New Books in Film
651 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 13 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books
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Episodes
Wazhmah Osman, "Television and the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Local Activists" (U of Illinois Press, 2020)
May 12, 2021 08:00 - 49 minutesPortrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. In Television ad the Afghan Culture Wars: Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Local Activists (University of Illinois Press, 2020), Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans w...
Michael L. Siciliano, "Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries" (Columbia UP, 2021)
May 06, 2021 08:00 - 47 minutesHow should we understand creative work? In Creative Control: The Ambivalence of Work in the Culture Industries (Columbia UP, 2021), Michael Siciliano, an assistant professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, explores this question through a comparison of a recording studio and a digital content creation company. The book considers the meaning and practice of ‘creative’ labour, considering its ambivalences, the passions and commitments, as well as the compromises and alienations asso...
Marko Dumancic, "Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
May 05, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourMarko Dumancic's book Men Out of Focus: The Soviet Masculinity Crisis in the Long Sixties (University of Toronto Press, 2021) charts conversations and polemics about masculinity in Soviet cinema and popular media during the liberal period - often described as "The Thaw" - between the death of Stalin in 1953 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The book shows how the filmmakers of the long 1960s built stories around male protagonists who felt disoriented by a world that was becoming inc...
Jörg Matthias Determann, "Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World" (I. B. Tauris, 2020)
May 05, 2021 08:00 - 52 minutesThe Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World by Jörg Matthi...
Carol Dyhouse, "Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen" (Oxford UP, 2021)
May 03, 2021 04:00 - 56 minutesCinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life's problems. But over the next fifty years women's lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control--and feminism. However, while widening opportunities for women were seen as progress, feminists were regularly caricatured as man-haters, cast in the role of ugl...
Tara T. Green, "Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resistance in Literature, Television, and Song" (Ohio State UP, 2018)
April 30, 2021 08:00 - 59 minutesFrom ships and novels to Mardi Gras, water, and television, how does the legacy of the Middle Passage, the leg of the Atlantic through which African people were trafficked as slaves, reverberate through the creations of writers and authors of the African diaspora? In this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee M. Pierce interviews Dr. Tara G. Green about her latest book on the Middle Passage, rebirth, trauma, water, social death, and resistance. In Reimagining the Middle Passage: Black Resista...
Jack Black, "Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy: A Psychoanalytic Exploration" (Routledge, 2021)
April 28, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourJack Black, Race, Racism and Political Correctness in Comedy (Routledge 2021). In what ways is comedy subversive? This vital new book critically considers the importance of comedy in challenging and redefining our relations to race and racism through the lens of political correctness. On this episode of New Books Network, your host Lee M. Pierce (they) interviews author Jack Black (he) about psychoanalysis, PC culture, The Office, and the subversive potential of comedy to change our collectiv...
Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom" (Indiana UP, 2021)
April 27, 2021 08:00 - 43 minutesHow do race and sexuality intersect in the American sitcom? In The Generic Closet: Black Gayness and the Black-Cast Sitcom (Indiana University Press, 2021), Alfred L Martin, an assistant professor of communication studies at The University of Iowa, explores the production and reception of Black-cast sitcoms, along with a detailed analysis of the representations of gay men within this genre. At the centre of the book is a theorisation of the generic closet, both as a way to explain the absenc...
Steven Capsuto, "Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV" (2020)
April 23, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesSteven Capsuto's book Alternate Channels: Queer Images on 20th-Century TV (2020) explores the fight for lesbian and gay visibility on 20th-century American television, as gay activists faced off with powerful, often vicious "traditional values" crusaders, with TV executives caught in the crossfire. It documents countless programs, characters, and political skirmishes, examining lesbian and gay portrayals and the few pioneering depictions of bisexual and trans people. The first edition was a s...
Maria San Filippo, "Provocauteurs and Provocations: Screening Sex in 21st Century Media" (Indiana UP, 2021)
April 13, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourTwenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, ...
Sheila E. Jelen, "Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies" (Wayne State UP, 2020
April 12, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Sheila Jelen explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. I...
Ramsey McGlazer, "Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress" (Fordham UP, 2020)
April 07, 2021 04:00 - 1 hourRamsey McGlazer's Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the ways in which a group of modernist cultural practitioners (thinkers, politicians, artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers) across varied linguistic and cultural contexts ((Italian, English, Irish, and Brazilian) resisted certain notions of education perceived as “progressive”. At the heart of this remarkable study, pulses a nexus of issues that are of interest to a...
