New Books in Film
645 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago - ★★★★★ - 11 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books
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Episodes
Daniel Fairfax, "The Red Years of Cahiers Du Cinéma (1968-1973)" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
June 03, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma embarked on a militant turn that would govern the journal's work over the next five years. With a Marxist orientation inspired by the thinking of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes, the "red years" of Cahiers du cinéma produced a theoretical outpouring that was formative for the establishme...
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, "When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today" (Harper, 2021)
June 01, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIt was the Golden Age of Radio and powerful men were making millions in advertising dollars reaching thousands of listeners every day. When television arrived, few radio moguls were interested in the upstart industry and its tiny production budgets, and expensive television sets were out of reach for most families. But four women--each an independent visionary-- saw an opportunity and carved their own paths, and in so doing invented the way we watch tv today. Irna Phillips turned real-life tr...
Chris Wade, "The Films of James Woods" (Wisdom Twins Books, 2022)
May 30, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourJames Woods is one of the most versatile and captivating actors in American film history. From his breakthrough performance as Greg Powell in The Onion Field (1979), Woods has grabbed the attentions of filmgoers the world over, and remains a firm fixture in our collective cinematic consciousness. In such films as Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986), Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984), David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995), and John Carpenter's Vampire...
Zachary F. Price, "Black Dragon: Afro-Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination" (Ohio State UP, 2021)
May 13, 2022 08:00 - 3 hoursIn Black Dragon: Afro Asian Performance and the Martial Arts Imagination (Ohio State UP, 2022), Zachary F. Price illuminates martial arts as a site of knowledge exchange between Black, Asian, and Asian American people and cultures to offer new insights into the relationships among these historically marginalized groups. Drawing on case studies that include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's appearance in Bruce Lee's film Game of Death, Ron van Clief and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Wu-Tan...
Lorena Cuya Gavilano, "Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia" (Ohio State UP, 2021)
May 10, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn this episode of the New Books in Latin America podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Lorena Cuya Gavilano about her interesting new book Fictions of Migration: Narratives of Displacement in Peru and Bolivia published in 2021 by the Ohio State University Press. This book analyses the impact of political and economic trends on migration narratives and films in Peru and Bolivia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It is a critical exploration of the affects and epistemologies of migrati...
Mila Zuo, "Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium" (Duke UP, 2022)
May 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourYi’s eyes soften as he watches Jiazhi sing a Chinese folk song with subtle, feminine movements in the film, Lust, Caution. The room fills with laughter when Ali Wong unabashedly enacts her vulgar, bodily desires. What is the affect created through these performances? At different localities and temporalities, an actress and a comedian Tang Wei and Ali Wong embody ever-failing meaning of Chineseness, offering themselves for consumption and survival. In Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Glob...
Steve A. Wiggins, "Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons" (Fortress, 2020)
April 27, 2022 08:00 - 56 minutesDemons! Nightmares with the Bible: The Good Book and Cinematic Demons (2021) published by Fortress Academic views demons through two lenses: that of western religion and that of cinema. Sketching out the long fear of demons in western history, including the Bible, Steve A. Wiggins moves on to analyze how popular movies inform our beliefs about demonic forces. Beginning with the idea of possession, he explores the portrayal of demons from ancient Mesopotamia and the biblical world (including i...
Amanda D. Lotz, "Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars" (MIT Press, 2021)
April 27, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourHas the internet really been the main culprit behind the upheaval of the contemporary media industries? In Media Disrupted: Surviving Pirates, Cannibals, and Streaming Wars (MIT Press, 2021), Professor Amanda Lotz provides a rebuttal to persistent myths about disruption across the mediascape of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Through a granular reading of four media industries – newspapers, recorded music, film and television – Lotz demonstrates that the internet has had diffuse and d...
Delinda Collier, "Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa" (Duke UP, 2020)
April 20, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesIn Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa (Duke University Press, 2020) Delinda Collier provides a sweeping new understanding of technological media in African art, rethinking the assumptions that have conceptualized African art as unmediated, primary, and natural. Collier responds to these preoccupations by exploring African artworks that challenge these narratives. From one of the first works of electronic music, Halim El-Dabh’s Ta’abir Al-Zaar (1944), and Souleymane Cissé's 1987 fi...
Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman, "Hollywood and Israel: A History" (Columbia UP, 2022)
April 08, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesFrom Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry...
Lester D. Friedman, "Citizen Spielberg" (U of Illinois Press, 2022)
April 06, 2022 08:00 - 50 minutesSteven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery. This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman’s original analysis to include films of the 201...
Sherryl Vint, "Science Fiction" (MIT Press, 2021)
April 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourThe world today seems to be slipping into a science fiction future. We have phones that speak to us, cars that drive themselves, and connected devices that communicate with each other in languages we don't understand. Depending the news of the day, we inhabit either a technological utopia or Brave New World nightmare. This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge surveys the uses of science fiction. Sherryl Vint's Science Fiction (MIT Press, 2021)focuses on what is at the core of all defin...
Nick Marx, "Sketch Comedy: Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television" (Indiana UP, 2019)
March 30, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutes“Sketch comedy – more than any other television genre – lays bare the process of identity formation, pokes fun at its contradictions, and invites us to debate its terms.” In Sketch Comedy: Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television (Indiana University Press, 2019), author Nick Marx makes this argument and goes on to systematically prove it through a series of case studies dating from the earliest days of network television through to our post-network era. While sketch is an understudied f...
Robert P. Kolker, "Triumph Over Containment: American Film in the 1950s" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
March 25, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutesThe long 1950s, which extend back to the early postwar period and forward into the early 1960s, were a period of “containment culture” in America, as the media worked to reinforce traditional family values and suspected communist sympathizers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Yet some brave filmmakers and actors still challenged the status quo to produce indelible and imaginative work that delivered uncomfortable truths to Cold War audiences. Triumph Over Containment: American...
Liz Clarke, "The American Girl Goes to War: Women and National Identity in US Silent Film" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
March 23, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the 1910s, films about war often featured a female protagonist. The films portrayed women as spies, cross-dressing soldiers, and athletic defenders of their homes--roles typically reserved for men and that contradicted gendered-expectations of home-front women waiting for their husbands, sons, and brothers to return from battle. The representation of American martial spirit--particularly in the form of heroines--has a rich history in film in the years just prior to the American entry i...
René V. Arcilla, "Wim Wenders's Road Movie Philosophy: Education Without Learning" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
March 16, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourWhat is education? Most of the time, we have little patience for this question because we take the answer to be obvious: we identify education with school learning. This book focuses on education outside of the school context as a basis for criticizing and improving school learning. Following the examples of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey, Arcilla seeks to harmonize schooling with a more pervasive education we are all naturally undergoing. He develops a philosophical theory of education...
Annie Berke, "Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television" (U California Press, 2022)
March 16, 2022 08:00 - 53 minutesWhat is the hidden history of women in the television industry? In Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (U California Press, 2022), Annie Berke, film editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and host of the Film channel of the New Books Network podcast, explores the history of women writers through key case studies, industry analysis, and readings of on-screen representations. The book is a rich and detailed analysis of the changing nature of the gendered profession ...
Nadir Lahiji, "Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema: From Benjamin to Badiou" (Routledge, 2021)
March 11, 2022 09:00 - 28 minutesPhilosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as ‘mass art’, they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing ‘mass art’. In Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema: From Benjamin to Badiou (Routledge, 2021), Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture. Building art p...
Helene Meyers, "Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
March 11, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesMovie-Made Jews: An American Tradition (Rutgers University Press, 2021) focuses on a rich, usable American Jewish cinematic tradition. This tradition includes fiction and documentary films that make Jews through antisemitism, Holocaust indirection, and discontent with assimilation. It prominently features the unapologetic assertion of Jewishness, queerness, and alliances across race and religion. Author Helene Meyers shows that as we go to our local theater, attend a Jewish film festival, pla...
Dahlia Schweitzer, "Haunted Homes" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
March 10, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesIn her new book, Haunted Homes (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dahlia Sweitzer explores the ways in which the trope of the haunted house in horror signifies the anxieties, traumas, and terrors of suburban American life. Comprehensive and readable, this slim volume establishes beyond a doubt that in movies and television series from The Conjuring to The Haunting of Hill House, "home is where the horror is." Haunted Homes is unique in its focus on what Schweitzer calls the "suburban gothic." ...
