The film director Jane Campion suggested earlier this year that she was finished with cinema. “The really clever people used to do film,” she said. “Now, the really clever people do television.” Admittedly, she had a TV series – Top of the Lake: China Girl – to promote, but the sentiment is in the air. With Hollywood in thrall to CGI spectacle there are some who would argue that movies are now little more than an industrial process.

It’s not true of course. Indeed, because of technology, movie-making has probably never been easier. But in the culture at large it’s fair to say that cinephilia seems to be in retreat.

Certainly that’s the case in publishing where it’s all cash-in memoirs and academia. All the more reason to welcome a book like The Pedro Almodovar Archives (Taschen, £49.99). Originally published in 2011 but now brought up to date, it gives a film-by-film account of his career; taking Almodovar from the scrappy cinematic provocateur of the Movida years up to the elegant and, yes, rather bourgeois but brilliant purveyor of 21st-century melodrama.

Edited by Paul Duncan with Barbara Piero, this is a brick of a book full of behind-the-scene photos, reviews and interviews with Almodovar itself, one that takes its subject gratifyingly seriously. Some might say too seriously, but you can’t hate any book that is so in love with the movies that it discusses cinema technique in its very captions.

The auteur theory is also front and centre in Tom Shone’s monograph on Tarantino (Thames & Hudson, £24.95). For some Tarantino is an example of the auteur as problematic text; a man with an immense facility for image-making and blessed of an unarguable cinephilia set against his hipster misogyny. This book, though, is very much the case for the defence. 

Shone is simply one of the most eloquent and acute film writers we have, but the retrospective shadow of the Harvey Weinstein allegations now inevitably seep into the margins of his text here given that Tarantino and Weinstein were joined at the hip in their salad days.  Then there’s the fact that the more films Tarantino has made the more enamoured the director has become with the sound of his own voice. To his detriment.

All that said, this remains a real engagement on Shone’s part with a director who clearly loves cinema. And for those who love him it’s a must. But be warned. It contains a lot of pictures of Quentin. I mean, a lot.

Here’s a glorious oddity. Studio: Remembering Chris Marker (Or Books, £32) by Adam Bartos and Colin MacCabe, is a photographic study of the study of a film-maker.

The film-maker in question is Chris Marker. He died in 2012 aged 91, having lived in the same house in Paris for the last ten years of his life surrounded by cats and books and video tapes.

Photographer Adam Bartos has documented the space he left behind, a cluttered marker of Marker’s all-encompassing mind.

In an accompanying essay, Colin MacCabe talks of his friendship with the film-maker who made La Jetee, a short film made up of photographic stills that may be the greatest science fiction film ever made, and follows Marker’s story from his birth in 1921, via the Battle of the Bulge and the student risings of 1968 right through to the 21st century and the director’s fascination with virtual world Second Life.

Although it also covers the rise of Italian fashion and automobiles, the real heart of Dolce Vita Confidential (W&N, £20), Shawn Levy’s account of post-war Italian culture, is pure celluloid; from the emergence of Hollywood on the Tiber (resulting in films like Roman Holiday and Quo Vadis) to the rise of Italian directors such as Roberto Rosselini, Michelanglo Antonioni and, the book’s real hero, Federico Fellini.

Levy is enamoured of Italian sixties cinema and the way it reflected and refracted Il Boom years. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was both a response to and an advertisement for the emergence of paparazzi photographers on Via Veneto after all.

But the pleasure of the book probably comes in the gossip; here are love affairs between actresses and aristocrats, a tragic murder or two and the inevitable starry feuds, most notably that between two of the country’s most eminent maggiorata (curvy girls), Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobridigida.

Charlotte Rampling’s memoir Who I Am (Icon Books, £12.99) was met with dismissive reviews when it came out in March, partly because it is a scrap of a thing (barely over 100 pages), partly because its author Christopher Bataille’s approach is, umm, very French. 

And yet there are shards of light permitted on a painful family story here. At its heart is the suicide of her sister and even though Rampling wants to keep her emotions in hiding she can’t help but reveal the pain and horror that settled on her family as a result. This is not a great book but, despite itself, it feels like a revealing one. 

Finally, two very different approaches to post-war American cinema. Noah Isenberg’s We’ll Always Have Casablanca (Faber, £25) is a fond “genius of the system” take on the making and the legacy of one of Hollywood’s most beloved movies. It’s baggy at times, but full of good stories. It makes for a fine double bill with Warner Bros (Yale University Press, £16.99), David Thomson’s book on the Hollywood family whose company gave us Casablanca. 

Isenberg’s book is loving. Thomson’s is more ambivalent. And yet, at heart, his too is a love letter to cinema that riffs on the seductiveness of the artform. As a writer he is aware of the dirtied hems, but he just can’t help himself admire the cut.