Shannan Clark, "The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and 20th-Century Consumer Capitalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
April 06, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourDuring the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America’s consumer culture was centralized in New York to an extent unparalleled in the history of the United States. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, and secretaries made advertisements, produced media content, and designed the shape and feel of the consumer economy. While this centre of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices...
Amanda Ann Klein, "Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming" (Duke UP, 2021)
April 05, 2021 08:00 - 57 minutesIn Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV’s Transition to Reality Programming (Duke University Press, 2021), Dr. Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereot...
James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini, "Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines" (Oxford UP, 2020)
April 01, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourIn Visual Worlds: Looking, Images, Visual Disciplines (Oxford University Press, 2020), James Elkins and Erna Fiorentini provide a full introduction to the visual world across all the fields that theorize it. In contrast with typical visual culture texts, their book looks beyond the arts, taking a comparative approach that considers a number of fields, including art history and theory but also epistemology, ontology, vision science, neurology, cognitive psychology, law, advertising, medicine, ...
D. A. Miller, "Hidden Hitchcock" (U Chicago Press, 2016)
March 31, 2021 08:00 - 1 hourAfter decades of criticism about perhaps the most famous director in history, it seems that nothing is left to be said. But maybe critics just haven’t been willing to be surprised by the films they have watched again and again. On this episode of New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews famed literary critic Dr. D.A. Miller (h) about ropes, shoes, desserts, stains, and the other surprising little touches that characterize Hitchcock’s surplus style. In Hidden Hitchcock (University of...
Xiaomei Chen, "Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda" (Columbia UP, 2016)
March 10, 2021 09:00 - 54 minutesXiaomei Chen's Staging Chinese Revolution: Theater, Film, and the Afterlives of Propaganda (Columbia UP, 2016) examines the changing place of revolutionary propaganda in a changing China. Chen analyzes the "grey areas" in deceptively simple plays and films, showing how a contemporary film about Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping can also be read as an indictment of the corruption and inequality of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." In our discussion we also touch on Xiaomei's family's history...
Frances Galt, "Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries" (Bristol UP, 2020)
March 05, 2021 09:00 - 43 minutesHow can the history of women’s work in film and TV help address inequality today? In Women’s Activism Behind the Screens: Trade Unions and Gender Inequality in the British Film and Television Industries (University of Bristol Press, 2020), Frances Galt, a Teaching Associate in history at Newcastle University, looks at the history of women’s struggles for equality within unions in the screen industry, to show the lessons of how gender equality has progressed and receded since the 1930s. The bo...
Morton Schoolman, "A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics" (Duke UP, 2020)
March 04, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourMorton Schoolman, Professor in the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the State University of New York at Albany, has published a new book that explores the idea of democratic enlightenment in the United States, and the way that we may want to consider both how to achieve this enlightenment and how we can be guided by our literary and philosophical traditions. Schoolman explains that we need to come to democratic enlightenment through a process of reconciliation, and that thi...
Debashree Mukherjee, "Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City" (Columbia UP, 2020)
February 25, 2021 09:00 - 43 minutesIn 1935, the writer Baburao Patel writes the following about Bombay’s film industry: “In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional film distributor thrives. . . . He comes with a fortune made in share and cotton gambling, advances money to the producer at a killing rate of interest plus a big slice of royalty and recovers his investment by blackmailing the exhibitors into giving heavy and uneconomic minimum guarantees. His only aim in life is to multiply his rupee an...
J. Lahti and R. Weaver-Hightower, "Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film" (Routledge, 2020)
February 24, 2021 09:00 - 49 minutesThe medium of cinema emerged during the height of Victorian-era European empires, and as a result, settler colonial imperialism has thematically suffused film for well over a century. In Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World on Film (Routledge, 2020), Drs. Janne Lahti (Academy of Finland Fellow in history, University of Helsinki) and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (Professor of English, Virginia Tech University) bring together a collection of scholars from a variety of disciplines to exami...
