New Books in Film
632 episodes - English - Latest episode: 11 days ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books
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Episodes
Eve Golden, "Strictly Dynamite: The Sensational Life of Lupe Velez" (UP of Kentucky, 2023)
April 17, 2024 08:00 - 35 minutesBefore Salma Hayek, Eva Longoria, and Penelope Cruz, there was Lupe Velez―one of the first Latin-American stars to sweep past the xenophobia of old Hollywood and pave the way for future icons from around the world. Her career began in the silent era, when her beauty was enough to make it onto the silver screen, but with the rise of talkies, Velez could no longer hope to hide her Mexican accent. Yet Velez proved to be a talented dramatic and comedic actress (and singer) and was much more versa...
Cathy Yue Wang, "Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy" (Wayne State UP, 2023)
April 17, 2024 08:00 - 36 minutesContemporary Chinese film and literature often draw on time-honored fantastical texts and tales which were founded in the milieu of patriarchy, parental authority, heteronormativity, nationalism, and anthropocentrism. Cathy Yue Wang's Snake Sisters and Ghost Daughters: Feminist Adaptations of Traditional Tales in Chinese Fantasy (Wayne State University Press, 2023) examines the processes by which modern authors and filmmakers reshape these traditional tales to develop new narratives that inte...
The Ladykillers
April 15, 2024 08:00 - 17 minutesEveryone loves gut-busting belly-laughs in a film. But sometimes, big laughs slow things down. There’s something to be said for films that amuse us for their duration. Join us for a conversation about a film that makes us smile from its first moment to its last: The Ladykillers, Alexander Mackendrick’s 1955 dark comedy starring Alec Guinness as the creepiest criminal and a young Peter Sellars as one of his gang. Dan praises the film’s economy and compares it to John Cheever’s “Reunion”; Mike ...
Sharrona Pearl, "Mask" (Bloombury, 2024)
April 14, 2024 08:00 - 30 minutesFrom the theatre mask and masquerade to the masked criminal and the rise of facial recognition software, masks have long performed as an instrument for the protection and concealment of identity. Even as they conceal and protect, masks – as faces – are an extension of the self. At the same time, they are a part of material culture: what are masks made of? What traces do they leave behind? Acknowledging that that mask-wearing has become increasingly weaponized and politicised, in Mask (Bloomsb...
Grazia Ingravalle, "Archival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital" (Amsterdam UP, 2024)
April 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourArchival Film Curatorship: Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam UP, 2023) is the first book-length study that investigates film archives at the intersection of institutional histories, early and silent film historiography, and archival curatorship. It examines three institutions at the forefront of experimentation with film exhibition and curatorship. The Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY, and the National Fairground and Circus Archi...
Pan’s Labyrinth
April 08, 2024 08:00 - 21 minutesIn 1965, Bob Dylan teased the squares by stating, “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is.” The same could be said for childhood and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a film that takes childhood seriously—as opposed to the way it is usually portrayed in big-budget, effects-laden films. Join us for a conversation about a film sometimes compared to the work of C. S. Lewis but one we find is more like that work of Miguel de Cervantes and Hayao Miyazaki. If you’re interested in learning mor...
Jane M. Ferguson, "Silver Screens and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
April 05, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesWithin the social sciences and the humanities, international research in Burma/Myanmar studies tends to lean toward political science and Buddhist studies, or what can be characterized as the “soldiers or monks” approach. The political situation within the country has restricted the access that foreign researchers have had to the country. It has also shaped the type of research that international scholars choose to research and that grant agencies are willing to fund. As a result of this our ...
Daniel de Visé, "The Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic" (Grove Atlantic, 2024)
April 05, 2024 04:00 - 58 minutesThe Blues Brothers: An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv, and the Making of an American Film Classic (Grove Atlantic, 2024) tells the story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. “They’re not going to catch us,” Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. “We’re on a mission from God.” So opens the musical action comedy The Blues B...
Adapting Liu Cixin’s "Three-Body Problem" for Television
April 02, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourIt’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the genr...
