Third in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, Modern Nature is the journal he kept during 1989 and 1990 with the awareness that one day it would be published. Written during the period Jarman was at work on The Garden and Edward II, he here juxtaposes his planning and cultivation of his famous garden in Dungeness with his declining health due to the ravages of AIDS. JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 154 pages

Last in the series of memoirs by late filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, Derek Jarman’s Garden is his personal account of how his garden evolved from its beginnings to the last days of his life. The photographs provide glimpses of Jarman’s life in Dungeness: “walking, weeding, watering or simply enjoying life.” JAT

Publisher: Overlook
Paperback: 144 pages

“His life and art were inseparable, but in a sense art came before life: that is, it took precedence where individuals were concerned. And what of the ethics of that: well, life lived and grew on his art… People got sacrificed sometimes.”—Losey on Brecht, ‘L’oeil du Maitre,’ 1960
This statement may apply equally to Losey himself, the creator of 31 features which range from the puritan social messages of his early work to the increasingly baroque style of his later films. Born in 1909, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, into a once wealthy family, Losey was reared in an environment which fueled his adult art; in which “wealth, sex and power are interwoven in a tapestry of constant torment and pain,” where “the sexes butcher one another.” He began his career in the ‘30s with the experimental theater in New York. Moving to Hollywood, Losey directed some less-than- memorable films while subverting the system to create the cult classic The Boy With Green Hair. After blacklisting forced him into exile, he reestablished himself as a European director. His collaborations with Harold Pinter—the films Accident, The Go Between, and his great classic The Servant—ensured his cinematic immortality. His creative generosity, alcoholism and sometimes brutal egoism elicited a full range of critical reaction while being honored in Europe and ignored by Hollywood. JAT

Publisher: Oxford University
Hardback: 607 pages
Illustrated

Ray was raised among a hybrid of influences ranging from orthodox Hinduism and the genius of Rabindranath Tagore to Hollywood films and Western classical music. In over 30 films, Ray experimented extensively with mood, period and milieu, conveying through his films a sense of whole personality in the manner of great writers or painters. His works “offer us intimations, if we tune ourselves to him, of a mysterious unity behind the visible world.” Written several years before his death, this book contains a number of interviews with Ray and firsthand observations by the author on the sets of two of Ray’s films. Replete with 150 photographs from his life and films plus sketches from his shooting notebooks, his early advertising work and his memoirs. JAT

Publisher: University of California
Paperback: 430 pages
Illustrated

The propaganda machine of the Third Reich under its minister of culture, Joseph Goebbels, sought to entertain by replacing the innovations of Fritz Lang and the expressionist cinema with largely escapist fare. Be they cocktail comedies, operettas or historical costume pageants, these often completely apolitical films were populated with glamorous female star, whose charm and beauty rivaled that of their Hollywood counterparts. But with the fall of the Third Reich, so too fell the career fortunes of these women, whose work remains largely unknown to audiences outside of Germany. Tainted Goddesses explores the careers of 18 of the most significant of these actresses. JAT

Publisher: Sarpedon
Paperback: 192 pages
Illustrated

The UFA Story concentrates on the political and corporate machinations which formed and ultimately destroyed this great dream factory. Created by the German government in 1917 and financed by the German Bank, UFA was originally intended to serve as a unifying tool of propaganda to unite the peoples of Central Europe and to combat the influence of Hollywood. UFA’s history and fortunes ultimately mirrored Germany’s. UFA grew rapidly through its systematic acquisition of virtually every significant studio, distribution network and cinema chain not only in Germany but in surrounding regions from Denmark to the Ukraine, achieving a vertical as well as a horizontal integration. Government control loosened during the Weimar Republic, allowing such innovative talents as Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, G.W. Pabst, Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings to blossom and produce such works as Metropolis, Dr. Mabuse, The Blue Angel, Die Niebulungen, and Pandora’s Box. With the rise of the Third Reich, UFA once again became a tool of propaganda, glorifying National Socialism until the end of World War II when only its gutted remains survived. JAT

Publisher: Hill and Wang
Hardback: 451 pages
Illustrated

Perhaps a better title for this volume might have been “80 or so Drawings We Got the Rights to, Many of Which Are Erotic.” With portraits of subjects ranging of famous personages to objects of his affection to school friends, this book offers an unusually strong cross section of Cocteau’s art. Printed on matte paper, the drawings presented here were created primarily during the 1930s. Approximately 16 rather explicit drawings are from the second edition of his unhappy tale of homosexual love, Le Livre Blanc. Originally published anonymously to protect his mother while she was alive, the drawings were later added to the second edition. Also included are an introduction, which provides the background to the art presented, and a chronology of Cocteau’s life. JAT

Publisher: Dufour
Hardback: 110 pages
Illustrated

This slim volume follows the adventures of a youth of humble origins who exploits the privileges garnered through being mistaken for the relative of a great French general during World War I. He is befriended by a noblewoman and her daughter and assists with their genteel wartime charities. But, hungering for action, Guillaume secures a position at the Flemish front and discovers that the 19th-century notions of gallantry have little place among the horrors of a 20th-century mechanized war. An elegiac fable, The Impostor economically illustrates the passing of the grace and elegance of the European aristocracy as the modern world emerged with a vengeance. JAT

Publisher: Dufour
Paperback: 133 pages
Illustrated

The popular conception of Surrealism views it as a visual means of expression; as in the paintings of Dali and Ernst or in the films of Buñuel. However, Surrealism yielded substantial output inliterary form. Surrealist literature is often overlooked since it eschews the traditions of modernism, embracing fragmentation and disintegration. Drawing on traditional forms of storytelling, the fairy tale and the Gothic novel, Surrealist fiction, according to Julien Gracq, “had the essential virtue of laying claim to express, at each moment, man’s totality… by maintaining at its most extreme point the tension between two simultaneous attitudes—bedazzlement and fury—that do not cease to respond to this fascinating and unlivable world in which we exist.” The first collection, The Identity of Things, brings together approximately 50 stories and fragments by authors from 17 countries, including such familiar names as Breton, Crevel, Unik, Paz and Aragon. The Myth of the World, the second volume, groups approximately 45 works of less familiar authors from 20 countries which explore the importance of myth, myth being the core around which human sensibility and societies are based. Wishing to “transform the world,” the Surrealists made myth the focus of their fiction. JAT

Publisher: Dedalus
Paperback: 277 pages

The popular conception of Surrealism views it as a visual means of expression; as in the paintings of Dali and Ernst or in the films of Buñuel. However, Surrealism yielded substantial output inliterary form. Surrealist literature is often overlooked since it eschews the traditions of modernism, embracing fragmentation and disintegration. Drawing on traditional forms of storytelling, the fairy tale and the Gothic novel, Surrealist fiction, according to Julien Gracq, “had the essential virtue of laying claim to express, at each moment, man’s totality… by maintaining at its most extreme point the tension between two simultaneous attitudes—bedazzlement and fury—that do not cease to respond to this fascinating and unlivable world in which we exist.” The first collection, The Identity of Things, brings together approximately 50 stories and fragments by authors from 17 countries, including such familiar names as Breton, Crevel, Unik, Paz and Aragon. The Myth of the World, the second volume, groups approximately 45 works of less familiar authors from 20 countries which explore the importance of myth, myth being the core around which human sensibility and societies are based. Wishing to “transform the world,” the Surrealists made myth the focus of their fiction. JAT

Publisher: Dedalus
Paperback: 292 pages