New Books in Film

In 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...

The 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, Virgini...

Is 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...

Paola 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 1...

Tavia 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 discrimi...

The 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 subjec...

André 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 reflec...

One 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 u...

In 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 newsree...

Although 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 s...

In 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 t...

Ben-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 blockbuster...

Psychoanalysis 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...

In 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 sexual...

It 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...

In 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 ge...

Why 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...

In 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....

Behind 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 America...

On 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,...

Bollywood 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...

What 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 representa...

In 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 “Neore...

Cary 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-...

Few 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 directo...