After the longest of waits, French film scholar and militant cinéphile Nicole Brenez has finally had a book translated into English (it appears in the Contemporary Film Directors series). For those of us who don’t read French, this is exciting news: Brenez’s rigorous engagement with what she calls the history of forms has until now only been available to us piecemeal, spattered across the hyperlinked pages of online film journals such as Rouge and Senses of Cinema. To find ourselves able to read a full-length monograph – on one of the greatest and most shamefully overlooked film-makers of our times – should be cause for celebration in film departments everywhere. (That it probably won’t be is another matter entirely.)
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