I. Stavans and J. Lambert, "How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish" (Restless Books, 2020)
February 23, 2021 04:00 - 48 minutesIs it possible to conceive of the American diet without bagels? Or Star Trek without Mr. Spock? Are the creatures in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are based on Holocaust survivors? And how has Yiddish, a language without a country, influenced Hollywood? These and other questions are explored in this stunning and rich anthology of the interplay of Yiddish and American culture, entitled How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (Restless Books, 2020), and edited by Il...
Paola Bonifazio, "The Photoromance: A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture" (MIT Press, 2020)
February 19, 2021 09:00 - 59 minutesPaola Bonifazio’s The Photoromance. A Feminist Reading of Popular Culture (MIT Press, 2020) is the first feminist reading of photoromances that examines both its industry and its fandom, arguing for their relevance as transmedia narratives in a transnational market. The photoromance, a form of graphic storytelling that uses photographs instead of drawings, reached a readership of millions in the 1960s. Despite its popularity, the photoromance was—and still is—widely scorned as a medium, and i...
Linda C. Ehrlich, "The Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema" (Palgrave, 2019)
February 05, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourThe Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu: An Elemental Cinema (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) draws readers into the first 13 feature films and 5 of the documentaries of award-winning Japanese film director Kore-eda Hirokazu. With his recent top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Shoplifters, Kore-eda is arguably Japan’s greatest living director with an international viewership. He approaches difficult subjects (child abandonment, suicide, marginality) with a realistic and compassionate eye. The lyrical ...
Tavia Nyong’o, "Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life" (NYU Press, 2028)
February 05, 2021 09:00 - 53 minutesTavia Nyong’o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018), examines a broad range of artists and disciplines, from Adrian Piper to Kara Walker to the meaning of the auroch's in the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Throughout the book, Nyong’o draws the reader's attention to the ways Black and queer artists construct alternative worlds in a context of brutality and discrimination. Negotiating between the twin poles of Afro-futurism and Afro-pessimism, Nyong’o summons t...
André Gregory, "This Is Not My Memoir" (FSG, 2020)
January 20, 2021 09:00 - 52 minutesAndré Gregory's not-memoir This Is Not My Memoir (FSG, 2020) is a fascinating trip through theatre history as seen through the eyes of one of its greatest directors. The André we encounter in this book will be familiar to fans of his theatre work or of his celebrated performance in My Dinner with André: curious, ebullient, searching, passionate, funny, and inspiring. This book also includes reflections on André's collaborations and friendships with some of theatre's greatest artists, includin...
Woojeong Joo, "Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday" (Edinburgh UP, 2017)
January 11, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourOne of the most well regarded of non-Western film directors, responsible for acknowledged classics like Tokyo Story (1953), Ozu Yasujiro worked during a period of immense turbulence for Japan and its population. In The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Woojeong Joo offers a new interpretation of Ozu's career, from his earliest work in the 1920s up to his death in 1963, focusing on Ozu's depiction of the everyday life and experiences of ordin...
Thomas Doherty, "Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century" (Columbia UP, 2020)
January 11, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourIn Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century (Columbia University Press, 2020), Thomas Doherty offers a lively and comprehensive cultural history of the media coverage of the abduction and its aftermath. Beginning with Lindbergh’s ascent to fame and proceeding through the trial and execution of the accused kidnapper, Doherty traces how newspapers, radio, and newsreels reported on what was dubbed the “crime of the century.” He casts the affair as a transformativ...
Mike Miley, "Truth and Consequences: Game Shows in Fiction and Film" (UP Mississippi, 2020)
January 08, 2021 09:00 - 1 hourAlthough nearly every other television form or genre has undergone a massive critical and popular reassessment or resurgence in the past twenty years, the game show’s reputation has remained both remarkably stagnant and remarkably low. Scholarship on game shows concerns itself primarily with the history and aesthetics of the form, and few works assess the influence the format has had on American society or how the aesthetics and rhythms of contemporary life model themselves on the aesthetics ...
Courtenay Stallings, "Laura's Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks" (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2020)
January 06, 2021 09:00 - 51 minutesIn this episode Miranda Corcoran speaks to Courtenay Stallings about her new book, Laura’s Ghost: Women Speak about Twin Peaks (Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2020). Laura’s Ghost is unique exploration of an iconic television series. The book focuses on the character of Laura Palmer, the beautiful homecoming queen whose murder sets in motion the mysteries at the heart of David Lynch’s eccentric small town. Through conversations with women involved in both the show itself and the Twin Peaks fan com...
