New Books in Film

The 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 fic...

“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 earli...

The 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 w...

During 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...

What 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 per...

What 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 representat...

Philosophers 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 appa...

Movie-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....

In 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...

“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...

I 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...

Ruth 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 ha...

Today 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 thr...

From 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 th...

Double 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...

In 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 Potte...

Since 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, New...

A 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 U...

In 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 t...

Joseph 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 yea...

Holocaust 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 com...

In 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...

This 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 Fi...

Caught 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 stor...

Scholars 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,...