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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
Magic
Magic is misdirection, and Richard Attenborough and William Goldman do a terrific job of misdirecting the audience in this 1978 thriller. Like The King of…
- New Books in Film
Dune, Part Two: An Interview with Dr. Kara Kennedy
Part 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…
- New Books in Film
Baby Face
Baby Face is the 1933 film that created the archetypal Barbara Stanwyck character and famously laid everything bare before the production code tried to clean…
- New Books in Film
Jinying Li, "Anime's Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — the…
- New Books in Film
Jesse David Fox, "Comedy Book:: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work" (FSG, 2023)
In 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…
- New Books in Film
Eve Benhamou, "Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)
Eve Benhamou's book Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh UP, 2022) is the first in-depth study of Disney’s latest animated…
- New Books in Film
Conan the Barbarian
It’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…
- New Books in Film
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
A 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…
- New Books in Film
Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)
Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the image…
- New Books in Film
Kartik Nair, "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (U California Press, 2024)
1980s 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…
- New Books in Film
The Hunting Trilogy
We 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…
- New Books in Film
Robert Alpert et al., "Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
As I may be the target audience for Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies (Edinburgh UP, 2023), I really enjoyed interviewing…
- New Books in Film
Limelight
Being 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…
- New Books in Film
Courtney Brannon Donoghue, "The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere" (U Texas Press, 2023)
Conversations about gender equity in the workplace accelerated in the 2010s, with debates inside Hollywood specifically pointing to broader systemic problems…
- New Books in Film
Andrew David Jackson, "The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)
Dr. Andy Jackson’s The Late and Post-Dictatorship Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) examines an unexplored area…
- New Books in Film
Anatomy of a Fall
We 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…
- New Books in Film
Ridley Scott's "Napoleon": A Historian's Review
Charles Coutino discusses Ridley Scott's film "Napoleon" with military historian Jeremy Black. Is it accurate? Is it inaccurate? Does it matter? Listen in to…
- New Books in Film
Bliss Cua Lim, "The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema" (Duke UP, 2024)
In The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024), Bliss Cua Lim draws on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist…
- New Books in Film
My Best Fiend
Werner 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…
- New Books in Film
"Apocalypto" and Mel Gibson (with Jonathon Fessenden)
The 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…
- New Books in Film
Eyes Wide Shut
In 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…
- New Books in Film
Matt Singer, "Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2023)
Once 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…
- New Books in Film
Ofer Ashkenazi, "Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (U Michigan Press, 2020) studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular…
- New Books in Film
Jennifer Cazenave, "An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah" (SUNY Press, 2019)
Jennifer 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…
- New Books in Film
The Omen
Can 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…
New Books in FilmPlot
In 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…
- New Books in Film
W. K. Stratton, "The Wild Bunch: Sam Peckinpah, a Revolution in Hollywood, and the Making of a Legendary Film" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
On 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…
- New Books in Film
Meet John Doe
Have 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…
- New Books in Film
Patrick Ffrench, "Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics" (Bloomsbury, 2019)
Suspicious of what he called the spectator's "sticky" adherence to the screen, Roland Barthes had a cautious attitude towards cinema. Falling into a hypnotic…
- New Books in Film
Annie McClanahan, "Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture" (Stanford UP, 2016)
When 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…
- New Books in Film
Nobuko Ishitate-Okunomiya Yamasaki, "Prostitutes, Hostesses, and Actresses at the Edge of the Japanese Empire" (Routledge, 2023)
Analysing materials from literature and film, this book considers the fates of women who did not or could not buy into the Japanese imperial ideology of "good…
- New Books in Film
The Sting
There’s nothing like being conned at the movies. Join Mike and Dan as they talk about George Roy Hill’s beautifully-constructed toy, The Sting. Dan explains…
- New Books in Film
George MacLeod, "Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War" (U Nebraska Press, 2023)
George MacLeod's book Mediating Violence from Africa: Francophone Literature, Film, and Testimony After the Cold War (U Nebraska Press, 2023) explores how…
- New Books in Film
Jie Li, "Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Welcome to the latest episode of New Books in Chinese Studies! I am your host, Julia Keblinska, and today I will be talking today to Jie Li, about her new…
- New Books in Film
Nate Patrin, "The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
In The Needle and the Lens: Pop Goes to the Movies from Rock 'n' Roll to Synthwave (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), Nate Patrin examines how the link…