Maggie Hennefeld, "Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema" (Columbia UP, 2024)
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 59 minutesCan you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? In Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2024), Dr. Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has...
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
March 25, 2024 08:00 - 29 minutesIf we could undergo a procedure that would erase the painful memories from our lives, would we do it? That seems to be the question of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) until we realize that we’re asking the wrong question. The real question this film asks is why wouldn’t such a procedure ever work? Join us for a conversation about Michel Gondry’s mind-bending film that is a completely different experience when you’re 20 versus when you’re 40. Go ahead and give it a listen–then vis...
Stephen Lee Naish, "Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper" (Routledge, 2024)
March 21, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesIn Music and Sound in the Films of Dennis Hopper (Routledge,2024), Stephen Lee Naish explores how as a director Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative of his work and to signpost the era in which the films were made and the characters' place within American culture. Naish examines five of Hopper's films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds...
Defending Your Life
March 18, 2024 08:00 - 23 minutesWe are supposed to get smarter as we get older. Do we? If the meaning of your life had to be found in nine representative days, which days would you choose? Are they the same days that your critics would select? Would you live your life differently if you had to watch yourself years later a big screen? Would you think you were as cool as you do now if you had to see yourself as a cold observer does? Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks’s version of A Matter of Life and Death, asks all of these ...
Anna Kornbluh, "Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism" (Verso, 2024)
March 17, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesWhat is the status of art and culture in a world dominated by apps, algorithms, and influencers? Anna Kornbluh’s newest book Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023) analyzes a swath of cultural forms from auto-fiction to Netflix binges and immersive art installations. For Kornbluh, neoliberalism’s economic disintermediation manifests itself in a new dominant cultural style that renounces complex forms of representation, abstraction, and mediation in favor of instantaneity...
Ellen E. Jones, "Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World" (Faber and Faber, 2024)
March 16, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutesWhy does race matter in film and TV? In Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber and Faber, 2024), Ellen E. Jones, a journalist, broadcaster and the co-host of the BBC’s Screenshot, shows how the storytelling potential offered by screen media shape how we understand ourselves and our societies. The book covers a huge range of genres in film and TV, from superheroes and horror, through romance and crime, to costume drama, comedy and westerns. It tells the history...
Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
March 15, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourThe Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences, re...
Eleanor Patterson, "Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution" (U Illinois Press, 2024)
March 12, 2024 08:00 - 1 hourLong before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content via informal networks that crisscrossed transnational boundaries. Eleanor Patterson’s fascinating cultural history explores the distribution of radio and TV tapes from the 1960s through the 1980s. Looking at bootlegging against the backdrop of mass media’s formative years, Patterson delves into some of the major subcultures of the era. Old-time ra...
Magic
March 11, 2024 08:00 - 26 minutesMagic is misdirection, and Richard Attenborough and William Goldman do a terrific job of misdirecting the audience in this 1978 thriller. Like The King of Comedy and Limelight, the film looks at the desperation of people who want to be recognized; unlike those films, there’s nothing funny about the hero’s struggle. Join us for a conversation about a film so unsettling that even the TV spot (featured at the start of the episode) caused people to run from their living rooms. So put down the dum...
Dune, Part Two: An Interview with Dr. Kara Kennedy
March 08, 2024 09:00 - 47 minutesPart Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source of the valuable drug spice, Arrakis has been colonized and its resources extracted by the Imperium. The Fremen fight to liberate themselves and their planet from Imperial control under the messianic leadership of Paul Atreides. In Frank Herbert’s original series of Dune novels, the Fremen were inspired by the Bedouin, nomadic pastoralist inhabit...
Baby Face
March 04, 2024 09:00 - 17 minutesBaby Face is the 1933 film that created the archetypal Barbara Stanwyck character and famously laid everything bare before the production code tried to clean up Hollywood. It’s direct and “against interpretation”—but that’s what makes it so compelling. Join Tim and Dan for a conversation about how the film speaks to our current moment regarding agency, exploitation, and climbing the corporate ladder. It’s also a lot like Richard III. This may have been the first of Barbara Stanwyck’s big role...
