Shows / New Books in Film
New Books in Film
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Film
Joseph McBride, "George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director" (Columbia UP, 2024)
The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely…
- New Books in Film
Victoria Sturtevant, "It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy" (U Texas Press, 2024)
Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing…
- New Books in Film
Scott Anthony, "The Story of British Propaganda Film" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
'All art is propaganda,' wrote George Orwell, 'but not all propaganda is art.' Moving from World War I to the 'War on Terror' and beyond, The Story of British…
New Books in FilmBiopic
In this episode of High Theory, Laura Stamm talks about the biopic. One of the oldest forms of narrative cinema, biographical pictures are a mainstay of the…
- New Books in Film
Sam Langsdale, "Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics" (U Texas Press, 2024)
It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other…
- New Books in Film
Chris Berry et al., "Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (Edinburgh UP, 2024), edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri, and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, is…
- New Books in Film
Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, "Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction" (Northwestern UP, 2024)
In Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024), Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay enact a dialogue between cinema, philosophy, and…
- New Books in Film
Shalini Kakar, "Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023)
Devotional Fanscapes: Bollywood Star Deities, Devotee-Fans, and Cultural Politics in India and Beyond (Rowman and Littlefield, 2023) examines how fans worship…
- New Books in Film
A Serious Man
A Serious Man (2009) may seem much different from the Coens’ adaptation of No Country for Old Men, which they released two years earlier. But they both concern…
- New Books in Film
Erin Lee Mock, "Changed Men: Veterans in American Popular Culture after World War II" (U Virginia Press, 2024)
Millions of GIs returned from overseas in 1945. A generation of men who had left their families and had learned to kill and to quickly dispatch sexual urges…
- New Books in Film
Nicholas Baer, "Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism" (U California Press, 2024)
Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Nicholas Baer reassesses Weimar cinema in light of…
- New Books in Film
Elsie Walker, "Life 24x a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Life 24x a Second: Cinema, Selfhood, and Society (Oxford UP, 2023) highlights the life-sustaining and life-affirming power of cinema. Author Elsie Walker pays…
- New Books in Film
Laure Astourian, "The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema" (Indiana UP, 2024)
The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema (Indiana UP, 2024) explores the significant ties…
- New Books in Film
Hunter Hargraves, "Uncomfortable Television" (Duke UP, 2024)
From The Wire to Intervention to Girls, postmillennial American television has dazzled audiences with novelistic seriality and cinematic aesthetics. Yet this…
- New Books in Film
Sarah Cleary, "The Myth of Harm: Horror, Censorship and the Child" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
The horror genre has endured a long and controversial success within popular culture. Fraught with accusations pertaining to its alleged ability to harm and…
- New Books in Film
True Believer
Actors win awards and gain our admiration when they convince us that they have “become” someone else–it’s what we mean when we say that so-and-so “inhabits” a…
- New Books in Film
Daniela Berghahn, "Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
Daniela Berghahn's award-winning monograph Exotic Cinema: Encounters with Cultural Difference in Contemporary Transnational Film (Edinburgh UP, 2023) is the…
- New Books in Film
Blow Out
Political noise is as American as baseball and apple pie and in this election season it’s impossible to tune it out completely: it’s on our televisions…
- New Books in Film
The Fly
There’s a moment in The Fly (1986) in which Seth Brundle–well into his transformation into Brundlefly–explains that he must vomit on a donut before eating it…
- New Books in Film
Landon Palmer, "Rock Star/Movie Star: Power and Performance in Cinematic Rock Stardom" (Oxford UP, 2020)
During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an…
- New Books in Film
Kevin Sanson, "Mobile Hollywood: Labor and the Geography of Production" (U California Press, 2024)
What is the future of the film industry? In Mobile Hollywood Labor and the Geography of Production (U California Press, 2024), Kevin Sanson, Professor of Media…
- New Books in Film
Peter C. Kunze, "Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
In the early 1980s, Walt Disney Productions was struggling, largely bolstered by the success of its theme parks. Within fifteen years, however, it had become…
- New Books in Film
Out of Sight
The second-best movie based on an Elmore Leonard novel, Out of Sight (1998) does what Netflix and other platforms try to do all the time: throw a bunch of…
- New Books in Film
Slavery and Film, Creativity and Academia, and Is Slavery a Good Metaphor for AI?