- New Books in Film
Olga V. Solovieva, "The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently" (Oxford UP. 2023)
Olga V. Solovieva's book The Russian Kurosawa: Transnational Cinema, Or the Art of Speaking Differently (Oxford UP. 2023) offers a new historical perspective…
- New Books in Film
David Craig, "Apocalypse Television: How The Day After Helped Save the World" (Applause Books, 2023)
On November 20, 1983, a three-hour made-for-TV movie The Day After premiered on ABC. Set in the heartland of Lawrence, Kansas, the film depicted the events…
- New Books in Film
Donnie Darko
If we had seen Donnie Darko in high school, we would been drawn to the Easter eggs throughout the film and made videos in which we pointed them out with big…
- New Books in Film
Simone Gigliotti, "Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced" (Indiana UP, 2023)
The global refugee, the ship passenger, the displaced person. How did their homeseeking routes and visual motifs intersect and diverge in the early Holocaust…
- New Books in Film
Ervin Malakaj, "Anders als Die Andern" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
Released in 1919, "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated…
- New Books in Film
The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance
How should one deal with evil? What are people capable of doing when they are given unconstrained liberty? Why does democracy work when people run things…
- New Books in Film
This is the Best Statement of the Simulation Hypothesis We've Seen
It’s the UConn PopCast, and in this episode we discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 movie World on a Wire, shown on West German television over two nights…
- New Books in Film
Wild Strawberries
What if you could receive the adulation and respect of strangers but not from your own family-or even yourself? In Wild Strawberries (1957), Ingmar Bergman…
- New Books in Film
Daniel Herbert, "Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film" (U California Press, 2023)
Daniel Herbert's book Maverick Movies: New Line Cinema and the Transformation of American Film (U California Press, 2023) tells the improbable story of New…
- New Books in Film
I Know Where I’m Going!
Samuel Johnson once asked, “What enemy would invade Scotland, where there is nothing to be got?” He must never have seen I Know Where I’m Going (1945). In…
- New Books in Film
Michael Rushton, "The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023)
Should governments fund the arts? In The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), Michael Rushton, Co-Director of the…
- New Books in Film
Mia Mask, "Black Rodeo: A History of the African American Western" (U Illinois Press, 2023)
Did you know Sidney Poitier was a western icon? In a genre best known for John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, African American actors and directors have played an…
- New Books in Film
Jeffrey Angles, ed., "Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again: The Original Novellas by Shigeru Kayama" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
Earlier this month, Toho Studios released “Godzilla Minus One”—the 37th film in the now almost seven-decade-old franchise. Godzilla has gone through many…
- New Books in Film
Spirited Away
We are used to entering cinematic fantasy worlds in which we learn the rules of how the world works and then watch our hero navigate through it: think of Star…
- New Books in Film
Alexa Weik von Mossner, "Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative" (Ohio State UP, 2017)
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative (Ohio State UP, 2017) explores our emotional engagement with environmental narrative…
- New Books in Film
'For All Mankind,’ An Alternate History About the Possibility of Utopia
It’s the UConn PopCast, and in this episode we tackle ‘For All Mankind,’ Apple TV’s alternate history about a space race that never ended. We first react to…
- New Books in Film
Pavitra Sundar, "Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema" (U Michigan Press, 2023)
Pavitra Sundar's book Listening with a Feminist Ear: Soundwork in Bombay Cinema (U Michigan Press, 2023) is a study of the cultural politics and possibilities…
- New Books in Film
Minority Report
Minority Report (2002) is Exhibit A of how screenwriters love the premises of Philip K. Dick’s source materials and then adapt his core thought experiments…
- New Books in Film
Adrien Sebro, "Scratchin' and Survivin': Hustle Economics and the Black Sitcoms of Tandem Productions" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
The 1970s was a golden age for representations of African American life on TV sitcoms: Sanford & Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons. Surprisingly, nearly all the…
- New Books in Film
What Reality TV Says About Us
Reality TV shapes and reflects how we see ourselves, and what we regard as normal. Professor Danielle J. Lindemann watched thousands of hours of reality tv to…
- New Books in Film
This Will Change Your Perspective on James Bond
The Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender…
- New Books in Film
Point Blank
In 1962, Donald E. Westlake used the pseudonym Richard Stark and published The Hunter, the story of Parker, a betrayed thief who seeks vengeance with more…
- New Books in Film
Jacqueline R. Braitman, "She Damn Near Ran the Studio: The Extraordinary Lives of Ida R. Koverman" (UP of Mississippi, 2020)
In this episode, I am happy to be interviewing historian and author Dr. Jacqueline R. Braitman about her very engaging biography, She Damn Near Ran the Studio…
- New Books in Film
Scott Eyman, "Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided" (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
The remarkable, must-read story of Charlie Chaplin’s years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career…
- New Books in Film
Babette’s Feast
In 1965, Bob Dylan sang, “She’s got everything she needs; she’s an artist; she don’t look back.” About twenty years later, Gabriel Axel brilliantly dramatized…