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Stanley Schtinter's debut collection, Last Movies, is an alternative account of the first century of cinema according to the films watched by a constellation of its most notable stars shortly before (or at the time of) their deaths. An extensive and exhaustive research project-a holy book of celluloid spiritualism and old canards-Schtinter questions and reconfigures common knowledge to recast the historic column inches of cinema's mythological hearsay into a thousand-yard stare. Via a series of interlinked vignettes, here we've a book in which Manhattan Melodrama, directed by W.S. Van Dyke and George Cukor, is seen by American gangster John Dillinger, only for him to be gunned down by federal agents upon leaving the cinema. In which George Cukor watches The Graduate, and dies thereafter. In which Bette Davis-given her break by Cukor-watches herself in Waterloo Bridge (the 1940 remake Cukor had been meant to direct), before travelling to France and failing to make it back to Hollywood. In which Rainer Werner Fassbinder watches Bette Davis in Michael Curtiz's 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and suffers the stroke that kills him. In which John F. Kennedy watches From Russia with Love at a private 'casa-blanca' screening prior to the presidential motorcade reaching Dealey Plaza; in which Burt Topper's War is Hell exists only in a fifteen-minute cut, considering this is as much as Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen at the Texas Theatre in the wake of JFK's killing.Including a foreword from Erika Balsom-an 'intermission' by Bill Drummond-and an afterword by Nicole Brenez, Last Movies is a love letter to those that've lived (and died) amidst the patina and glow of cinema's counterpoint to life. Like Hermione Lee 'at the movies,' and redolent of the works of Kenneth Anger, Last Movies antagonises the possibility of survival in an age of extremity and extinction only to underline the degree of accident involved in a culture's relationship with posterity.

'Life asked Death why he needed her to live / And Death asked Life why she needed him to die.' So begins Miquel's El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove; a lyrical, acute, and metaphysical sequence of poems some fifteen years in the making. At the heart of Miquel's collection, we've a central image. An unnamed man in a state of constant decomposition, rotting away in the kitchen sink. Piece by piece, his slow unbinding underpins a train of images wrought in sensuous, playful, and dynamic language. Stark vignettes spun from everyday colloquy-run through with the aura of Catalonian Renaissance writings-and gilded with a patina of light, a glut of shadow, and a blur of sensory experiences. El guant de plàstic rosa houses 36 studies of the dynamics of decay. The purr and buzz of bees humming, off-stage asides, slaughtered cows, mountains made of olive stones, the hum of a permanently empty refrigerator, and edible dreams littered with dahlias and roses, with carnations and colourful chrysanthemums... Here, sex rattles the bones; Miquel's pages percolate with love, with life-with the subjectivist and social connotations of disease and decay-and on the prospect of mass destruction in a world itself on the brink of a self-inflicted extinction. In Peter Bush's visceral new translation, this chaos of signifiers sing-speaks its way through the undying days of a century beyond its "sell-by," and cogitates on life-so furnished with all its illusions and ironies-in an age consistently defined by its constant decline. Awarded the Ausiàs March de Gandia 2016, El guant de plàstic rosa defies neat categorisation, and publishes with Tenement Press in its first English language edition.

'I think therefore I am other...' In Reza Baraheni's Lilith, the mythological demon of the night gives a youthfully irreverent, viscerally wise voice to the lucidity of the rebel. Rather than renouncing freedom, Lilith is outcast for her outspokenness and sensuality. Sequestered to a place wherein freedom is crucially situated in the power and beauty of language, and where that language is seated in stark opposition with the oppressive forms of authority that seek to make it mute. Lilith can be seen as an allegorical take on the condition of the poet in exile. Like the banned and persecuted author, the demon refuses to yield to force and is, resultantly, a pariah. Her body becomes the dumping ground of all power-driven fantasies, and the figure of the exile is invested with the projected fears and compulsions of the dominant society. But it is the creative drive of language that permeates these pages.A deeply lyrical and irreducibly subversive work, over a little less than a hundred pages Lilith investigates the limits of a linguistic freedom via encounters between Lilith and a cast of fabled figures, as the vulnerable courage of the poet is set against avatars of patriarchal oppression and authoritarian rule alike via the demon's dance with language. In Lilith, it is language that disrupts ordinary chronology; language that allows for the shade of a dream life to dint the light of day; harking back to an envisaging of poetry as music, as ritual. This is not language as an evocation of some distant golden age, but as celebration.An experiment in word alchemy; a dance of grace and danger on the fault line of prose and song; Lilith explores the reality-making function of language to pinpoint the antagonistic faculty and political felicities of poetry itself.

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti's request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini's lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John xxiii; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we've a panoply of photorealist intimations. The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, as the poet's line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints. In Viti's translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini's work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we've a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise in a rallying call against blindness. Alongside a first, unabridged English language translation of Pasolini's 'Sequences,' the Tenement Press publication of La rabbia also includes an introduction by Roberto Chiesi (cultural director of the Centro Studi-Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cineteca di Bologna), and an afterword by storyteller, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, John Berger.

The Liberated Film Club is a collection of transcriptions, special commissions and texts anchored in a series of screenings held at London's Close-Up Film Centre, 2016 to 2020, and curated by Stanley Schtinter. From its onset to its end, the Club guaranteed a wide wingspan for critical conversation. Screening liberated film (titles drawn from Schtinter's expansive archive of 'lost, suppressed and impossible' motion picture), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there'd be a disruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what would be shown, and this anonymised arrangement would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film; on the act(s) of showing, sharing, and seeing. Playing with the ways we reproach the institutions built around all our cultures of making, and the manners and methods of an elsewhere dominant culture of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself. This collection-an unabridged collation of works pertaining to this series-is a unique proposition. It is urgent, exciting, and sincere in its silliness; challenging received notions of critical exchange, and abandoning entirely the dogma of atomised, predictable viewing. It is a profound celebration of community and conversation, and a timely paean to free, shared space.