Dana Stevens, "Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century" (Simon and Schuster, 2022)
March 09, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutes“Not a whisper. / Never laughter. / Buster, thank you / for disaster.” So wrote graduate student Dana Stevens, who would go on to become Slate’s resident film critic and podcaster. Her love affair with Buster Keaton – strictly platonic, as their “first sustained encounter” was decades after the actor’s passing in 1966 – began at a cinematheque in Alsace. But Stevens’ book about actor-director-gag man-stunt virtuoso Buster Keaton, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Inventio...
Edward Tyerman, "Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture" (Columbia UP, 2021)
March 08, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourI am joined for my interview with Edward Tyerman by Ed Pulford, another host on our channel. Together, we discuss Edward’s new book, Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture (Columbia University Press, 2021). Internationalist Aesthetics examines how knowledge of China is produced in the early Soviet period through the aesthetic idiom of internationalism. Tyerman shows how artist intellectuals, especially Sergei Tretyakov, the book’s protagonist, make China affectively sensi...
3.3 In the Editing Room with Ruth Ozeki and Rebecca Evans (EH)
March 03, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesRuth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telesc...
David Schwartz, "David Cronenberg: Interviews" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutesFrom his early horror movies, including Scanners, Videodrome, Rabid, and The Fly—with their exploding heads, mutating sex organs, rampaging parasites, and scientists turning into insects—to his inventive adaptations of books by William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis), and Bruce Wagner (Maps to the Stars), Canadian director David Cronenberg (b. 1943) has consistently dramatized the struggle between the aspirations of the mind and the messy realities of the flesh. “I think of ...
Rebecca Janzen, "Unholy Trinity: State, Church, and Film in Mexico" (SUNY Press, 2021)
February 24, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesToday I spoke to Dr. Rebecca Janzen, Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of South Carolina about her book Unholy Trinity: State Church and Film in Mexico published by the State University of New York Press 2021. She says in the Introduction that her aim is not to promote religious devotion but to research how films critically engage with their context through imagery and goes on to describe how the State in Mexico has been remarkably active in creati...
Kathryn Millard, "Double Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies" (Rutgers UP, 2022)
February 17, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourDouble Exposure: How Social Psychology Fell in Love with the Movies (Rutgers University Press, 2022) examines the role of film in shaping social psychology’s landmark postwar experiments. Dr. Kathryn Millard shares that we are told that most of us will inflict electric shocks on a fellow citizen when ordered to do so. Act as a brutal prison guard when we put on a uniform. Walk on by when we see a stranger in need. But there is more to the story. Documentaries that investigators claimed as evi...
Abby S. Waysdorf, "Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom" (U Iowa Press, 2021)
February 09, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn her new book, Fan Sites: Film Tourism and Contemporary Fandom (U Iowa Press, 2021)(University of Iowa Press, 2021), Abby Waysdorf explores why and how we experience film and television-related places, and what the growth of this practice means for contemporary fandom. Through four case studies—Game of Thrones tourism in Dubrovnik, Croatia and Northern Ireland, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks in Orlando, Florida, fandom of The Prisoner in Portmeirion, Wales, and Friends even...
James S. Williams, "Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
February 08, 2022 13:00 - 1 hourSince the beginnings of African cinema, the realm of beauty on screen has been treated with suspicion by directors and critics alike. In Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty (Bloomsbury, 2019), James S. Williams explores an exciting new generation of African directors, including Abderrahmane Sissako, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Fanta Régina Nacro, Alain Gomis, Newton I. Aduaka, Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Mati Diop, who have begun to reassess and embrace the conce...
Susan Jolliffe Napier, "Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art" (Yale UP, 2018)
February 08, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesA thirtieth‑century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red‑haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit—what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. In Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art (Yale UP, 2018), Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this e...
Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible, "Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
February 04, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (U of Minnesota Press, 2021), co-editors Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible argue that the notion of “depth” is a multivalent one in the field of the humanities. In literary criticism, “depth” is a term that can qualify the profoundness of a given text and the ways that we analyze it, while for film theorists “depth” typically refers to the volume and spatial coordinates of the moving image. In the geohumanities, “deep time” names...
