Out

The Visible Press

Flare Out

Peter Gidal

Essays €21.00

Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 is a collection of essays by Peter Gidal that includes “Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film” and other texts on metaphor, narrative, and against sexual representation.

Also discussed in their specificity are works by Samuel Beckett, Thérèse Oulton, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. Throughout, Gidal’s writing attempts a political aesthetics, polemical as well as theoretical. One of the foremost experimental film-makers in Britain since the late 1960s, Peter Gidal was a central figure at the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, and taught advanced film theory at the Royal College of Art. His previous books include Andy Warhol: Films and Paintings (1971), Understanding Beckett (1986) and Materialist Film (1989).

Cover of To Become Two

Archive Books

To Become Two

Alex Martinis Roe

To Become Two: Propositions for Feminist Collective Practice offers a narrative of artist Alex Martinis Roe’s research into a genealogy of feminist political practices in Europe and Australia from the seventies until today.

These practices include those of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative; Psychanalyse et Politique, Paris; Gender Studies (formerly Women’s Studies) at Utrecht University; a network in Sydney including people involved in the Sydney Filmmakers Co-operative, Feminist Film Workers, Working Papers Collective, and the Department of General Philosophy at Sydney University; and Duoda – Women’s Research Centre and Ca la Dona, a women’s documentation centre and encounter space in Barcelona.

Drawing from their practices and experiences, Martinis Roe’s research forms a proposal for a transgenerational approach to feminist politics. This is further developed as a practical handbook of twenty new propositions for feminist collective practice, which were formed in collaboration with a network of contributors through experiments with these historical practices.

Cover of As Celebration, As Critique, As Play: Ron Hunt, Selected Writings (1957-2020)

Bricks from the Kiln

As Celebration, As Critique, As Play: Ron Hunt, Selected Writings (1957-2020)

Ron Hunt

Essays €37.00

The first standalone title on the BFTK imprint, ‘As Celebration, As Critique, As Play’ pulls together selected writings by Ron Hunt across his varied career as a writer, librarian, curator, critic and self described ‘lapsed anarchist’. Structured as a ‘biographic bibliography’ supplemented with annotations and contextual notes, ‘As Celebration, As Critique, As Play’ combines commissioned writing and previously unpublished texts that range from exhibition catalogue essays and détourned Q&As, to A–Z indexes and cherry-picked readers. Writings reproduced in full include:

Francis Picabia: Introduction (1964)
Yves Klein: A Mythopoeic of the Plurisignative (1967)
The Arts in Our Time (1968)
We Are Revealing New Pages of Art in Anarchy’s New Dawns (1968)
Interview with Brigitte Bardot (1969) (preview)
Poetry must be made by all! / Transform the world! (1969)
An Interview with Pontus Hultén, Stockholm 1981 (1971)
For Factography! (1976)
Andreas Gursky (1999)
Kalf: A Late Perspective (2000)
Dreams of / Fears of …… Flying (2009)
Fourier / Breton / Cherries (2017)
Hélène Cixous or Waiting for Tears (2018)
Some Books of Barbara Bloom (2019)
A Very Brief Dictionary in the Vicinity of Situationism (2019)
‘Recovery’ / Is Recovery Possible (2020)
with photographs by Tom McCaughan
typeset in Janson Max Neue by Dinamo & Sam de Groot

224 pgs, 21 × 15 cm, Softcover

Cover of About Narration – Materials, Comments, Interventions

Rab-Rab Press

About Narration – Materials, Comments, Interventions

Ingemo Engström, Harun Farocki

Published in collaboration with Harun Farocki Institut, this book unpacks About Narration [Erzählen], a 1975 essay film directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert, this book focuses on About Narration [Erzählen] directed by Ingemo Engström and Harun Farocki.
It includes the film's script alongside the historical documents related to its making and Farocki's previously unpublished theoretical and programmatic essay on the film. The publication also includes a retrospective essay by Ingemo Engström on the film's political and artistic background.

Volker Pantenburg's detailed elaboration of the conditions of its making, alongside Boynik and Holert's concluding remarks, further contextualizes the film. The interview with Cathy Porter on Larisa Reisner, a heroine of About Narration, gives an overview of the life of a militant writer who inspired Engström and Farocki.

Edited and introduced by Sezgin Boynik and Tom Holert.