Aargh, I still haven't figured out how to properly link images (is there a place where there are instructions?)Tom Amolad wrote: Tue Mar 04, 2025 7:05 pm With warning that this involves self-promotion (I'm midwife to these books), I wanted to alert people to a new book series that may be of interest. The series, entitled Cutaways, and edited by Erika Balsom and Genevieve Yue, is devoted to short book, each on a single object, motif, or technique that runs across a range of films. Further details on the first three books can be found here.
The first, Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes's account of film props releases today and is already getting attention insofar as it itself appears as a prop in a new short film by Joanna Hogg (see the third picture here for its brief cameo). There's also an excerpt from the book up at Mubi.
Next month sees the release of the series' second book, Jules O'Dwyer on Hotels, which makes a brilliant case for hotels well beyond the Bates and Overlook as being centrally entertwinted with film, from their concerns over the organization of space to their function, from Grand Hotel on, as a cinematic mode of marking where public and private stories come together. It's also a very fun read.
On the horizon is Martine Beugnet on film blur as a feature, not a defect; followed by Devika Girish on identity papers, Genevieve Yue on trains, and Ben Mercer on brain surgery.
And I forgot to point out that, for those in London, there's a launch of the Prop book coming up -- a talk following a screening of Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow at the Barbican. And for New Yorkers, watch soon for a similar screening/launch at Lincoln Center, probably on Mar 27.
UPDATE: The Lincoln Center Screening (Sirk + Chaplin) and book launch is now announced.
