Flashbacks: A Passion for Film Hardcover – September 1, 2025

In Flashbacks, Peter Cowie tells his story with the same clarity, curiosity and quiet authority that have made him one of cinema's most respected chroniclers. From his postwarn childhood in the English countryside to decades spent in screening rooms, studios and film festivals around the world, Cowie reflects on a life shaped by cinema, and a career that has shaped how cinema is remembered, written about and understood. Along the way, he draws vivid portraits of the filmmakers and actors who left their mark on his life and work, including Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, Louise Brooks, and a host of others. Flashbacks doubles as cultural history and personal meditation, on how a passion became a vocation - Sight and Sound declared that Cowie's Tantivy Press, which he acquired from his parents in 1963, "put film publishing on the map" - and fuelled a lifelong conversation with the moving image. From the moment Bergman's The Seventh Seal first seized his imagination as a teenager, in 1959, Peter Cowie has been a significant force behind the way we watch and think about film. Read more