New Books in Film

Discover the real-life history that inspired Game of Thrones and Shakespeare’s history plays, and learn the distinctive ways in which Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin each transform history into art Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

From Marion Davies's humble days in Brooklyn to her rise to fame alongside press baron William Randolph Hearst, the public life story of the film star plays like a modern fairy tale shaped by gossip columnists, fan magazines, biopics, and documentaries. Yet the real Marion Davies remained largely hidden from view, as she was wary of interviews and trusted few with her true life story. In Captain of Her Soul: The Life of Marion Davies (U California Press, 2022), Lara Gabrielle pulls back layers of myth to show a complex and fiercely independent woman, ahead of her time, who carved her own path.Through meticulous research, unprecedented access to archives around the world, and interviews with those who knew Davies, Captain of Her Soul counters the public story. This book reveals a woman who navigated disability and social stigma to rise to the top of a young Hollywood dominated by powerful men. Davies took charge of her own career, negotiating with studio heads and establishing herself as a top-tier comedienne, but her proudest achievement was her philanthropy and advocacy for children. This biography brings Davies out of the shadows cast by the Hearst legacy, shedding light on a dynamic woman who lived life on her own terms and declared that she was "the captain of her soul."Lara Gabrielle is a film writer and researcher whose work on Marion Davies has been featured in The Missouri Review, The Wall Street Journal, and on PBS’s American Experience. She has spoken about Davies at film festivals and retrospectives worldwide and has served as a consultant on her life and legacy for books, dissertations, and film projects. Gabrielle’s biography of Davies, Captain of Her Soul, is included in Alta Journal’s Top 16 Books to read this September. She lives in Oakland, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Let’s talk about zombies! Scholars Patricia Saldarriaga and Emy Manini have produced an engaging and important analysis of the idea of zombies, and how and why these particular monsters are omnipresent in American popular culture, especially these days. Zombies both represent and present ideas about the world in which we live, and Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies (Rutgers UP, 2022) examines these connections, helping us consider our relationship to this vision of the “undead” and why these monsters are indigenous to the Americas.Zombies reflect the colonial experience in the Americas, not only those who settled in both North and South America, but also in the approach taken to labor and those who labored. Saldarriaga and Manini examine the zombie as a representation of chattel slavery, which used the human body as a commodity like the other exploited resources in “the new world.” Those who were enslaved were essentially dead labor, according to Marxian conceptions, and the continued exploitation and disposability of workers continues this idea of the use of the undead in the modern world. Zombies as a concept can be seen within neoliberalism as corpses made into commodities, just as other commodities are valued or devalued based on supply and demand.Another avenue of exploration is how zombies live in an ablest world where they have very limited abilities—thus making us consider our own toggling between ableism and disability. In a sense, zombies push on the idea that disability itself is the norm. They represent the way that bodies should not look, with all the insides missing, or on the outside. They also reproduce in rather unique ways—not in the biologically expected way, but in the consumption of others to create more zombies. Thus, in a world with zombies, the patriarchal form of reproduction is replaced, erasing binary sex roles along the way. While we usually consider zombies as horror staples, they are, in fact, science fiction entities, since they are really a kind of futurity.Infected Empires: Decolonizing Zombies explores these myriad ways that zombies are symbolic of so much of what surrounds us in our everyday lives, but also what scares us. Zombies, if we think of them as a future, cause us a great deal of anxiety, since they demonstrate a post-human existence. Zombies regularly show us how we are literally eating ourselves. With the existential threat of global climate change, and the antagonism between humans and the nature world, zombies as metaphor and popular culture trope highlight our fears about the future as well as the long shadow of a colonial and enslaving past. Saldarriaga and Manini systematically explore the many dimensions of why zombies are so entrenched in our imaginaries and what these monsters are teaching us about ourselves and our fears and anxieties.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (University Press of Kansas, 2022), as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

An exploration of the intersection of feminism, human rights, and memory, Ethical Encounters: Transnational Feminism, Human Rights, and War Cinema in Bangladesh (Temple University Press, 2022) examines contemporary, woman-centered Muktijuddho cinema--features and documentaries that focus on the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Elora Chowdhury shows how these films imagine, disrupt, and reinscribe a gendered nationalist landscape of trauma, freedom, and justice. She analyzes the Bangladeshi feminist films Meherjaan, Guerilla, and Itihaash Konna, as well as socially engaged films by activist-filmmakers including Rising Silence, Bish Kanta, Jonmo Shathi, and Shadhinota, to show how war films of Bangladesh can conjure a global cinematic imagination for the advancement of human rights. Focusing on women-centric films, and steeped in Black and transnational feminist critiques, Chowdhury engages shared histories, experiences, and identities in the region to encourage transnational solidarity among women across borders. Ethical Encounters reveals how Bangladeshi national cinema can foster a much-needed dialogue among ordinary citizens who have grown up with the legacy of liberty and violence of nationalist and anti-colonial struggles.Dr. Elora Halim Chowdhury is a Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, College of Liberal Arts, at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, as well as an Affiliate Faculty of the Asian Studies Department; the Asian American Studies Program; the Cinema Studies Program; and the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance. She is also an Affiliated Researcher, Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights, and the Series Editor for the Dissident Feminisms Series at the University of Illinois Press.Dr. Rine Vieth is a researcher studying how the UK Immigration and Asylum tribunals consider claims of belief, how claims of religious belief are evidenced, and the role of faith communities in asylum-seeker support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

