Cutaways

Series Editors: Erika Balsom (King’s College London) and Genevieve Yue (The New School)

Cutaways is a series of pocket-sized books by and for cinephiles. Each volume offers journey through the history of cinema guided by a single motif or formal device: the train, the projection booth, the film crowd. Adopting an essayistic style free of jargon and imbued with each author’s unique voice, the series features critics, scholars, and filmmakers. The books create a new and hybrid space for intellectually engaged and broadly accessible cinephilia, bringing together expertise, eclecticism, provocation, and passion.

Each volume considers popular and lesser-known films from around the world, ranging from early cinema to contemporary releases, and from mainstream Hollywood to the cutting edge of documentary and the avant-garde. Cutaways offers inspiring and unlikely conversations with and among films. The motif-based approach breaks with the categories of author, nation, and period that govern so much writing on cinema. It allows for classic films to appear in a new light and for relatively unknown films to challenge the inherited orderings of film history.

Cutaways seeks to inhabit this interstitial space between academia and a wider public sphere, bringing together contributors from both backgrounds who aim to advance film criticism as a domain of vibrant intellectual inquiry. It allows our best film writers to experiment with form and voice and encourages writing that departs from the economy of the “hot take.” While the series is grounded in a commitment to cinema, it conceives of filmmaking as a portal through which to consider culture, history, and politics.