Film

Film

episodes

Interviews with film makers and scholars of film about their new books.

Defending Your Life

March 18, 2024

Defending Your Life

Hosted by Daniel Moran

We are supposed to get smarter as we get older. Do we? If the meaning of your life had to be found in nine representative days, which days would you …

Anna Kornbluh, "Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism" (Verso, 2024)

March 17, 2024

Immediacy

Anna Kornbluh
Hosted by David Maruzzella

What is the status of art and culture in a world dominated by apps, algorithms, and influencers? Anna Kornbluh’s newest book Immediacy, Or the Style o…

Ellen E. Jones, "Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World" (Faber and Faber, 2024)

March 16, 2024

Screen Deep

Ellen E. Jones
Hosted by Dave O'Brien

Why does race matter in film and TV? In Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber and Faber, 2024), Ellen E. Jones, a jo…

Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

March 15, 2024

Gooey Media

Nick Jones
Hosted by Miranda Melcher

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it h…

Eleanor Patterson, "Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution" (U Illinois Press, 2024)

March 12, 2024

Bootlegging the Airwaves

Eleanor Patterson
Hosted by Pete Kunze

Long before internet archives and the anytime, anywhere convenience of streaming, people collected, traded, and shared radio and television content vi…

Magic

March 11, 2024

Magic

Magic is misdirection, and Richard Attenborough and William Goldman do a terrific job of misdirecting the audience in this 1978 thriller. Like The Ki…

Dune, Part Two: An Interview with Dr. Kara Kennedy

March 8, 2024

Dune, Part Two

Kara Kennedy
Hosted by Maggie Freeman

Part Two of director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films embeds viewers among the Fremen, the Indigenous inhabitants of the planet Arrakis. The sole source …

Baby Face

March 4, 2024

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 t…

Jinying Li, "Anime's Knowledge Cultures: Geek, Otaku, Zhai" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

March 3, 2024

Anime's Knowledge Cultures

Jinying Li
Hosted by Anthony Kao

With comics franchises getting turned into multi-billion dollar revenue opportunities and consumer technology companies dominating daily headlines — t…

Justin Owen Rawlins, "Imagining the Method: Reception, Identity, and American Screen Performance" (U Texas Press, 2024)

March 3, 2024

Imagining the Method

Justin Owen Rawlins
Hosted by Pete Kunze

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: “Method acting.” The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imag…

Jesse David Fox, "Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture–and the Magic That Makes It Work" (FSG, 2023)

March 2, 2024

Comedy Book

Jesse David Fox
Hosted by Pete Kunze

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 come…

Eve Benhamou, "Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

February 27, 2024

Contemporary Disney Animation

Eve Benhamou
Hosted by Pete Kunze

Eve Benhamou's book Contemporary Disney Animation: Genre, Gender and Hollywood (Edinburgh UP, 2022) is the first in-depth study of Disney’s latest ani…

Conan the Barbarian

February 26, 2024

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 ci…

Tucker: The Man and His Dream

February 19, 2024

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 Copp…

Kartik Nair, "Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror" (U California Press, 2024)

February 14, 2024

Seeing Things

Kartik Nair
Hosted by Priyam Sinha

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 …

Jenna Ng, "The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections: Where Screen Boundaries Lie" (Amsterdam UP, 2021)

February 14, 2024

The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections

Jenna Ng
Hosted by Miranda Melcher

Screens are ubiquitous today. Yet contemporary screen media eliminate the presence of the screen and diminish the visibility of its boundaries. As the…

The Hunting Trilogy

February 12, 2024

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 app…

Robert Alpert et al., "Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

February 6, 2024

Diseased Cinema

Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai
Hosted by Michael Vann

As I may be the target audience for Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics and Zombies in American Movies (Edinburgh UP, 2023), I really enjoyed intervie…

Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams, "Kubrick: An Odyssey" (Pegasus Books, 2024)

February 6, 2024

Kubrick

Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams
Hosted by Daniel Moran

The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of th…

Limelight: A Film by Charlie Chaplin

February 5, 2024

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 …