Mysteries of Cinema comprises twenty-six essays of varying length and subject matter, written between 1982 and 2016. These essays are not chronological; rather, they are divided into parts that revolve around a particular cinematic idea, theme, phenomenon, or experience, such as lyricism in film and the parameters of film genres. In the first chapter, ‘Retying the Threads’ – a de facto introduction – Martin stresses that the book is not an exhaustive collection of his essays. Nor is it representative of his wide-ranging corpus of writing, unlike Sanford Schwartz’s edited compilation of American film critic Pauline Kael’s reviews and essays, The Age of Movies: Selected writings of Pauline Kael (2011). Martin remarks that many of the essays in Mysteries of Cinema are ‘obscure, hard-to-access texts’; for they were published in magazines and journals long since discontinued. In this regard, the book serves a sort of archival purpose, presenting to his public work that Martin holds dear.

Martin’s devotees will devour Mysteries of Cinema, savouring its details, imagery, and linguistic flourishes.

Martin’s aspirations for Mysteries of Cinema exceed that relatively prosaic object. For him, the book embodies something more romantic, profound. Mysteries of Cinema is ‘a book of threads’ of ‘transversal reflections – clusters of associations’. He writes: ‘there are threads that accompany all of us as we make our way through time’. A substantial number of these threads are perceptible within and between essays, especially as Martin quotes and borrows from a recurring cast of writers, critics, and artists – Raymond Bellour, Raúl Ruiz, Serge Daney, Manny Farber, Chantal Akerman, Raymond Durgnat, Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Godard – pulling together disparate essays on the condition of cinephilia, the scourge of screenwriting manuals, the tension between narrative and the cinematic ‘art of showing, spectacle’. Nevertheless, one intuits that the depths of these links are only truly known by its author.

Martin recounts in the book’s third essay – on his precocious taking to cinema – that he began reading Film as Film (1972) and Theory of Film Practice (1973), reasonably dense books, in his mid-teens. That Martin refers to these books as his ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ illustrates their lasting impact. Aged seven teen, he had delved into the film-philosophy writing of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At twenty-one, Martin ‘wrote and sang a song dedicated to Deleuze’ with his band in Melbourne, a curious and possibly unprecedented tribute to the much revered intellectual figure. Decades on, Martin still writes of these formative moments with the instinctual fervour of youth.

Indeed, much of Mysteries of Cinema is written in this mode; one conjures the visual image of Martin leaning over his desk, frantically scribbling (or typing), as the sparks of thought and films, and scenes from films, capture him. Martin’s hunger for the films, writers, and questions he engages with can be infectious. ‘This is what all the discontinuities, fluxes and quiverings of style serve: a particular kind of lyricism,’ Martin writes of Anne-Marie Miéville’s short film Le Livre de Marie (1985). Some passages in these essays are so personal, so tethered to his subjective experience, that it is difficult to share his irrepressible fascination in the material, particularly when he embarks on extended discursive discussions or heavy, page-long descriptions of film scenes.

A tenor of self-regard, of great self-assurance, permeates Martin’s writing. It is entrenched in the few introductory essays, colouring the rest of the book. ‘I plan for a Volume 2 in 2050,’ he writes, almost satirically, in the first paragraph of the opening essay (by then, he will be in his nineties). In that same essay, without a hint of reservation, Martin compares himself to filmmakers Terrence Malick and George Miller, both of whom shelved projects ‘until the capabilities of digital technology had caught up with their imaginations’. He remarks, ‘I, too, as it turned out, had to wait for a machine’ to create audiovisual essays with his frequent collaborator Cristina Álvarez López. This is likely a product of Martin’s lack of distance from the cherished contents of his book. Such musings belong, more appropriately, in a private journal.

The final essay, co-authored by Álvarez López, contains thirteen separate texts ‘written to accompany the online audiovisual essays’ they have made together, which are described as ‘poetic critical fragments’. This coda gestures towards the emergent possibilities of film analysis and ‘speculative criticism’, of projecting ‘one film into another, through another’. Working within the constraints of writing, Mysteries of Cinema seeks to perform a similar task: to uncover what makes the cinematic form special, by comparing, juxtaposing, and refracting films as diverse as Stan Brakhage’s Murder Psalm (1980) and George Miller’s Mad Max series. All of this is, of course, filtered through the eyes and ears of Martin himself.