Jinying Li, "Anime's Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
March 03, 2024 09:00 - 49 minutesWith comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the trappings of “geekdom” have made their way into the global mainstream over the past few days. As part of this trend, Japanese-style anime has also gained immense transnational popularity, arguably becoming part of the “new cool”. It’s against this backdrop that Jinying Li dives into the sociocultural landscape of anime with her book Anime’s K...
Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)
March 03, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesOnly one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance (U Texas Press, 2024) investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive arc...
Jesse David Fox, "Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work" (FSG, 2023)
March 02, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work (FSG, 2023), Jesse David Fox—the country’s most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, enjoys comedy “maybe more than anyone on this planet”—tackles everything you need to know about comedy, an art form that has been under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force. Weaving together history and analysis, Fox unravels the genre’s political legacy t...
Eve Benhamou, "Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
February 27, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourEve Benhamou's book Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh UP, 2022) is the first in-depth study of Disney’s latest animated output from the perspective of genre theory. Analysing a decade in Disney’s history (2008-2018), Benhamou examines the multifaceted interactions between animated films, Disney properties such as Pixar and Marvel, and popular genres including the romantic comedy, the superhero film and the cop buddy film. Through this extensive critical len...
Conan the Barbarian
February 26, 2024 09:00 - 29 minutesIt’s easy for some people to laugh at Conan the Barbarian, John Milius’s 1982 film about Robert E. Howard’s most famous creation: it seems like the cinematic equivalent of middle-schoolers playing Dungeons and Dragons. But this is an honest (as in “unpretentious”) film with ideas: the pagan existentialism of Thulsa Doom, the theology of Subatai, and the difference between soldiers and warriors are all offered for the viewer’s consideration. It’s also oddly countercultural and conservative in ...
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
February 19, 2024 09:00 - 24 minutesA genuine crowd-pleaser that couldn’t please enough crowds in 1988, Tucker: The Man and His Dream has finally found an audience. Tim defends 80s Coppola and calls out critics who dismissed his post-Godfather II output; Dan talks about the film’s enthusiasm for its subject and how that enthusiasm helps the viewer feel like those who find themselves in any great leader’s orbit. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Wordsworth, and Emerson all find their way into the conversation. Larry David may want us to cu...
Kartik Nair, "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (U California Press, 2024)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutes1980s Bombay was a time when a wave of low-budget, gory horror films made by independent film producers such as the Ramsay Brothers swept the B-movie market. Kartik Nair's book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (U California Press, 2024) is about the sudden cuts, botched makeup effects, continuity errors, and celluloid damage found in these movies. Kartik Nair reads such "failures" as clues to the conditions in which the films were made, censored, and seen, offering a vie...
Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
February 14, 2024 09:00 - 52 minutesScreens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image becomes indistinguishable from the viewer’s surroundings, this unsettling prompts re.examination of how screen boundaries demarcate. Through readings of three media forms – Virtual Reality; holograms; and light projections – The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie (University o...
The Hunting Trilogy
February 12, 2024 09:00 - 21 minutesWe all know the rules of the Looney Tunes universe: rabbits can outrun bullets, shots to the face don’t kill, and the laws of gravity don’t always apply. But that universe is still very much like our own, in which we all strive to be like Bugs Bunny, but are really like Daffy Duck. If there’s an aesthetic of frustration, Chuck Jones is its Shakespeare. Join us for a conversation about Rabbit Fire, Rabbit Seasoning, and Duck! Rabbit, Duck!—the three cartoons that comprise what’s called “The Hu...
Robert Alpert et al., "Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAs I may be the target audience for Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies (Edinburgh UP, 2023), I really enjoyed interviewing Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai. Their co-authored book explores the politics of American films about disease and zombies. We had a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and funny conversation about pandemics, capitalism, academic collaboration, apocalyptic fiction, and the importance of family. Robert Alpert is an Adjunct Instructor ...
Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
February 06, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesThe definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of the groundbreaking filmmaker. The enigmatic and elusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has not been treated to a full-length biography in over twenty years. Kubrick: An Odyssey (Pegasus Books, 2024) fills that gap. This definitive book is based on access to the latest research, especially Kubrick's archive at the University of the Arts, London, as well...
