The Best New Cinema Books To Read In 2025

A lavishly illustrated inside account of one of avant-garde film’s most original outsiders, the filmmaker Robert Beavers. Double Vision is a beautifully written work of biography and criticism that tells the inside story of Robert Beavers (b. 1949), a major American avant-garde filmmaker. Until now, Beavers’s dramatic life of itinerancy and resistance to commercial circulation has obscured his recognition as one of today’s most significant living filmmakers.

In Double Vision, Rebekah Rutkoff, the first scholar to have full access to Beavers’s writing archive, sheds light on this deeply original underground figure and reveals the way Beavers’s films explore nonoptical seeing—awareness itself—as an outcome of cinematic sight. Born in the United States, Beavers moved to Europe as a teenager with his partner, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, in 1967. Over the following decades, he developed a unique cinematic language that fuses spiritual aims with cultural critique and braids domestic and erotic self-portraiture with studies of colored light and his own filmmaking process. Rutkoff uses the concept of “double vision” as a means to explore the poetic feedback loop between Beavers’s filmmaking and writing practices, examine his life story and art next to those of Markopoulos, and demonstrate how his films defy standard art historical genealogies and binary thought.Richly illustrated with compelling film stills, many never before seen, Rutkoff’s account of the outsider artist stands as the most detailed, knowledgeable, and fully researched to date. Double Vision celebrates Beavers’s singular achievement and promises to make him known to all those who have not yet encountered his work.

The fourth edition of Bill Nichols's best-selling text, Introduction to Documentary, has been vastly altered in its entirety to bring this indispensable textbook up to date and reconceptualize aspects of its treatment of documentaries past and present. Here Nichols, with Jaimie Baron, has edited each chapter for clarity and ease of use and expanded the book with updates and new ideas. Featuring abundant examples and images, Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition is designed to facilitate a rich understanding of how cinema can be used to document the historical world as it is seen by a wide variety of filmmakers.

Subjectivity, expressivity, persuasiveness, and credibility are crucial factors that move documentary film away from objective documentation and toward the thought-provoking realm of arguments, perceptions, and perspectives that draw from a filmmaker's unique sensibility to help us see the world as we have not seen it before. Exploring ethics, history, different modes of documentary, key social issues addressed, and both the origins and evolution of this form, this updated volume also offers guidance on how to write about documentaries and how to begin the process of making one. Introduction to Documentary, Fourth Edition will be of use not only to film students but also those in adjacent fields where visual representations of reality play an important role: journalism, sociology, anthropology, feminist and ethnic studies, among others.

Historical Turns reassesses Weimar cinema in light of the "crisis of historicism" widely diagnosed by German philosophers in the early twentieth century. Through bold new analyses of five legendary works of German silent cinema—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Destiny, Rhythm 21, The Holy Mountain, and Metropolis—Nicholas Baer argues that films of the Weimar Republic lent vivid expression to the crisis of historical thinking. With their experiments in cinematic form and style, these modernist films revealed the capacity of the medium to engage with fundamental questions about the philosophy of history.

Reconstructing the debates over historicism that unfolded during the initial decades of moving-image culture, Historical Turns proposes a more reflexive mode of historiography and expands the field of film and media philosophy. The book excavates a rich archive of ideas that illuminate our own moment of rapid media transformation and political, economic, and environmental crises around the globe.