Presence

The twenty-first century’s Notes on the Cinematograph: a memoir and critical work necessary for any cinephile, from one of the greatest living directors.

One of the world’s greatest, most iconoclastic living directors, Carlos Reygadas’s lush and challenging films probe the natural and emotional world for its existential ruptures. Here, he expands on the title concept of cinema not as narrative but as a unified moment, a prepared spontaneity about “seeing, hearing and recognizing—receiving the present, not translating what is represented.” Combining process memoir, critical theory, and film studies, Presence is a must-own for any cinephile and presents a master illuminating the creation, philosophy, and poetics of cinema.

Writing about films and film writing from Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and more, Reygadas guides the reader through his thinking on image and sound, his beloved Mexican countryside, and on directing non-professional actors. A rare personal look at an artist characterized as a “Warholian impresario” by J. Hoberman in Artforum, who makes “ceremonial cinema at once dauntingly local and boldly universal.”