This week’s new ebooks I’ll be focussing on are a pleasant handful of contemplations on film and filmmakers, both present and past. A collection of interviews with photographer and film director Agnès Varda is the first. Well known for her quiet mediation on the people who work on rue Daguerre in Paris, Daguerréotypes, and her more recent success, The gleaners and I, this compilation gives a wide coverage of her career from her own point of self-reflection.

Moving forward in time, we come across this text on the work of transgressive UK filmmaker Michael Winterbottom. Moving out of the world of television in the mid 90s, progressing to the highly self-referrential 24 hour party people and Tristram Shandy, and the controversial frank 9 songs, gaining a reputation for experimentation within accessible narratives.

The next text in this week’s handful covers a sad history of extreme unappreciation in the film industry: Hollywood exiles in Europe. Though, despite the obviously distressing aspect of the effects of McCarthyism on artists in the early days of the Cold War, the text also looks at the benefit to European cinema of the sudden influx of talent from across the Atlantic.

The last title I’ll be highlighting, Between the black box and the white cube, looks at the shift in appreciation of cinema after the widespread uptake of television, thus moving cinema up the ladder of artistic respectability. Given the renaissance of respectability and expectation of higher quality in television content over the last two decades, at least aligning it to its cinematic brethren, it is interesting to look back at a time when such an approach to cinema was happening, though for somewhat different reasons.

As always, if you’re having trouble accessing our ebook collection, just quickly peruse this guide for a few pointers.