Charles R. Acland, "American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder" (Duke UP, 2020)
December 29, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourBen-Hur (1959), Jaws (1975), Avatar (2009), Wonder Woman (2017): the blockbuster movie has held a dominant position in American popular culture for decades. In American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder (Duke University Press, 2020), Charles R. Acland charts the origins, impact, and dynamics of this most visible, entertaining, and disparaged cultural form. Acland narrates how blockbusters emerged from Hollywood's turn to a hit-driven focus during the industry's business crisis in th...
Trevor C. Pederson, "Psychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom" (Routledge, 2018)
December 28, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourPsychoanalysis and Hidden Narrative in Film: Reading the Symptom (Routledge, 2018) proposes a way of constructing hidden psychological narratives of popular film and novels. Instead of offering interpretations of classic films, Trevor C. Pederson recognizes that the psychoanalytic tradition began with making sense of the seemingly inconsequential. Here he turns his attention to popular films like Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (1987). While masterworks like Psycho (1960) are not the object o...
Dan Callahan, "The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 22, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn The Camera Lies, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press, author Dan Callahan spotlights the many nuances of Hitchcock's direction throughout his career, from Cary Grant in Notorious (1946) to Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960). Delving further, he examines the ways that sex and sexuality are presented through Hitchcock's characters, reflecting the director's own complex relationship with sexuality. Dan Callahan is the author of Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, Vanessa: The Life of Vane...
Waleed F. Mahdi, "Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation" (Syracuse UP, 2020)
December 15, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIt comes as little surprise that Hollywood films have traditionally stereotyped Arab Americans, but how are Arab Americans portrayed in Arab films, and just as importantly, how are they portrayed in the works of Arab American filmmakers themselves? In Arab Americans in Film: From Hollywood and Egyptian Stereotypes to Self-Representation (Syracuse University Press, 2020), Waleed F. Mahdi offers a comparative analysis of three cinemas, yielding rich insights on the layers of representation and...
Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody, "Monstrous Women in Comics" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
December 02, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesIn their new collection, Monstrous Women in Comics (University Press of Mississippi, 2020), Samantha Langsdale and Elizabeth Rae Coody put together a critical volume on the ways women are made monstrous in popular culture. This edited volume examines the coding of woman as monstrous and how the monster as dangerously evocative of women/femininity/the female is exacerbated by the intersection of gender with sexuality, race, nationality, and disability. The five sections of this book look at th...
Rebecca Harrison, "The Empire Strikes Back" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
November 30, 2020 09:00 - 45 minutesWhy does The Empire Strikes Back matter? In BFI Classics Series's The Empire Strikes Back (Bloomsbury, 2020), Rebecca Harrison, a lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, tells the story of the film’s production and reception, and analyses the film’s on-screen representations. The book is framed through the idea of disruption, with The Empire Strikes Back discussed as a film that disrupted the industry, genre and cinematic conventions, and critical expectation. Mo...
Chris Richardson, "Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture" (Routledge, 2020)
November 25, 2020 09:00 - 51 minutesIn Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the rivalry of Batman and The Joker. Richardson's queer reading of the text provides new understandings of Batman and The Joker and the transformations of the Gotham Universe throughout its 80-year existence. In particular, Richardson investigates how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and...
Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960" (U Nebraska Press, 2020)
November 20, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesBehind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Ind...
E. Goldberg et al, "Bollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 49 minutesBollywood Horrors: Religion, Violence and Cinematic Fears in India (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a multi-faceted and wide-ranging collection that examines cinematic representations of real-life horror, the religious aspects of horror imagery and themes, and the ways in which Hindi films have projected “cinematic fears” onto the screen. Part I, “Atrocity”, deals with Bollywood's representation of the real horrors of communal violence, rape culture, and human trafficking. In Part II (“Religion”) the ro...
Ara H. Merjian, "Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
November 18, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesOn this episode of New Books in History, Jana Byars talks with Ara Marjian, Professor of Italian and affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History at New York University about his newest book Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art, and Neocapitalism (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Paosolini, a filmmaker who created art in a variety of media, has something approaching a cult following. Merjian explores, “Pasolini’s fraught relationship t...