Limelight
February 05, 2024 09:00 - 29 minutesBeing lighthearted and amusing can be a painful business. That’s one of the themes of Limelight, Charlie Chaplin’s 1952 portrait of the artist as an older man. It’s like a combination of The Red Shoes and Death of a Salesman, with elements of The Entertainer and The King of Comedy. Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about the ways in which art and love prove to be antidotes to poisonous despair. If you like Charlie Chaplin, visit the New Books Network and listen to Dan’s interview of Scott ...
Courtney Brannon Donoghue, "The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere" (U Texas Press, 2023)
February 04, 2024 09:00 - 56 minutesConversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems of employment disparities and exploitative labor practices. Compounded by the devastating #MeToo revelations, these problems led to a wide-scale call for change. Courtney Brannon Donoghue's book The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere (U Texas Press, 2023) traces female-driven filmmaking across development, financing, ...
Andrew David Jackson, "The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
January 30, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourDr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area of South Korean cinema history – the 1985-1997 growth of art film exhibition, consumption, and cinephilia. This moment of heightened interest in art film altered how many Koreans conceptualised cinema and helped pave the way for the critical success of South Korean film. This historical study analyses the cultural, political, social, an...
Anatomy of a Fall
January 29, 2024 09:00 - 33 minutesWe all know the rules of courtroom dramas. We welcome the confusion we feel during the case and the sense of release upon hearing the jury’s decision: this is true in Witness for the Prosecution, Anatomy of a Murder, and, of course, The Verdict. But what if the feeling of disorientation that we enjoy in the middle of these films was heightened and then examined by the director as a subject on its own? Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet’s terrific film ...
Ridley Scott's "Napoleon": A Historian's Review
January 28, 2024 09:00 - 22 minutesCharles Coutino discusses Ridley Scott's film "Napoleon" with military historian Jeremy Black. Is it accurate? Is it inaccurate? Does it matter? Listen in to the discussion. Charles Coutinho, PH. D., Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, received his doctorate from New York University. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European, American diplomatic and political history. He has written for Chatham House’s International Affairs, the Institute of Historical Resear...
Bliss Cua Lim, "The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema" (Duke UP, 2024)
January 24, 2024 09:00 - 57 minutesIn The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024), Bliss Cua Lim draws on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist media studies, and postcolonial historiography to analyze the crisis-ridden history of Philippine film archiving—a history of lost films, limited access, and collapsed archives. Rather than denigrate underfunded Philippine audiovisual archives in contrast to institutions in the global North, this book shows how archival practices of maki...
My Best Fiend
January 22, 2024 09:00 - 27 minutesWerner Herzog is a filmmaker with an intuitive sense for showing the right thing at the right time, whether he is offering the story of a maniacal conquistador, Count Dracula, or himself eating his own shoe. Klaus Kinski was, according to many, more monster than man and an actor who resembled the megalomaniacs he portrayed. Together, Herzog and Kinski made five films. Kinski died in 1991; in 1999, Herzog released the documentary My Best Fiend about their relationship. The film combines the ra...
"Apocalypto" and Mel Gibson (with Jonathon Fessenden)
January 18, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourThe 2006 Mel Gibson movie, Apocalypto, takes us into a decadent Maya civilization in the Yucatan on the eve of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico. It could be a commentary on ancient Rome or the present-day US, but, because it is a new world for both the viewer and the forest-dwelling protagonists, we get to see it through ‘new eyes’ and a ‘beginner’s mind.’ It’s a great movie, a cinematic masterpiece. It also allows us to ask how Mel Gibson, a devout Catholic and such a human sinner—as we all ar...
Eyes Wide Shut
January 15, 2024 09:00 - 38 minutesIn a past episode in which they discussed the films of Tom Cruise, Mike told Dan, “You’re the smartest person I know who ever made it all the way through Eyes Wide Shut.” After reading a forthcoming biography of Stanley Kubrick, Dan returned to the film and urged it on Mike, who rewatched it, but who still finds it a total failure. Dan thinks it’s a sobering and startling portrayal of a man exiled from his own Eden—a fool’s Paradise—while Mike finds every element and deviation from establishe...
