Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, September 2017

“There are few writers and few filmmakers who make me rethink what cinema is more than Thom Andersen. Sometimes this is a matter of introducing fresh perspectives, such as making cinema and architecture more mutually interactive. It’s always a political matter of figuring out just who and where we are, and why.”
—– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“In his disarmingly plainspoken introduction, Thom Andersen more or less apologizes for not becoming a film critic, and for not delivering a manifesto. Personally I’m relieved, and I think you should be as well, because we instead have his superb films, and that is something much more valuable. And now we have Slow Writing, where he shows us just how terrific a critic he hasn’t (mostly) bothered to be, and where he is also free to write brilliantly about his own films. The result of the resonance between this conjunction — writing about his own work alongside that of others — forms, in truth, a kind of quiet manifesto. This book belongs on a very small and special shelf of the most incisive and ungrandiose books by artists, alongside The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson.”
—– Jonathan Lethem

“This collection is a long time coming. Anyone who has seen Los Angeles Plays Itself, that most Proustian of contemporary films, surely agrees that there is no filmmaker quite like Thom Andersen. The intellectual pleasure found on screen comes across gangbusters in his alternately trenchant and jocular criticism. Thom’s writing may not concretely alter the way you see the given films he’s chosen to discuss; the power of his writing is a function of his selectivity. But in a period where generic writing has proliferated, it certainly might change the way you see film criticism. More critics should write so seldom!”
—– Mark Peranson, editor of Cinema Scope magazine