Eithne Quinn, "A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood" (Columbia UP, 2019)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 48 minutesWhat is the history of equal rights in Hollywood? In A Piece of the Action: Race and Labor in Post–Civil Rights Hollywood (Columbia UP, 2019), Eithne Quinn, a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Manchester, explores the transitional years following the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in order to chart the struggle by Black film makers for rights, recognition and representation. The book combines analysis of on-screen representations, with research on both the producti...
Charles L. Leavitt IV, "Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History" (U Toronto Press, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIn Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Charles Leavitt steps back from the micro-histories focusing more narrowly on, for example, Italian cinema so as to weave together divers cultural strands (literature, the visual arts, drama, journalism, poetry, essays) into a tapestry of historical practice. Which realisms are being invoked under the category of “Neorealism” as it was plied and applied in the mid-20th Century? What were the aims of these realisms?...
Mark Glancy, "Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourCary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend (Oxford University Press, 2020) tells the incredible story of how a sad, neglected boy became the suave, glamorous star many know and idolize. The first biography to be based on Grant's own personal papers, this book takes us on a fascinating journey from the actor's difficult childhood through years of struggle in music halls and vaudeville, a hit-and-miss career in Broadway musicals, and three decades of film stardom during Hollywood's golden age...
Eric San Juan, "The Films of Martin Scorsese: Gangsters, Greed, and Guilt" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020)
October 20, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFew mainstream filmmakers have as pronounced a disregard for the supposed rules of filmmaking as Martin Scorsese. His inventiveness displays a reaction against the “right” way to make a movie, frequently eschewing traditional cinematic language in favor of something flashy, unexpected and contrary to the way “proper” films are done. Yet despite this, he’s become one of the most influential directors of the last fifty years, a critical darling (though rarely a box office titan), and a fan favo...
Yvonne Rainer, "Revisions: Essays by Apollo Musagète, Yvonne Rainer, and Others" (No Place Press, 2020)
October 14, 2020 08:00 - 45 minutesYvonne Rainer is one of the most influential living choreographers. After studying with Merce Cunningham she co-founded the Judson Dance Theater, a center of post-modern dance whose influence far outlasted its three years of existence. In the 1970s Rainer transitioned into film directing. She released seven feature films between 1972 and 1996 before returning to choreography in 2000 with After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, a piece created for Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. Her ...
Dave O’Brien, "Culture is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries" (Manchester UP, 2020)
October 12, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIt would be hard to overstate the importance of culture. It teaches us, heals us, rips us apart and puts us back together in new and surprising ways. Given its fundamental importance to the human experience, it would make sense that looking at the sort of people who produce it for us, thinking about who they are, what their experiences are, and what that may say about the cultural products they then make. There is no product without a producer, and cultural products are no different, so under...
Chris Fenton, "Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, and American Business" (Post Hill Press, 2020)
October 05, 2020 08:00 - 49 minutesFor seventeen years, Chris Fenton served as the president of DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, a multi-billion-dollar global media company headquartered in Beijing. He has produced or supervised twenty-one films, grossing $2 billion in worldwide box-office. In his new book, Feeding the Dragon: Inside the Trillion Dollar Dilemma Facing Hollywood, the NBA, & American Business (Post Hill Press, 2020), Fenton shares not only his journey from waiting tables at the Olive Garden to producing s...
Glenn Kenny, "Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas" (Hanover Square, 2020)
September 30, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor the thirtieth anniversary of its premiere comes the vivid and immersive history behind Martin Scorsese’s signature film Goodfellas, hailed by critics as the greatest mob movie ever made. In the first ever behind-the-scenes story of Goodfellas, film critic Glenn Kenny chronicles the making and afterlife of the film that introduced America to the real modern gangster—brutal, ruthless, yet darkly appealing, the villain we can’t get enough of. Featuring interviews with the film’s major player...
Bruce Isaacs, "The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators (Oxford University Press) is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Sydney, explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avan...
Giorgio Bertellini, "The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America" (U California Press, 2019)
September 25, 2020 08:00 - 57 minutesIn 1927, the Hollywood stars (and spouses), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr stood outside their California home, arms raised in fascist salute. The photo’s caption, referencing the couple’s trip to Rome the previous year, informs fans that the couple “greet guests at their beach camp in true Italian style.” How did “America’s sweetheart” and her husband, a swashbuckler on and off screen, both patriots who had promoted Liberty bonds following the United States’ entry into World War I, ...