Few directors are more erudite and eloquent than Martin Scorsese, making this addition to the Faber and Faber “directors on themselves” series particularly interesting. Scorsese the raconteur and film scholar tells stories about his own movies. Interviews interspersed with oeuvre analyses cover familiar territory: Scorsese’s Italian Catholic upbringing in Queens and Manhattan’s Lower East Side, his early fascination with movies, his student films, the director’s encounters with Roger Corman, and his breakthrough biographical films. Given the intense nature of Scorsese’s films, it is surprising how casual he makes their productions appear. In his telling, Taxi Driver almost sounds like a home movie made during preproduction on New York, New York. Taxi Driver storyboards for Travis Bickle’s bordello shoot-out and Scorcese’s description of Bible-film research and personal reflections on The Last Temptation of Christ provide insight into his working methods. RP

Publisher: Faber and Faber
Paperback: 178 pages
Illustrated

Best known for his black-line illustrations that escorted the pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic movements into Decadence, Aubrey Beardsley also pursued literature in a suitably tuberculosis—haunted and fragmentary way. Under the Hill was Beardsley’s own title for this hallucinatory account of the knight Tannhäuser’s dalliance with Venus in her subterranean city of delights.
The original work (left incomplete at the time of Beardsley’s death at 26) was suppressed for its studied perversity; this edition brings together in one place Beardsley’s incomplete text and all of his original illustrations, including an additional frontispiece and a supressed title page. Beardsley’s own writing is fascinating. The critic Holbrook Jackson says that episodes in Venus and Tannhäuser “read like romanticized excerpts from the Psychopathia Sexualis of Krafft-Ebing.” In other passages, Beardsley glides seamlessly from frivolity to Sadean delirium, as exemplified by a staged encounter between pampered courtiers and rustic satyrs and nymphs. RP

Publisher: Blue Moon
Paperback: 141 pages
Illustrated