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PODCAST

New Books in Film

Interviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

tv & film

All Episodes

58:15

Alien: Earth Episode Analysis: Emergence and The Real...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/29

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we conclude our analysis of the FX series Alien: Earth with episode 7, “Emergence” and episode 8, “The Real Monsters.”Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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28:07

History Is Made at Night

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/29

Every so often, you encounter The Perfect Movie: something with a screenplay, cast, and direction that combine in a way that reminds you of what happens when everyone working on a movie gets it exactly right. History is Made at Night (1937) is one of those movies. Join us for a conversation about how a film that accelerates emotions almost to the level of farce and shifts between genres like a bored teenager with a remote control still dramatizes perfectly what it’s like to fall in love. Hervé

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39:56

Mark Archuleta, "The Reel Thrilling Events of Bank...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/24

In 1921 headlines across the country announced the death of Henry Starr, a burgeoning silent film star who was killed while attempting to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas. Cynics who knew the real Starr were not surprised. Before becoming a matinee idol, Starr had been the greatest bank robber of the horseback bandit era. Born in 1873, Cherokee outlaw Henry Starr had survived shootouts and death sentences and lived long enough to witness the invention of moving pictures. In 1919, after Starr was

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68:14

Mary Beth Willard, "Why It's Ok to Enjoy the Work of...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/22

The #metoo movement has forced many fans to consider what they should do when they learn that a beloved artist has acted immorally. One natural thought is that fans ought to give up the artworks of immoral artists, but according to Mary Beth Willard, it’s hard to find good reasons to do so. In Why It's OK to Enjoy the Work of Immoral Artists (Routledge, 2021), she contends that because most boycotts of artists won’t succeed, there’s no ethical reason to do so most of the time. She then argues that

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57:41

Yu Zhang, "Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/20

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of "going to the countryside" a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of "down to the villages" movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What then was the special

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55:11

Mark Goble, "Downtime: The Twentieth Century in Slow...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/15

Slow motion is everywhere in contemporary film and media, but it wasn't always so ubiquitous. How did slow motion ascend to the dubious honor of becoming our culture's least "special" effect? And what does slow motion — a trick secured paradoxically through the camera's ever-racing speeds of capture — tell us about the temporalities and trajectories of modernity? Mark Goble, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, takes up these questions in his latest book Downtime: The

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29:28

The Straight Story

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/15

Everybody was shocked when, in 1999, David Lynch released a G-rated film with a Norman Rockwell setting that didn’t have a dark underbelly or wild reveal; if you have a David Lynch bingo card, The Straight Story is the free space. And while The Straight Story is as wholesome a film as you can find, it's never sentimental or corny. Dan thinks it’s Lynch’s best. Join him and Mike as they talk about all the ways that the film could have gone wrong and, more importantly, all the things that Lynch gets

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43:30

Katherine Fusco, "Hollywood's Others: Love and...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/06

We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with

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36:42

Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry" (U...

New Books in Film ·

2025/09/02

In Tales of Militant Chemistry (U of California Press, 2025), Alice Lovejoy tells the untold story of film as a chemical cousin to poison gas and nuclear weapons, shaped by centuries of violent extraction. The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century's history of war, destruction, and cruelty. This story comes into focus during

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84:21

Patricia Aufderheide, "Kartemquin Films:...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/30

Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy (U California Press, 2024) traces how filmmaker-philosophers brought the dream of making documentaries and strengthening democracy to award-winning reality—with help from nuns, gang members, skateboarders, artists, disability activists, and more.The evolution of Kartemquin Films—Peabody, Emmy, and Sundance-awarded and Oscar-nominated makers of such hits as Hoop Dreams and Minding the Gap—is also the story of U.S. independent

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33:01

Excalibur

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/25

We’ve seen many attempts at transferring Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and its variants onto the screen, but none of them capture the spirit of the original quite like Excalibur, John Boorman’s 1981 film that can be called, without insult, “aggressively two-dimensional.” Join us for a conversation about how Boorman makes the experience of watching a film like the experience of reading the legends. We also talk about the two best portrayals of King Arthur: Nigel Terry and Graham Chapman. If the

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60:17

Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis eds., "The...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/19

Autonomous weapons exist in a strange territory between Pentagon procurement contracts and Hollywood blockbusters, between actual military systems and speculative futures. For this week's Liminal Library, I spoke with Jascha Bareis, co-editor of The Realities of Autonomous Weapons (Bristol UP, 2025), about how these dual existences shape international relations and cultural imagination. The collection examines autonomous weapons not just as military hardware but as psychological tools that reshape

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50:30

Prudence Peiffer, "The Slip: The New York City Street...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/15

For just over a decade, from 1956 to 1967, a collection of dilapidated former sail-making warehouses clustered at the lower tip of Manhattan became the quiet epicenter of the art world. Coenties Slip, a dead-end street near the water, was home to a circle of wildly talented and varied artists that included Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, Delphine Seyrig, Lenore Tawney, and Jack Youngerman. As friends and inspirations to one another, they created a unique community

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44:21

Alisha Mughal, "It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow"...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/13

Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance. A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a

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61:34

Jirí Anger, "Towards a Film Theory from Below:...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/12

Jiří Anger is a scholar, archivist, and videographic critic devoted, as he says in this interview, to "making weird shapes shine." In this episode of New Books in Film, Anger sits down with Alix Beeston to discuss his award-winning book Towards a Film Theory from Below: Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up. Anger's book is an experiment in theorizing film "from below," from the perspective of moving-image objects themselves. Its revelatory readings of single frames from the digitized

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68:32

Horror and Humanism in "28 Years Later"

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/11

We break down the themes and ideas in 28 Years Later, with a particular focus on the politics of this Danny Boyle / Alex Garland sequel to 28 Days Later. We react to the humanitarianism of Dr. Kelson, the role of the islands within the movie, and analyze the visions of family, fatherhood, and masculinity presented. We explain the controversial ending to the movie, and consider the extent to which the movie is commenting on Britain past, present, and future. We begin, though, with a review of the

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39:09

Liza Black, "Picturing Indians: Native Americans in...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/08

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 American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians"

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68:10

Nezar AlSayyad and Heba Safey Eldeen, "Cinematic...

New Books in Film ·

2025/08/07

The relationship between the city and cinema is formidable. The images and sounds of the city found in movies are perhaps the only experience that many people will have of cities they may never visit. Films influence the way we construct images of the world, and accordingly, in many instances, how we operate within it. Cinematic Cairo: Egyptian Urban Modernity from Reel to Real offers a history of Cairo’s urban modernity using film as the primary source of exploration, and cinematic space as both an

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27:59

Moonstruck

New Books in Film ·

2025/07/21

Our episode on Moonstruck (1987) was almost never made: as with Manchester By the Sea, Dan harbored an irrational suspicion against it–but when he finally saw it, he sought forgiveness for the errors of his ways. That’s an appropriate theme to consider in light of a film saturated with Italian Catholicism that explores themes of sin and redemption, but with a light touch and in a celebratory mode. It’s a terrific film that couldn’t be made today; listen to the show to learn why.Ira Wells’s Norman

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36:23

Richard Scheib, "A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic:...

New Books in Film ·

2025/07/20

Richard Scheib's A Viewing Guide to the Pandemic (Headpress, 2025) is a film book like no other. It opens with the author's first-hand account of the Covid-19 pandemic and life in lockdown. His sense of dread, and anxiety about his state of health, were experiences shared with millions of others across the world. For author Richard Scheib, already committed to writing a book about plagues and pandemics in popular culture, Covid-19 felt like a perverse twist of fate. Media depictions of deadly

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