‘The Carbon Arc’ (Vanguard Editions, 2025)

‘I always want the audience to outguess me, and then I double-cross them.’ 
​—Buster Keaton

Marina Benjamin / Jonathan Coe / Jude Cook / Rob Doyle / Wendy Erskine / Gareth Evans / Maria Fusco / David Gaffney / Karen Krizanovich / Sam Mills / Nicholas Royle / David Savill / Richard Skinner / Christiana Spens / Christina Tudor-Sideri / Anne Worthington

The second in a series of essay collections on the world of Cinema, its films, actors and directors, by a spectacular array of reviewers, film critics, essayists, interdisciplinary writers, novelists & academics. Includes brand new, exclusive work about a young woman’s sexual awakening to Saturday Night Fever, walking in the footsteps of George Lazenby on a Portuguese beach, mirrors as portals to the other world in Orphée, the idea of rebirth in Lois Patiño’s Samsara and the whole of cinema, the relationship between mother and son in Mamma Roma, the glory days of Time Out’s film reviewing culture and its demise, watching a scene in Don’t Look Now and asking yourself ‘Are you prepared to reinvent your death?’, tracking down the Manchester locations in Hell Is a City, the eternal allure of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the role paperbacks play in movies, a survey of all the films with the word ‘Last’ in their title, Hungarian cinema before and after the fall of the Berlin wall, the heart of the piano teacher in winter, body doubles in Bergman, Lynch, Aronofsky & von Trier, how Time and Memory play out in Theo Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day, what we do to film stars and what they do to us.

Keywords: film criticism, creative journalism, comparative essay, memoir, intertextuality
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Front cover stills from (top to bottom): The Piano Teacher, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Samsara

‘The Carbon Arc is named after an electrical process used in early film projection and reading it can sometimes feel like staring directly into a projector’s burning bulb; it’s a book which blinds and dazzles as much as it illuminates. In a sometimes arid and overly conservative environment for film criticism, that sense of overwhelm is no bad thing.’ — Sight & Sound

pp.164 / £12 incl. UK p&p (please add £7 for Europe / £10 for the rest of the world). 
​The Carbon Arc is available via PayPal using: [email protected]
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