NEW YORK, NY.- MUBI, the global film distributor, streaming service and production company, presents Read Frame Type Film, the first book from its brand new global publishing arm, MUBI Editions.
Publishing in May 2025 as the first title in its ‘Projections’ series, the book is
available to pre-order now on Amazon and will be distributed online and through bookshops internationally by D.A.P / Distributed Art Publishers (USA & Canada) and Thames & Hudson (UK and other territories worldwide).
Prepared in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Read Frame Type Film is a richly illustrated work, exploring the relationship between film and typography. From credits to subtitles to title cards and beyond, text plays a critical part in the structure of a film. Yet, away from the world of mainstream cinema, these textual—and visual—elements have often been overlooked. In Read Frame Type Film, curator Enrico Camporesi, design historian Catherine de Smet, and designer Philippe Millot aim to address this gap by focusing on the often neglected fields of artists’ film and other experimental cinema.
They bring their expertise to a discussion of 24 films, a meaningful homage to analogue cinema’s standard 24-frames-per-second frame rate, from the collection at the Centre Pompidou, dating back as far as the 1920s, that together offer unique perspectives on the affinity between cinema and the written word. Composed of a series of rich explorative texts, accompanying specially commissioned photography of analogue film strips from the collection, the book is itself an experimental object, in which text and images mirror one another.
Among the films featured are works by renowned figures of modern art such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, as well as some of the most significant contributors to the field of avant garde cinema, including Dziga Vertov, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow. Across the 24 films, as the book’s authors explore, the traditional role of text on screen is replaced by something more ambitious and invigorating, from concrete poetry to instructional signs, word fragments to optical illusions. Through their discussion of the typefaces and techniques used by these artists for a vast array of text styles, the authors weave together the significant histories of two intimately connected artforms and foreground the written word on screen.
Developed from the ambitious TypoFilm research project, instigated at the Centre Pompidou in 2020, Read Frame Type Film spotlights the endless possibilities of interplay between images and text, in a beautifully produced work that sits at the intersection of film, visual history, and design.
Dedicated to cinema and the arts, MUBI Editions aims to broaden the horizons of what cinema-related publishing can be. It marks an exciting new chapter for MUBI, building on their long history of championing cinema culture through both film viewing and film publishing, and will publish globally across four core series: Projections, books exploring the world of film culture and history; Auteurs, books and art objects made in close collaboration with renowned artists and filmmakers; Internegatives, republications of rare, out-of-print, or newly translated texts and Lights!, books that explore and expand MUBI’s productions and releases. Through its distinctive range of titles, MUBI Editions intends to play a meaningful role in fostering a global community of engaged, art-loving viewers and readers—now and into the future. The second title from MUBI Editions will be published later in 2025.
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