Matt Singer, "Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
January 13, 2024 09:00 - 59 minutesOnce upon a time, if you wanted to know if a movie was worth seeing, you didn’t check out Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB. You asked whether Siskel & Ebert had given it “two thumbs up.” On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at t...
Matthew Kennedy, "On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide" (Oxford UP, 2024)
January 10, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourIn the oceans of ink devoted to the monumental movie star/businesswoman/political activist Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor (1932-2011), her beauty and not-so-private life frequently overshadowed her movies. While she knew how to generate publicity like no other, her personal life is set aside in this volume in favor of her professional oeuvre and unique screen dynamism. In On Elizabeth Taylor: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford UP, 2024), her marriages, illnesses, media firestorms, perfume empire, violet...
Ofer Ashkenazi, "Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
January 09, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourAnti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (U Michigan Press, 2020) studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers' contemplations of "Heimat"-- a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity -- it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. The book shows how these filmmakers devised the landscapes of the German "H...
The Omen
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 28 minutesCan a film do everything wrong yet still find its defenders, who not only acknowledge each of the film’s faults but find these faults endearing? Such is the case with Mike and The Omen, the 1976 Richard Donner blockbuster that—like Satan himself—has spawned sequels, remakes, and imitations. Dan tries to point out all the things that are bad about The Omen, but Mike spins each one into a perverse mark of greatness and claims that the film somehow rises above them in its high seriousness. Wheth...
Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)
January 08, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourJennifer Cazenave’s An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (SUNY Press, 2019) is a fascinating analysis of the 220 hours of outtakes edited out of the final nine and a half-hour 1985 film with which listeners and readers might be familiar. Well known around the world as one of the greatest documentary films ever made, and certainly one of the most important works/artifacts of Holocaust history and memory, Lanzmann’s eventual finished film emerged from an ...
Plot
January 04, 2024 09:00 - 18 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Pardis Dabashi tells us about plot. A plot consists of a change with stakes that establish norms. This seemingly simple structure shapes novels, films, politics, and our world, from easy seductions of comfort to difficult promises of liberation. In the episode, Pardis references Thomas Edison’s 1903 film, Electrocuting an Elephant, which is super sad, and kind of terrifying, but an economical explanation of plot. She also discusses Max Ophüls’s 1953 film, The E...
W. K. Stratton, "The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
January 03, 2024 09:00 - 58 minutesOn June 18, 1969, "The Wild Bunch" premiered to critical success. Over the past 50 years it has been rightly recognized as one of the landmark films from the end of the Hollywood studio system. Yet it was developed out of chaos, with a controversial director who had already largely burned his bridges with Hollywood studios. Sam Peckinpah worked for years to film a story that both illustrated the end of the “Old West” and also showed how newer filmmakers wanted to proceed with their newfound i...
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 1 hourSuspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic trance, the philosopher warned, an audience can become susceptible to ideology and "myth". In Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (Bloomsbury), Patrick Ffrench explains that although Barthes was wary of film, he engaged deeply with it. Barthes' thought was, Ffrench argues, punctuated by the experience of watching films -...
Meet John Doe
January 01, 2024 09:00 - 31 minutesHave you seen that other Capra film in which the protagonist in a moment of crisis, attempts suicide on Christmas Eve? Join Mike and Dan for a conversation about Meet John Doe (1941), a film Frank Capra made five years before It’s a Wonderful Life and which shares that film’s celebration of the common man—the John Doe—living and working and dying across the country. We know we’d all be better off—and the country would be in better shape—if we acted like the people in the John Doe Clubs, so wh...
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
December 28, 2023 09:00 - 59 minutesWhen teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the one which most clearly explained the 2008 crisis and the financialized economy, was written by an English professor. It was Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture (Stanford University Press, 2016). The book is a masterful exploration of the cultural politics of the financial crisis and ...