New Books in Film

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 right about aging, regret, and family. Any fan of David Lynch’s work should read Room to Dream, Lynch’s memoir that’s as unique as the man himself: the book has alternating chapters of Lynch and his official biographer telling the story of his life. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 Twentieth Century in Slow Motion (Columbia UP, 2025), out now from Columbia University Press. In this conversation with Alix Beeston, Mark shares from his fascinating account of slow motion across film, art, and literature in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. For Mark, slow motion is a key index of a period of capitalist, ecological, political, and cultural crisis that we're still enduring — but that we hope will one day, however slowly, come to an end.  Tracking bodies and things as they move fast and slow at once also prompts new reflections on the value of the time that academic labor takes, the nature of its uneven rhythms and contingencies, and why dad jokes, witty asides, and extended bits on the impotence of Clyde in the classic 1968 film Bonnie and Clyde might turn out to be essential to scholarly writing.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 disabilities? Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System (Columbia UP, 2025) explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified—but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while also policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple’s career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood’s Others challenges common notions about film’s capacity to build empathy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project--uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world's largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany's machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak's film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout. Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak's and Agfa's global empires, Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling, Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 documentary film over the last seventy years. Patricia Aufderheide reveals the untold story of how Kartemquin developed as an institution that confronts the brutal realities of the industry and society while empowering people to claim their right to democracy. Kartemquin filmmakers, inspired by pragmatic philosopher John Dewey, made their studio a Chicago-area institution. Activists for a more public media, they boldly confronted in their own productions the realities of gender, race, and class. They negotiated the harsh terms and demands of commercial media, from 16mm through the streaming era, while holding fast to their democratic vision. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and personal experience, Aufderheide tells an inspiring story of how to make media that matters in a cynical world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 conversation makes you want to read the original material, you can find a great edition of Le Morte d’Arthur here. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Check out Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 power dynamics through their mere possibility. These systems epitomize what the editors call "the fluidity of violence"—warfare that dissolves traditional boundaries between human decision and machine action, between targeted strikes and algorithmic inevitability. Bareis and his contributors trace fascinating connections between fictional representations and military doctrine—how Terminator narratives influence Pentagon planning while actual weapons development feeds back into artistic imagination. The book wrestles with maintaining "meaningful human control" over systems designed to operate faster than human thought, a challenge that grows more urgent as militaries worldwide race toward greater autonomy. Each chapter reveals how thoroughly we need to rethink human-machine relationships in warfare, from the gendered coding of robot soldiers in film to the way AI imaginaries differ between Silicon Valley and New Delhi. Autonomous weapons force us to confront uncomfortable realities about agency, violence, and the increasingly blurred line between human judgment and algorithmic certainty. Links: A Clean Kill? the role of Patriot in the Gulf War Statement delivered by Germany on Working Definition of LAWS / “Definition of Systems under Consideration” The Silicon Valley venture capitalists who want to ‘move fast and break things’ in the defence industry Hype Studies 'The Gatekeepers' documentary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 for unbridled creative expression and experimentation, and the works they made at the Slip would go on to change the course of American art. Now, for the first time, in The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever (Harper, 2023) Dr. Prudence Peiffer pays homage to these artists and the unsung impact their work had on the direction of late twentieth-century art and film. This remarkable biography, as transformative as the artists it illuminates, questions the very concept of a “group” or “movement,” as it spotlights the Slip’s eclectic mix of gender and sexual orientation, abstraction and Pop, experimental film, painting, and sculpture, assemblage and textile works. Brought together not by the tenets of composition or technique, nor by philosophy or politics, the artists cultivated a scene at the Slip defined by a singular spirit of community and place. They drew lasting inspiration from one another, but perhaps even more from where they called home, and the need to preserve the solitude its geography fostered. Despite Coenties Slip’s obscurity, the entire history of Manhattan was inscribed into its cobblestones—one of the first streets and central markets of the new colony, built by enslaved people, with revolutionary meetings at the tavern just down Pearl Street; named by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and site of the boom and bust of the city’s maritime industry; and, in the artists’s own time, a development battleground for Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The Slip’s history is entwined with that of the artists and their art—eclectic and varied work that was made from the wreckage of the city’s many former lives. An ambitious and singular account of a time, a place, and a group of extraordinary people, The Slip investigates the importance of community, and makes an argument for how we are shaped by it, and how it in turns shapes our work. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.” In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable. Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Mughal brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

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 first Czech films by Jan Kríženecký challenge what we think we know about film materials, histories, and spectatorship. These early film objects are defined and deformed by scratches, stains, tears, and shakes that Anger takes seriously as part of an "accidental aesthetics" which reveals the creative potential of material traces and processes — beyond their shaping through human intention. How does doing film theory from below complicate our understandings of creativity and agency? What forms of scholarly or artistic interventions into film materials does it prompt? What are the ethics of "touching" or manipulating archival objects for the sake of restoration, dissemination, or interpretation? Reflecting on both his written scholarship and videographic practice, Jiří offers thoughtful answers to these and other vexing questions for all who seek to reimagine film history and theory through the archive's preponderance of idiosyncratic forms, disruptive materials, and weird shapes. Towards a Film Theory from Below is out now with Bloomsbury Academic. Anger builds on the work of the book in A Tale of Two Desktops: The First Czech Films in Parallel Worlds, a new videographic essay coproduced with Veronika Hanáková and Jiří Žák. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film