Joseph W. Ho, "Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China" (Cornell UP, 2022)
February 02, 2022 09:00 - 52 minutesJoseph W. Ho’s book Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2021) offers a transnational cultural history of US and Chinese communities framed by missionary lenses through time and space―tracing the lives and afterlives of images, cameras, and visual imaginations from before the Second Sino-Japanese War through the first years of the People's Republic of China. When American Protestant and Catholic missionaries entered ...
Isaac Butler, "The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
February 01, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular rise, struggles as it reached the top, and an eventual decline.” This is how Isaac Butler articulates his project in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury, February 2022). The Method tracks the origins of this transcontinental school of naturalistic acting and its many contradictions, includi...
Rich Brownstein, "Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide" (McFarland, 2021)
February 01, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesHolocaust movies have become an important segment of world cinema and the de-facto Holocaust education for many. One quarter of all American-produced Holocaust-related feature films have won or been nominated for at least one Oscar. In fact, from 1945 through 1991, half of all American Holocaust features were nominated. Yet most Holocaust movies have fallen through the cracks and few have been commercially successful. This book explores these trends—and many others—with a comprehensive guide ...
The 15 Best Films about the Holocaust
January 27, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn this special follow-up episode in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I again speak with Rich Brownstein, author of Holocaust Cinema Complete: A History and Analysis of 400 Films, with a Teaching Guide (McFarland, 2021). In this interview, Rich lists the 15 greatest holocaust films from his long-time study. He uses the categories he developed for his book and chooses 3 films from each group. I hope our conversation is both interesting and informative! Joel Tscherne is an Adju...
Henry K. Miller, "The First True Hitchcock: The Making of a Filmmaker" (U California Press, 2022)
January 25, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourThis untold origin story of the filmmaker explores its transatlantic history. Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger "the first true Hitchcock movie," one that anticipated all the others. And yet, the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, by even Hitchcock himself. The truth--revealed in new archival discoveries--is stranger still. In The First True Hitchcock: The Making of a Filmmaker (University of California Press, 2022), Henry K. Mi...
Dana Polan, "Dreams of Flight: 'The Great Escape' in American Film and Culture" (U California Press, 2021)
January 21, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourCaught on film, the iconic jump of escaped POW Virgil Hilts (Steve McQueen) over an imposing barbed wire fence on a stolen motorcycle has become an unforgettable symbol of a disaffected 1960s America. Dana Polan's Dreams of Flight: 'The Great Escape' in American Film and Culture (U California Press, 2021) offers the first full-length study of The Great Escape, the classic film based on a true story of American and Allied prisoners of war who hatched an audacious plan to divert and thwart the ...
Esther De Dauw and Daniel J. Connell, "Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
January 20, 2022 09:00 - 57 minutesScholars Esther De Dauw and Daniel J. Connell have assembled an array of chapters that explore the idea of masculinity in the realm of contemporary heroes and superheroes. Toxic Masculinity: Mapping the Monstrous in Our Heroes (UP of Mississippi, 2020) examines not only the presentation of masculinity in which we are constantly immersed in the superhero narrative in films, television, and comics, but also how this translates into our expectations as to what is the model for heroism. The edito...
Amy Holdsworth, "On Living with Television" (Duke UP, 2021)
January 18, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesHow should we understand the role of television in everyday life? In On Living with Television (Duke UP, 2021), Amy Holdsworth, a Senior Lecturer in Theatre, Film & Television Studies at the University of Glasgow uses an autobiographical and autoethnographic approach to understand an object that has ‘always been there’ in many people’s lives. The book combines analysis of programmes, including In the night garden, Man vs food and Last Tango in Halifax, with rich theoretical reflections from t...
Alexandra Cosima Budabin and Lisa Ann Richey, "Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development" (U Minnesota Press, 2021)
January 17, 2022 09:00 - 55 minutesAre celebrities “disruptors” who revitalize the development field, or are they just charismatic ambassadors for big business? In Batman Saves the Congo: How Celebrities Disrupt the Politics of Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) the authors argue that celebrities play both roles, and that understanding why and how yields insight into the realities of neoliberal development. As elite political participants, celebrities shape development practices through strategic partnerships th...
