Daytime Noir

“What happened to my book?”

This was the last email we received from Nick, in December 2021. A short, concise demand, which we responded to, telling him that the transcription was coming soon and that Marie was finalising the introduction. Little did we know, what Nick surely already knew: he was dying. The urgency should have given it away, but Nick was always blunt in our email exchanges.

Nick passed away on February 27th, 2022. We regret not getting the transcription to him while he could still edit it, so this book in your hands remains an unabridged testament.

The only thing he did edit were his final words, in an unsolicited email in September 2021:

“I was thinking about when you asked me if I had any final words, that it would be better to have me say: Freedom or death. At the crossroads. With a key.”

So we leave you with this; a homage to the legendary founder of the Cinema Of Transgression - a brilliant artist, a sharp mind, a loving father, a kind revolutionary, a boot stamping on the face of modernity forever, an underground phenomenon.
Nick Zedd, rest in peace.

[Note by the publisher.]

With a foreword by Goswell Road. Includes a conversation with Nick Zedd, and the manifesto 'Cinema of Transgression'.

Softcover (11 cm x 18 cm)
84 Pages
75 copies
Language : English

Focusing on Akerman's works of the last two decades, a period during which she diversified her creative practice, this collection traces her artistic trajectory across different media.

From her documentaries 'bordering on fiction' to her final installation, NOW, the volume elucidates the thematic and aesthetic concerns of the later works, placing particular emphasis on self-portraiture, the exploration of intimacy, and the treatment of trauma, memory and exile. It also attends to the aural and visual textures that underpin her art. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches as well as engaging more creatively with Akerman's work, the essays provide a new optic for understanding this deeply personal, prescient oeuvre.

Exclusive works designed by Laure Prouvost for her carte blanche at the Mucem in Marseille, a series of immersive and poetic installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean, photographed by Raphaël Massart for this cut-out book, between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, accompanied by drawings and critical texts.

For the Mucem, Laure Prouvost has created a series of immersive installations in the heart of Fort Saint-Jean. Repurposed everyday objects, glass sculptures, sound mirages, and underwater videos shot in the depths of the calanques and around Frioul compose a sensitive and poetic universe. Between fiction and reality, the artist invites visitors on a sensory journey where everything is transformed: forms, narratives, and life itself.
The book was conceived as a visual journey leading from the Old Port of Marseille to Fort Saint-Jean and into the very heart of each work. To recreate this encounter between artist Laure Prouvost and the Mucem, there is a constant dialogue between the exterior—the sea, the stone of the fort—and the interior—the intimacy of the installations that unfold in the air, in the bowels of the earth, and underwater... Designed in close collaboration with the artist, the book captures this moment through photographic work carried out especially by Raphaël Massart and an evocative form designed by the artist: like a book that also floats in the Mediterranean. To accompany this visual unfolding, a booklet embedded in the heart of the book contains texts by Hélia Paukner, curator of the exhibition, and Mathilde Roman, art historian.

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Mucem, Marseille, in 2025.

An autobiographical documentary, a fiction that's also an essay and an extended poetic meditation on the ability of the image to represent experience. Sarah Turner's film is a ghost story that explores what we forget and how we remember. The stunning imagery comes solely from the window of the Trans-Siberian train, shot first in 1987-8 and then again in 2007-8. The re-enactment of the journey is a memory work, a re-enactment of the past in the present through the process of filming. But the return journey is haunted by the voices of two dead friends that dominate the soundscape of the 'archive' footage. The film culminates at the haunting expanse of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

Perestroika: Reconstructed re-mixes and extends Perestroika, into two sequences. Sequence one constitutes the 2009 version of the film, whilst the second sequence constructs a new framing narrative that reinterprets and reconfigures both the imagery and the experience of the first. Part psycho-geography, part dream and part environmental allegory, both sequences of Perestroika : Reconstructed conclude at Lake Baikal, contrasting experiences of terror and apocalypse with those of beauty and tranquility, the one contaminating the other. In this uncanny return, form stages thee through twinning the instability of memory and re-enacting that within the projective experience of cinema. This extended work delves further into ideas of momentary truth, identity, and how an uncontaminated experience of landscape is literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.

Publication contains DVD of Perestroika, which was released theatrically, blu-ray of Perestroika:Reconstructed, first exhibited as a gallery installation at London's Carroll/Fletcher Gallery April-May 2013, and a booklet of three essays by Elizabeth Cowie, Sophie Mayer, and Paul Newland.

A journey through the archive of BAFTA award-winning curator and film programmer, June Givanni. This private collection made public contains thousands of films from across Africa, the Caribbean and the diaspora amassed in a career spanning more than forty years. Using oral history interviews and ephemera from four film festivals as her touchstones, author Onyeka Igwe offers a way to encounter Pan-African film through the archive. 

The book starts with Third Eye, the film festival that propelled June into a career in Pan-African cinema. Through connections she made there, she travelled to FESPACO in 1985. Participating in the festival while Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso was under the leadership of revolutionary Thomas Sankara was a formative experience. In Ouagadougou she connected with film programmers Suzy Landau and Claire Andrade Watkins, who would take steps to organise Images Caraïbes, Fort de France, Martinique, 1988, and Celebration of Black Cinema, Boston, US. 

Using original oral history research with June and other key figures in Pan-African and Black British cinema, Onyeka uncovers the important role that women festival organisers, programmers and cultural workers have played in Pan-African cinema history. She conceptualises June Givanni’s Pan-African Cinema Archive (JGPACA) as a feminist counter archive that foregrounds marginalised histories and proposes a radical approach to archiving itself. In tracing and naming the cinematic legacies that ground political filmmaking practices today, she preserves June’s work, knowledge and fervour for Pan African cinema for future generations.