With her book Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World's Largest Movie Market (New Press, 2022), media scholar Ying Zhu explores the 100+ year relationship between what are now the world's two largest movie markets: China and the United States. Zhu is a Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University's Academy of Film, and the founder/chief editor of Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images. Hollywood in China (July 2022, The New Press) is her fourth book, and it offers a comprehensive chronology of the Hollywood-China relationship, with numerous specific case studies. In this podcast, Anthony Kao chats with Zhu about the book, and delves into matters like reactions to "China-humiliation films" during the 1911-1949 Republican Era, Madame Mao's penchant for Hollywood classics, and what the future might hold for relations between China and Hollywood. Some movie recommendations from Ying Zhu (learn more by listening until the end of this episode): From the 1990s: Zhang Yimou's To Live and Tian Zhuangzhuang's Blue Kite (discussed more in one of Ying's earlier books) From the 2000s: Li Yang's Blind Shaft (analyzed in one of Ying's articles) From the 2010s: Feng Xiaogang's I Am Not Madame Bovary (explored in Hollywood in China) Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

When Maya Phillips first saw the opening of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, she knew her life would change forever. She then spent her formative years loving not just the Star Wars saga but superhero cartoons, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Doctor Who. In Nerd: Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse (Atria Books, 2022), Phillips, a critic at large for the New York Times, presents an incisive essay collection that explores race, religion, sexuality, class, and gender through the lens of pop culture fandoms.Maya Phillips received her BFA in writing, literature, and publishing with a concentration in poetry from Emerson College and her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers.Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in humanities. Her research and writing interests include reading in popular culture, the public history of fiction writing, and women in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In this episode, Dr. Kenny Linden, an environmental and animal historian of Mongolia and Inner Asia, joins me to discuss the Disney+ Star Wars prequel series Andor and its real-world parallels to pastoralism and the treatment of pastoralists in Central and East Asia by state authorities. We talk about nomadism in the Star Wars universe, depictions of nomads in pop culture, and the planet Aldhani in Andor as a reflection of modern histories of pastoralism and nomad-state relations in Central and Inner Asia.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Chris Kempshall's The History and Politics of Star Wars: Death Stars and Democracy (Routledge, 2022) provides the first detailed and comprehensive examination of all the materials making up the Star Wars franchise relating to the portrayal and representation of real-world history and politics.Drawing on a variety of sources, including films, published interviews with directors and actors, novels, comics, and computer games, this volume explores the ways in which historical and contemporary events have been repurposed within Star Wars. It focuses on key themes such as fascism and the Galactic Empire, the failures of democracy, the portrayal of warfare, the morality of the Jedi, and the representations of sex, gender, and race. Through these themes, this study highlights the impacts of the fall of the Soviet Union, the War on Terror, and the failures of the United Nations upon the ‘galaxy far, far away’. By analysing and understanding these events and their portrayal within Star Wars, it shows how the most popular media franchise in existence aims to speak about wider contemporary events and issues.If you are interested in the purchase of the book, you may use the following code for a 25% discount: HPSW25.Roberto Mazza is visiting professor at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In 1966 Stanley Kubrick told a friend that he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” A decade later Stephen King’s The Shining landed on the director’s desk, and a visual masterpiece was born. J. W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich's book Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (Taschen, 2023) is the definitive compendium of the film that transformed the horror genre features hundreds of never-before-seen photographs, rare production ephemera from the Kubrick Archive, and extensive new interviews with the cast and crew.Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Dr. Tim Harte's Faster, Higher, Stronger, Comrades!: Sports, Art, and Ideology in Late Russian and Early Soviet Culture (U Wisconsin Press, 2020) looks at sport as artistic subject matter, in late Imperial and early Soviet Russia. In sport, artists found inspiration that could be applied both to improvement of the self and to social progress as artists defined it. In the long run, the constraints of the Socialist Realist aesthetic came to constrain the creative freedom of artists, but until the late 1920's, sport served as a focus of genuine artistic interest, for its own sake and for its ability to provide a reservoir of metaphors that artists could use to make broader, more ideological commentary.Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film