Vivian Kirkfield, "Making Their Voices Heard: The Inspiring Friendship of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe" (Little Bee Books, 2020)
January 13, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourToday I talked to Vivian Kirkfield about her book Making Their Voices Heard: The Inspiring Friendship of Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe (Little Bee Books, 2020). Ella Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. On the outside, you couldn't find two girls who looked more different. But on the inside, they were alike--full of hopes and dreams and plans of what might be. Ella Fitzgerald's velvety tones and shube-doobie-doos captivated audiences. Jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington couldn'...
Olivier Delers and Martin Sulzer-Reichel, "Wim Wenders: Making Films that Matter" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
January 07, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourWim Wenders: Making Films That Matter (Bloomsbury, 2020) is the first book in 15 years to take a comprehensive look at Wim Wenders's extensive filmography. In addition to offering new insights into his cult masterpieces, the 10 essays in this volume highlight the thematic and aesthetic continuities between his early films and his latest productions. Wenders's films have much to contribute to current conversations on intermediality, whether it be through his adaptations of important literary w...
Stephanie M. Pridgeon, "Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
January 05, 2022 09:00 - 2 hoursStephanie M. Pridgeon's book Revolutionary Visions: Jewish Life and Politics in Latin American Film (U Toronto Press, 2020) examines recent cinematic depictions of Jewish involvement in 1960s and 1970s revolutionary movements in Latin America. In order to explore the topic, the book bridges critical theory on religion, politics, and hegemony from regional Latin American, national, and global perspectives. Placing these theories in dialogue with recent films, the author asks the following ques...
Proust Questionnaire 36: Haaz Sleiman, Actor
December 30, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesHaaz Sleiman (هاز سليمان) is a Lebanese actor who has appeared as Tarek in Tom McCarthy’s 2007 award-winning film The Visitor, for which he was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Male and the role of Jesus in the American TV mini-series Killing Jesus. He’s also appeared alongside Edie Falco and Anna Deavere Smith (guest on The Proust Questionnaire) in the hit show Nurse Jackie, and stars in Chloe Zhao’s 2021 blockbuster Eternals, where he plays (spoiler alert!) the...
Jennifer Fay, "Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene" (Oxford UP, 2018)
December 27, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourInhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (Oxford UP, 2018) explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene —the mise-en-scène— where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is ...
Rayna Denison, "Anime: A Critical Introduction" (Bloomsbury, 2015)
December 16, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourRayna Denison’s Anime: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2015) uses genre as a window into the evolving global phenomenon of Japanese animation. Denison’s wide-ranging analysis tackles the anime themselves – including classics such as Astro Boy, Akira, Urotsukidōji, Spirited Away, and Natsume’s Book of Friends – but also the mechanics behind anime production and distribution in Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Tracking anime’s circulation through these locations over time ...
Matthew H. Brown, "Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address" (Duke UP, 2021)
December 15, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIn Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and circulation to show how screen media play spatial roles in global power relations. Scrutinizing the deep structural and aesthetic relationship between Nollywood, as the industry is known, and Nigerian state television, Brown tracks how several Nollywood films, in ways similar to...
"Bambi" isn't about what you think it's about: Jack Zipes explains
December 15, 2021 09:00 - 39 minutesMost of us think we know the story of Bambi—but do we? The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton UP, 2022) is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film—an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence—which was based on a 1928 English translation of a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten. This ma...
Kate Fortmueller, "Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID" (U Texas Press, 2021)
December 09, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourBy March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks, production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (U Texas Press, 2021), Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Holly...
Alisa Freedman, "Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost" (Association for Asian Studies, 2021)
December 08, 2021 09:00 - 58 minutesAlisa Freedman's book Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Join Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost (Association for Asian Studies, 2021) explores political, economic, and cultural issues underlying depictions of Japan on U.S. television comedies and the programs they inspired. Since the 1950s, U.S. television programs have taken the role of “curators” of Japan, displaying and explaining selected aspects for viewers. Beliefs in U.S. hegemony over Japan underpin this curation process. Japan...
Caetlin Benson-Allott, "The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television" (U California Press, 2021)
December 06, 2021 09:00 - 56 minutes“Made of light and later sound, the film experience cannot be touched, but that does not mean it is immaterial.” So writes Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott in her third academic monograph, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, April 2021). In The Stuff of Spectatorship, Dr. Benson-Allott turns away from that canonical concept of medium specificity to explore the nature of material specificity. How might the cinematic and televisual appa...