The Subversive Art of Film Desk Books

How did you come to start Film Desk Books?

My journey was not really book-related for a long time. I did a cinema studies Master's degree, and then I was trying to work in film-related things, wound up getting into music and had a record label for a while, and so that took me away from the film world. I didn't really have any experience in publishing. Then about ten years ago I had an idea for a book that I wanted to edit, of film criticism from this free weekly alt paper that used to exist called The New York Press. I contacted those critics, and I got to work on that book without really knowing where or how that was going to be published. 

Through the process of doing that I came to feel that I would like to start a small press to focus on books on cinema. I got talking to my good friend [the founder of Film Desk] Jake Perlin about this, and he said he had the rights to some books, but he didn't have the time to do them. I also had the rights to a couple of things, and we decided that we would join forces. The Film Desk was already a film distribution company, it had been since the early 2000s. I had never been involved with it, it was purely Jake's company, but we decided to start a small press as the press arm of the film desk, as it were.

Why do you think you felt the need to start a small press?

We both felt that there was a gap in film books at that time. It seemed like the big publishing houses were no longer tackling certain kinds of material, and university presses were, but they lent more academic. We had a strong feeling that we wanted to do books on cinema, that were also beautiful objects, that were also books that you would actually want to keep in your life. It felt like that had really gone. Of course, there are some people doing that, but it’s not like it used to be. So we wanted to fill that gap, and publish books that were intellectual but not academic.

There is a way of talking about film, and also visual art, that can be so jargon-heavy that it makes it inaccessible.

It's also about the distinction between academic writing and non-academic writing. I think a lot of people read that distinction as a distinction between ‘difficult’ intellectual writing and more accessible writing. That’s not really what it is. Academic writing is its own style, and it can be very impenetrable. I struggle to read it, and that’s not always because it’s difficult, it’s because academic writing has to constantly justify itself. It has to cite everything that everyone else has ever said on the subject. It's very verbose, and it takes a long time to say something because you can't just say it. With non-academic writing, you can just say it. I think that’s an important distinction and something that I think about a lot in terms of what we do. I'm not really interested in publishing stuff that is academic in style, but we do publish stuff that can be quite dense and difficult, and not always the most accessible.

I remember when I was doing that first New York Press book, at one point I was talking to a sizeable publisher in New York about them taking it on. The editor I was talking to said it was too academic for them, and I said that to one of the critics whose writing was in the book. He got incredibly defensive, he said, "I've never written academically.” And it was true, it was very accessible writing. Obviously, what the guy meant was that he thought it was a little too smart, maybe.

Do you think the popular standard of criticism is getting lower? 

I think the thing I've noticed a lot is the lack of an editorial hand, especially reading stuff online. Just on the base level, it hasn't been proofread, it hasn't been copyedited. Obviously, there are exceptions and there is good writing out there, but I think criticism, to be more specific, film criticism, has changed. There is a huge amount of writing out there, there's a huge amount of opinions, and there is a lot of passion. But it is not really a profession in the way it used to be, and that gives people a lot less time to work on what they're writing. People used to write long things and then discuss it with an editor, work on it, and improve it. A lot of that process has gone now.

I wonder has this saturation of online writing made it feel important to have physical books, where there is this process for things being put together?

A big part of my motivation is, I love books. I collect books, and I only read really in book form. I can't read long things on a screen, I struggle to pay attention. So it's my preferred method, and that is not a reaction to an online world. That is just how I've always been. I do think there is something of a trend now – I see it a lot in young people, probably especially because they've grown up having a device that does absolutely everything – that there's something almost novel or appealing about an item that does one single thing. 

I do think what I mentioned earlier, about the big publishing houses not touching the niche titles that we are doing. I think that is a reaction to the online world and to people reading less. I mean, we did a reissue of Amos Vogel’s Film As A Subversive Art. That book came out with Random House in the U.S. in the mid 1970s, it was a relatively mainstream book. That kind of book being treated that way now is relatively rare.

Is it important to try and keep certain titles like this in circulation?

Yes. Film As A Subversive Art was the first book that I wanted to reissue, and when I met with Jake it was the first book that he wanted to reissue, so it came together pretty clearly. We also recently reissued the out-of-print novel Hallelujah Now, by the filmmaker Terence Davies. That is a shorter process for us. It's a great book, and no one else was doing it, so it did feel important to get it out there again.

Publishing is a hard business to be in, and I think the one thing we have is that in terms of books on cinema, we're often dealing with names that people do know. Still, it can be niche stuff. When you have a book that already has an audience, it's a good way of having a mission statement at the gate.

When we published Film As A Subversive Art, it was almost a shorthand way of saying, “This is the kind of thing we're going to publish.” Then because people already know what that book is, they understand what that means very quickly. A lot of the stuff that we have published has been reissues, anthologies, or new translations. It’s funny, for a long time we hadn't done very much with living authors. Now we’re starting to work a lot more with living authors.

What do you think of film culture today?

The one thing I would say, that I absolutely see from living in New York, is how strong the scene of repertory screenings is at theatres here. That used to be the province of older people, and at some point in the past few years that really shifted. I go to these screenings now and they're filled with people in their early twenties, kids who are very passionate about film. So I do think there's something really burgeoning. It’s an extremely robust culture, and I think it’s very rich. There was a point around the turn of the millennium when a lot of people were writing these pieces about the death of cinephilia or the death of cinema culture. I certainly don't think that's true. The thing that I think is true is that it is more niche than it used to be, I don't think it is nearly as mainstream.

What’s the publishing arm’s relationship to Film Desk? 

Film Desk is not a big, robust thing. It’s a very small, boutique distributor. Many people view it as one company, which it kind of is, it's just separate divisions almost. I think what that did for the press straight away, is it gave us a name out of the gate, because people trusted The Film Desk. Jake has done great work in film distribution for a very long time, so when we started to publish things, people paid attention to us. 

I didn't know how to publish books before we did this. I genuinely had no experience. The only experience I had was editing that one book, which I didn't publish. When it came to some of the nuts and bolts it was just working it out, distribution was me calling and walking into stores and saying, "Hey, I published this book. Do you want to stock it?” There were a lot of things I genuinely didn't understand how to do, and it's been a learning curve.

It’s always nice to start something that you’re passionate about, but you're learning as you do it, so it’s like a journey in itself. 

As I said, I'd had a record label before, and in strange ways, that was good training for this. I understood some of the basics in terms of, you make a run of something, you press X amount of records, you print X amount of books, and then you stage a release and get it out there, and you have a distributor or you do it yourself. The life cycle of that is relatively similar, and I had experience working with bands that was similar to working with writers. I had the experience of running a business as well, so budgeting and dealing with how to do that in every sense, really. My record label had no other employees. It was two of us, and we did everything, and this is a similar situation. So that experience fed into it, and the rest was just a learning curve. But I read a lot, I knew a lot about film.