Dr. Dexter Gabriel is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He’s published and taught widely on the histories of slavery…
- New Books in Film
Aviva Dove-Viebahn, "There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises (Rutgers UP, 2023) interrogates the representation of…
- New Books in Film
Scott Henderson, "Comics and Pop Culture: Adaptation from Panel to Frame" (U Texas Press, 2019)
It is hard to discuss the current film industry without acknowledging the impact of comic book adaptations, especially considering the blockbuster success of…
- New Books in Film
Kramer vs. Kramer
Robert Benton’s 1979 interior drama turned out to be one of the biggest films of the 70s. While we might appreciate Dustn Hoffman now more often than we watch…
- New Books in Film
Shweta Kishore and Kunal Ray, "Resistance in Indian Documentary Film: Aesthetics, Culture and Practice" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Dr. Shweta Kishore and Dr Kunal Ray’s Resistance in Indian Documentary Film: Aesthetics, Culture and Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2024) is a unique collection of…
- New Books in Film
Gerald Sim, "Screening Big Data: Films That Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy" (Routledge, 2024)
Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (Routledge, 2024) examines the influence of key films on public understanding of big data and the…
- New Books in Film
As Good as It Gets
For years, Dan avoided this movie, fearing it was like a Hallmark Holiday Classic or Very Special Episode of Mad About You. But after our episode on Broadcast…
- New Books in Film
Alessandra Seggi, "Youth and Suicide in American Cinema: Context, Causes, and Consequences" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
Listener note: This interview contains discussions of suicide. Listener note: This interview contains discussions of suicide. Resources for people in a…
- New Books in Film
Emily Carman, "Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System" (U Texas Press, 2016)
During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative…
- New Books in Film
David Kroening Seitz, "A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still…
- New Books in Film
Sheri Chinen Biesen, "Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks…
- New Books in Film
Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis, "Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier" (Vernon Press, 2023)
n this special Star Trek Day episode on the New Books Network, hosted by Dessy Vassileva from Vernon Press, we celebrate over 55 years of Star Trek with a deep…
- New Books in Film
Salma Siddique, "Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers a new history of the partition. Based on previously unexamined…
- New Books in Film
Jennifer L. Lambe, "The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba" (UNC Press, 2024)
From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (UNC Press, 2024)…
- New Books in Film
Steve Jones, "The Metamodern Slasher Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
It is commonly proposed that since the mid-2000s, the slasher subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes of "classics". Consequently, most original…
- New Books in Film
L. A. Confidential
If L. A. Confidential (1997) were two degrees campier, it would seem like Dick Tracy–but Curtis Hanson made sure to capture the spirit of James Ellroy’s novel…
- New Books in Film
Chris Richardson, "Batman and the Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture" (Routledge, 2020)
In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity…
- New Books in Film
For a Few Dollars More
A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) are collectively known as “The Man with No Name” trilogy…
- New Books in Film
Christopher Brown, "Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-2020: Environments, Poetics, Practice" (Edinburgh UP, 2024)
Accounting for the unique characteristics of Taiwan’s cinema from 2008 to 2020, Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-2020: Environments, Poetics, Practice (Edinburgh…
- New Books in Film
To Have and Have Not
Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944) is more Hollywood than Hemingway–something for which we should all be grateful. The film is a wonderful…
- New Books in Film
Can "Alien: Romulus" Revive the Alien Franchise?
Fede Alvarez’s "Alien: Romulus" hit cinemas on August 16th. It’s set between the events of Alien and Aliens, two science fiction classics. We review the movie…
- New Books in Film
The Sounds of Silents
What did going to the movies sound like back in the “silent film” era? The answer takes us on a strange journey through Vaudeville, roaming Chautauqua…
- New Books in Film
Thief
Everyone loves a good heist movie that depends on the combination of cold, logical planning and some element going sideways–and Thief is one of the best. Its…
- New Books in Film
Karen Tongson, "Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us" (NYU Press, 2023)
In Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (NYU Press, 2023), Karen Tongson presents an irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer…
- New Books in Film
Alonso Duralde, "Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film" (Running Press Adult, 2024)
Film critic Alonso Duralde and I talk his new book, Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film (Running Press, 2024)…
- New Books in Film
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, "Movies Under the Influence" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
Movies under the Influence (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) by Dr. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece charts the entangled histories of moviegoing and…
- New Books in Film
Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack, "What's Next: A Backstage Pass to The West Wing, Its Cast and Crew, and Its Enduring Legacy of Service" (Dutton, 2024)
Twenty-five years ago, The West Wing premiered to great acclaim. This book is a behind-the-scenes look into the creation and legacy of the series, as told by…
- New Books in Film
Training Day
Do you need to be a wolf to protect the sheep? That’s the question at the heart of Training Day (2001), in which Ethan Hawke plays the lead and Denzel…
- New Books in Film
Nora Stone, "How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022" (Oxford UP, 2023)
How Documentaries Went Mainstream: A History, 1960-2022 (Oxford University Press, 2023) provides a more comprehensive and meaningful periodization of the…
- New Books in Film
Yiman Wang, "To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong's Cross-Media World" (U California Press, 2024)
Between 1919 and 1961, pioneering Chinese American actress Anna May Wong established an enduring legacy that encompassed cinema, theatre, radio, and American…
- New Books in Film
Kate Hext, "Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (Oxford University…
- New Books in Film
Collateral
Collateral was made in 2004, ten years after Speed—and while both films have the same story of a good guy trying to stop a killer in real time, Collateral…
- New Books in Film
Kathleen Loock, "Hollywood Remaking: How Film Remakes, Sequels, and Franchises Shape Industry and Culture" (U California Press, 2024)
From the inception of cinema to today’s franchise era, remaking has always been a motor of ongoing film production. Hollywood Remaking: How Film Remakes…
- New Books in Film
Jonathan Branfman, "Millennial Jewish Stars: Navigating Racial Antisemitism, Masculinity, and White Supremacy" (NYU Press, 2024)
Jewish stars have longed faced pressure to downplay Jewish identity for fear of alienating wider audiences. But unexpectedly, since the 2000s, many millennial…
- New Books in Film
Rosemary Pennington, "Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media" (Indiana UP, 2024)
As Muslim American representation becomes more prominent in popular culture, how are they continued to be portrayed? Rosemary Pennington's new book Pop Islam…
- New Books in Film
40 Years of Purple Rain: What to Make of the Movie/Album in 2024
It’s the UConn Popcast, and Purple Rain, Prince’s semi-autobiographical, semi-concert film, hit cinemas 40 years ago this week. The movie followed the album of…
- New Books in Film
Steven Powell, "Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Love Me Fierce In Danger: The Life of James Ellroy (Bloomsbury, 2023) is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in…