New Books in Film

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” So said W. H. Auden and so we see demonstrated in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), which boldly employs every convention of the horror film in order to achieve a stunning, authentic portrait of a disturbing mind at work. But Mark is no ordinary slasher: he’s an artist who is also a perfectionist and whose compulsion to destroy is like the compulsion to create. As Mark gives his all for the sake of his art, so did Michael Powell, whose reputation never recovered from the scandal of this film. It was released in the same year as Psycho, which it resembles, yet the two audiences across the Atlantic had very different reactions to their homegrown killers. The University Press of Mississippi offers an excellent series of collected interviews. Here’s their volume on Michael Powell. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find our hundreds of episodes here on the New Books Network or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we react to Andor Season 2, episodes 1-3. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the motives and aims of the rebellion and the Empire. Both sides have major coordination problems in these episodes, although the causes are very different. We explain and analyze the recurrent problems of authoritarian control and rebellion against it, and the way Andor comments upon them. We see a major theme of these three episodes as “the personal is political,” as micro motives are tied to macro causes on all sides. We also explore the dynamics of misinformation, double-talk, and masks worn by Dedra, Mon Mothma, Luthen Rael, and Cassian. We argue that Cassian is perhaps the most confident and action-oriented character at this point in the show, as he is able to operate out in the open as a mature and competent rebel leader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

On February 29, 1940, African American actor Hattie McDaniel became the first person of color, and the first Black woman, to win an Academy Award. The moment marked the beginning of Hollywood's reluctant move toward diversity and inclusion. Since then, minorities and women have struggled to attain Academy Awards recognition within a system designed to discriminate against them. In Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Inclusion at the Oscars (Octupus Publishing, 2025) author Ben Arogundade interweaves the experiences of Black actors and filmmakers with those of Asians, Latinos, South Asians, Indigenous peoples, and women throughout the decades, charting their progression to the Oscars podium, galvanized by defiant boycotts, civil rights protests, and social media activism. Through lenses of history, cinephelia, and social justice, Hollywood Blackout offers a backstage view for those seeking the real story of Hollywood, the Oscars, and the talents who fought to make change.You can find and follow Ben at hollywoodblackout.com or arogundade.com.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In 1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted our Bizarre Times (2025, University of Kansas Press) journalist Ross Benes examines low culture in the late 1990s. From pro wrestling and Pokémon to Vince McMahon and Jerry Springer, Benes reveals its profound impact and how it continues to affect our culture and society today. The year 1999 was a high-water mark for popular culture. According to one measure, it was the "best movie year ever." But as Benes shows, the end of the '90s was also a banner year for low culture. This was the heyday of Jerry Springer, Jenna Jameson, and Vince McMahon, among many others. Low culture had come into its own and was poised for world domination. The reverberations of this takeover continue to shape American society. During its New Year's Eve countdown, MTV entered 1999 with Limp Bizkit covering Prince's famous anthem to the new year. The highlights of the lowlights continued when WCW and WWE drew 35 million American viewers each week with sex appeal and stories about insurrections. Insane Clown Posse emerged from the underground with a Woodstock set and platinum records about magic and murder. Later that year, Dance Dance Revolution debuted in North America and Grand Theft Auto emerged as a major video game franchise. Beanie Babies and Pokemon so thoroughly seized the wallets and imagination of collectors that they created speculative investment bubbles that anticipated the faddish obsession over nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The trashy talk show Jerry Springer became daytime TV's most-watched program and grew so mainstream that Austin Powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Wayans Bros., The Simpsons, and The X-Files incorporated Springer into their own plots during the late '90s. Donald Trump even explored a potential presidential nomination with the Reform Party in 1999 and wanted his running mate to be Oprah Winfrey, whose own talk show would make Dr. Oz a household name. Among Springer's many guests were porn stars who, at the end of the millennium, were pursuing sex records in a bid for stardom as the pornography industry exploded, aided by sex scandals, new technology, and the drug Viagra, which marked its first full year on the US market in 1999. According to Benes, there are many lessons to learn from the year that low culture conquered the world. Talk shows and reality TV foreshadowed the way political movements grab power by capturing our attention. Pro wrestling mastered the art of "kayfabe"--the agreement to treat something as real and genuine when it is not--before it spread throughout American society, as political contests, corporate public relations campaigns, and nonprofit fundraising schemes have become their own wrestling matches that require a suspension of disbelief. Beanie Babies and Pokémon demonstrate capitalism's resiliency as well as its vulnerabilities. Legal and technological victories obtained by early internet pornographers show how the things people are ashamed of have the ability to influence the world. Insane Clown Posse's creation of loyal Juggalos illustrates the way religious and political leaders are able to generate faithful followers by selling themselves as persecuted outsiders. And the controversy over video game violence reveals how every generation finds new scapegoats. 1999 is not just a nostalgic look at the past. It is also a window into our contentious present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Video (television, film, the moving image generally) is today’s most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image: A User's Manual (MIT Press, 2025) is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, MIT’s Peter Kaufman presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters. Kaufman describes video’s vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how best to produce video, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, ultimately, archive and preserve it. With detailed guidance on producing and deploying video and sound for publication, finding and using archival video and sound, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing questions about citation, preservation, and storage—across the broadest spectrum of platforms, publications, disciplines, and formats—The Moving Image equips readers for the medium’s continued ascendance in education, publishing, and knowledge dissemination in the decades to come. And, modeled in part on Strunk and White’s classic, The Elements of Style, it’s also a highly enjoyable read.Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning. He is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world.Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In 1927, the Hollywood stars (and spouses), Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr stood outside their California home, arms raised in fascist salute. The photo’s caption, referencing the couple’s trip to Rome the previous year, informs fans that the couple “greet guests at their beach camp in true Italian style.” How did “America’s sweetheart” and her husband, a swashbuckler on and off screen, both patriots who had promoted Liberty bonds following the United States’ entry into World War I, come to normalize something like Italian Fascism in its first decade? How did the Italian-born divo, or star, of Hollywood’s silent cinema, Rudolph Valentino come to function as foil and counterpart to Benito Mussolini’s, the duce, in public opinion in American culture in the 1920s?Winner of the 2019 award for best book in film/media from the American Association for Italian Studies, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America (University of California Press, 2019) tells the story of the relationship between celebrity culture, charismatic leadership and national sovereignty as it plays out on both sides of the Atlantic from roughly 1917 to the end of 1933.Giorgio Bertellini asks how two racially othered foreigners, Valentino and Mussolini, became leading figures in America and how these two icons of chauvinist Latin masculinity became public opinion leaders in a nation undergoing a major democratic expansion in terms of gender, equality, social mobility, and political representation. In the post-WWI American climate of nativism, isolationism, consumerism, and the democratic expansion of civic rights and women’s suffrage, the divo and the duce became surprising paragons of both authoritarian male power as well as mass appeal. Bringing together star studies, screen studies, political science, Italian Studies, and American Studies Bertellini’s study teaches us to think in new ways about cinema, political authority, masculinity, and race in Italian cinema and beyond. Meticulously archived, the author pays especial attention to the mediators between screens and the polity, a vast cast of players including journalists, photographers, ambassadors and other functionaries of state, advertisers, sponsors, and publicity agents, all of whom, on concert, work to promote the “ballyhoo” of the day.Thanks to the efforts of TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries, The Divo and the Duce: Promoting Film Stardom and the Political Leadership in 1920s America is available free in an open access edition.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In 2018, the United States Supreme Court opened the floodgates for states to legalize betting on sports. Eager for revenue, almost forty states have done so. The result is the explosive growth of an industry dominated by companies like FanDuel and DraftKings. One out of every five American adults gambled on sports in 2023, amounting to $121 billion, more than they spent on movies and video games combined.The rise of online sports gambling—the immediacy of betting with your phone, the ability of the companies to target users, the dynamic pricing and offers based on how good or bad of a gambler you are—has produced a public health crisis marked by addiction and far too many people, particularly young men, gambling more than they can afford to lose. Under intense lobbying from the gaming industry, states have created a system built around profit for sportsbooks, not the well-being of players.In Losing Big: America's Dangerous Sports Gambling Boom (Columbia Global Reports, 2025), historian Jonathan D. Cohen lays out the astonishing emergence of online sports gambling, from sportsbook executives drafting legislation to an addicted gambler confessing their $300,000 losses. Sports gambling is here to stay, and the stakes could not be higher. Losing Big explains how this brewing crisis came to be, and how it can be addressed before new generations get hooked.Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural productions, as demonstrated by Misty Copeland’s ascension in American Ballet Theatre. Clout refers to Black fans’ realization of their own consumer spending power as an agent for industrial change, reducing the precarity of Blackness within historically white cultural apparatuses and facilitating the production of Black blockbusters like 2018’s Black Panther. Canon entails a communal fannish practice of sharing media objects, like the 1978 film The Wiz, which lead them to take on meanings outside of their original context. Comfort describes the nostalgic and sentimental affects associated with beloved fan objects such as the television show, Golden Girls, connected to notions of Black joy and signaling moments wherein Black people can just be themselves.Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation. Martin highlights the nuanced ways Black fans interact with media representations, suggesting class, clout, canon, and comfort are universal to the study of all fandoms. Yet, for all the ways these fandoms are similar and reciprocal, Black fandoms are also their own set of practices, demanding their own study.Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Confessional Video Art and Subjectivity Private Experiences in Public Spaces (Bloomsbury, 2025) examines the development of the confessional subject in video art and demonstrates how it can provide a vital platform for navigating the politics of self, subjectivity, and resistance in society. In doing so, it reframes video art – the most ubiquitous and yet most understudied art form of recent decades – as an urgent socio-political tool that is increasingly popular among contemporary artists as a means of exploring a broad range of social issues, from politics and identity, to the body and technologies of self-representation.Author Jaye Early brings together theory and practice to look afresh at contemporary video art through a Foucauldian lens. Early also brings the analysis of video art up to date by showing how social media and digital self representation has informed and further politicized time-based art practices.Dr. Jaye Early is Lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and a practicing video artist.The episode is hosted by Ailin Zhou, PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California - Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Megan Hunt joins us to talk about her recent book, Southern By the Grace of God, which was published in 2024 by the University of Georgia Press.Lke the media coverage of the civil rights era itself, Hollywood dramas have reinforced regional stereotypes of race, class, and gender to cleanse and redeem the wider nation from the implications of systemic racism. As Southern by the Grace of God reveals, however, Hollywood manipulates southern religion (in particular) to further enhance this pattern of difference and regional exceptionalism, consistently displacing broader American racism through a representation of the poor white southerner who is as religious as he (and it is always a he) is racist. By foregrounding the role of religion in these characterizations, Megan Hunt illuminates the pernicious intersections between Hollywood and southern exceptionalism, a long-standing U.S. nationalist discourse that has assigned racial problems to the errant South alone, enabling white supremacy to not only endure but reproduce throughout the nation. Southern by the Grace of God examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South. Hunt argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used--with varying degrees of sophistication--to define the region's presumed exceptionalism for regional, national, and international audiences. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of more than twenty Hollywood films that engage with the civil rights movement and/or its legacy, this book provides detailed case studies of films that use southern religiosity to negotiate American anxieties around race, class, and gender. Religion, Hunt contends, is an integral trope of the South in popular culture and especially crucial to the divisions essential to Hollywood storytelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film