The Cinema of Survival — Mad Max: Fury Road

In 2020, I published a book of twelve essays on and around George Miller’s extraordinary 2015 film, Mad Max: Fury Road. This book is now OUT OF PRINT — but a lost case of printed copies has recently been found!

The Cinema of Survival: Mad Max Fury Road is a book of essays by Matthew Brown, designed by Anastasiya Milova and edited by Nives Hajdin.


Mad Max: Fury Road impacted me in strange ways when it was released in 2015. I was going through some stuff back then, and that movie became a touchpoint for my own survival in a personal, seemingly-unexplainable way. Naturally, I saw it a lot in theatres – 10 times – and a lot since. 

“When you engage with a film like that, you start thinking about various aspects of it that you want to discuss more. Those thoughts became essays, and those essays became a book.

The Cinema of Survival: Mad Max Fury Road is a collection of twelve essays. Nine of them are about Fury Road. The other three are about other films that, like Fury Road, consider the survival of the body, the spirit, or the mind in a meaningful way.”

[An] insightful study of the ‘survival’ narrative. Ingenious layout… a perfect cinema object.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Oh, What A Lovely Day!

Image 1 of 3


From the back cover

“On its surface a formidable, post-apocalyptic car chase movie, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road is also a classical tale of desperate humans on a quest for their own survival: against their foes, the elements, and the traumas they each carry with them. 

“The twelve essays in this book consider how this tale of trauma and survival was told: from the filmmaking to the thematic concerns, the imagery to the ‘how on earth was this done?’ of it all.

“Witness us.”


This project was made possible through the support of my Kickstarter backers, and dozens of other people besides.

Read the production blog