Kahlo/Modotti – Forty Years Later / 40 Jahre später

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."—Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964

A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.

This is a readable—often quite funny—literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge, and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text.

Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades—Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage, Yvonne Rainer's Privilege—confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.

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.

Feminist Fatwas traces how Muslim feminists are resisting misogynistic interpretations of the Quran (like the verse male clerics have used to condone wife-beating). 

For centuries, the translators and interpreters of the Holy Quran have been men. This is changing now as more and more Muslim feminists cast their eye on the patriarchal contexts of these interpretations. Feminist Fatwas tells the story of  Verse 34 in Chapter 4 which has been interpreted by male clerics as condoning a husband beating his wife. This essay traces the groundbreaking work of knocking down this misogynist Quranic interpretations. The story of how Muslim feminists are doing this work is a chronicle of the slow and quiet feminist revolution taking place within Islam as women take on significant and powerful roles. 

Rafia Zakaria is a Pakistani-American attorney, feminist, journalist, and author. She has written for The Nation, Guardian Books, The New Republic, The Baffler, Boston Review, and Al Jazeera. In 2021, she published Against White Feminism, in which she critiques the emphasis that conventional feminist thought places on the experiences of white women while excluding women of color

This volume provides English-language readers with an overview of the life and work of Nicole Brossard, poet, novelist, and essayist, who is widely recognized in her native Québec and throughout the French-speaking world as one of the greatest writers of her generation. 

Brossard's poetry is rooted in her investigations of language, her abiding commitment to a feminist consciousness, and her capacity for renewing meaning as a virtual space of desire. The reader enters a poetic world in which the aesthetic is joined with the political, and the meaning of both is enriched in the process. 

The selections in this volume include translations of some of Brossard's best-known works-Lovhers, Ultra Sounds, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of Roses and Civilization-along with short prose works, an interview with Brossard, and a bibliography of works in French and English, and constitute the most substantial English-language sampling published to date of one of Canada's greatest living poets.

With an introduction by Jennifer Moxley.

A rigorous and mind-blowing account of the dynamics of capitalism today through an in-depth exposition of software, speculative finance, and the highest scales of arbitrage.

At the centre of Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo's argument is the idea that capital does not belong to humans, it belongs to—and is governed by—itself. Traditional economic theory struggles to keep up with the rapid rate of acceleration, and this book steps in to address this:

"The critical orthodoxy is slowing; it's tired, it's not especially good at the internet, it's probably never manned a Starbucks counter or an anonymous cubicle. Its younger adepts—though digitally native—are chronically underemployed, unavailable, drowning in the student debt (or student opportunity cost) required for entry into the critical apparatus. Few have any patience for the numbing slop-speak of the LinkedIn economy, the libertarian enclave of forex and HFT and memecoins, the quarter-zip depravity of employment at the charnel houses of McKinsey or Deloitte or Accenture, the blazingly random mood-swings of venture capital that lubricate all of the above. This impatience is—in the parlance of the above—a blocker: it means that the critical apparatus underestimates the power of the software economy, struggles to articulate the morphological density of digitally-realized capitalism, comprehensively ignores the functional death of labor, and doesn't understand scale."

Introduction by Charles Mudede.
Afterword by Alex Quicho.

"A masterpiece... Nick Land for adults."
— 0nty

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge.

Now, comedy is characterized by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive cultural warfare in the media and among people. Our comedy is fraught with tension like never before, and so too is our social life. We often hear the claim that no one can take a joke anymore.  But what if we really can’t take jokes anymore?

This book argues that the spirit of comedy is the first step in the building of society, but that it has been lost in the era of divisive identity politics. Comedy flares up debates about censorship and cancellation, keeping us divided from one other. This goes against the true universalist spirit of comedy, which is becoming a thing of the past and must be recovered.