FABER AND FABER

In The Faber Book of French Cinema, Charles Drazin explores the rich film culture and history of the country that first established the cinema as the most important mass medium of the twentieth century.

Offering portraits of such key figures as the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont, he looks at the early pioneers who transformed a fairground novelty into a global industry.
The crisis caused by the First World War led France to surrender her position as the world’s dominant film-making power, but French cinema forged a new role for itself as a beacon of cinematic possibility and achievement.

‘Fascinating . . . filled with lively historical digressions.’ New York Times ‘Best True Crime of 2022’

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England.

In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that the had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France – and disappeared without a trace. He was never seen or heard from again. No body was ever found.

Le Prince’s family were convinced Edison had stolen Louis’s work, and so they sued the most famous inventor in the world. By the time the lawsuit was over, Le Prince’s own son was dead under suspicious circumstances – and modern Hollywood was being born.

In recent years, the television landscape has seen the glorious rise of women to key positions of power within the industry, from writers to producers to directors. Successes like Shonda Rhimes’s Holy Trinity of shows as a producer—Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder—and critical darlings like Lena Dunham’s Girls, Jill Soloway’s Transparent and Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black have heralded a revolution and inspired women creators to put their smartest and boldest art onto screens everywhere.

The Innocence of Memories is an important addition to the oeuvre of Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk. Comprised of the screenplay of the acclaimed film by Grant Gee from 2015 (by the same name), a transcript of the author and filmmaker in conversation, and captivating colour stills, it is an essential volume for understanding Pamuk’s work.

Drawing on the themes from Pamuk’s best-selling books, The Museum of Innocence, Istanbul and The Black Book, this book is both an accompaniment to the author’s previous publications and a wonderfully revelatory exploration of Orhan Pamuk’s key ideas about art, love, and memory.

First there is an opportunity, then there is a betrayal.
Twenty years have gone by.

Much has changed but just as much remains the same.
Mark Renton returns to the only place he can ever call home.
They are waiting for him, of course: Spud, Sick Boy, and Frank Begbie.

But they are not alone.

Over the past year the success of British films at international film festivals – as well as the numerous awards bestowed on 12 Years a Slave – have demonstrated that British cinema has undergone a genuine renaissance that has caused new voices to emerge. At the same time, directors whose work have enthralled over the past five years have also continued to develop and expand their visions.

In Directing Herbert White James Franco writes about making a film of Frank Bidart’s poem, Herbert White. Though the main character, Herbert White, is a necrophiliac and a killer, the poem – and the film – are an expression of life’s isolation and loneliness. A poem became a film.

In the rest of book, Franco uses poems to express what he feels about film: about acting; about the actors he admires – James Dean, Marlon Brando, Sean Penn; about the cult of celebrity and his struggles with it; about his teenage years in Palo Alto, and about mortality prompted by the death of his father.

Inside Llewyn Davis chronicles a struggling young folk singer, played by Oscar Isaacs, who arrives in Manhattan in 1961 and tries to navigate the treacherous waters of the the Greenwich Village coffeehouse scene, as well as having to deal with a disaffected girlfriend, his father’s dementia, the suicide of his musical partner, and the loss of his friend’s cat . . .

In his highly acclaimed novel Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) created a remarkable story of love, loss and hidden truths. In it he posed the fundamental question: What makes us human? Now director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo), writer Alex Garland and DNA Films bring Ishiguro’s hauntingly poignant and emotional story to the screen.

Roeg began as a cameraman, working for such masters as Francois Truffaut and David Lean. His explosive debut as a director with Performance, established an approach to film-making that was unconventional and ever-changing, creating works such as Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Insignificance, and, more recently, Puffball.

Having now reached eighty years of age, Roeg has decided to pass on to the next generations, the wealth of wisdom and experience he has garnered over fifty years of film-making.

After a shooting in London goes hideously wrong, two hitmen, Ray and Ken, are sent to hide out in the strange, Gothic, medieval town of Bruges, Belgium, by their volatile and dangerous boss, Harry Waters.

While awaiting instructions from him as to what to do next, the pair attempt to deal both with their feelings over the botched killing and their differing attitudes towards this curious, otherworldly place they’ve been dumped in (‘Bruges is a shithole.’ ‘Bruges is not a shithole’), until the call from Harry finally comes through, and all three men are enmeshed in a spiral of bloody violence that few will get out of alive.

Sean Connery’s personification of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. But while Bond would make Connery the first actor to command a million dollar-plus fee, the man himself was forever pouring scorn on the fantasies audiences found it increasingly hard to separate him from.