New Books in Film

Although not all that well known to English-speaking audiences, cultural critic and Peking University professor Jinhua Dai’s incisive commentaries and critiques of contemporary Chinese life have elevated her to something akin to ‘rock star’ status in China itself. As Lisa Rofel discusses in this podcast, and in her introduction to After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History (Duke University Press, 2018), Dai interrogates the truly historic events unfolding in today’s China to ask what these mean for history itself. Vital analyses of the politics of memory and gender also pervade this collection of expertly translated essays.In particular Dai is interested in the post-Cold War entry of China into a Euro-American neoliberal world order and what this means for how the country sees its historical course. How are recent and more distant pasts invoked or ignored in conversations about this? What do erasures of past experience mean for the possibility of imagining alternative futures, as seemed possible in the twentieth century? In a searing analysis of recent Chinese films in their wider socio-political context, Dai critiques present-day historical myopias and the consequent marginalisation of those most buffeted by the storms of neoliberal capital: active female protagonists and the erstwhile socialist ‘masses’. Especially urgent in this year of key anniversaries for China, this work has much wider implications for understanding our entire global present, and for perceiving the ominous reality that “China must be a China of the future, or there will be no future” (p. 22).Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In 2012 George Lucas shocked the entertainment world by selling the Star Wars franchise, along with Lucasfilm, to Disney. This is the story of how, over the next five years, Star Wars went from near-certain extinction to the release of a new movie trilogy, two stand-alone films, and two animated series. In Star Wars after Lucas: A Critical Guide to the Future of the Galaxy(University of Minnesota Press, 2019), Dan Golding examines the current status of Star Wars, as well as the similarities and differences between the old and the new. His book is a great mix of both academic and popular that will give readers a useful sense of Lucas’ creation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

We all have images that we find unwatchable, whether for ethical, political, or sensory and affective reasons. Yet what does it mean to proclaim something “unwatchable”: disturbing, revolting, poor, tedious, or literally inaccessible? With over 50 original essays by leading scholars, artists, critics, and curators, this is the first book to trace the “unwatchable” across our contemporary media environment, in which viewers encounter difficult content on various screens and platforms. Edited by Nicholas Baer of the University of Chicago, Maggie Hennefeld of the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen, both of Carelton University, Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019) is interesting on both an academic and popular level. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

The U.S. Constitution is often depicted in popular films, teaching lessons about what this founding document means and what it requires. The United States Constitution in Film: Part of Our National Culture (Lexington Books, 2018) examines several different areas of the Constitution to illuminate how films in each area have tried to engage the document and teach the viewer something about it. Beginning with the first three articles, followed by reviews of various amendments, Eric T. Kasper and Quentin D. Vieregge describe how filmmakers deal with these legal issues, as well as their success or failure in properly illustrate the actual constitutional concepts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Michael Benson talks about the making of 2001, a movie inspired by the collaboration of American director Stanley Kubrick and British futurist Arthur C. Clark. Benson is a writer, artist, and film maker. He is the author of Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clark and The Making of a Masterpiece (Simon and Schuster, 2018).Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Audrey Hepburn was justly known for her long acting career, yet her early life is largely unknown. In his book, Robert Matzen describes how she lived during the World War II period in Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Based on many interviews and other primary sources, Robert shows how she was affected by the war. Listen in as we talk about his new book Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II (GoodKnight Books, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Racquel J. Gates’ new book, Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018), interrogates understandings of African-American representations on screen.  This book is an important analysis of the concepts of negative and positive representations, especially in regard to the narrow space that these binary classifications create. Gates takes on not only the concept of representation, but also the texts where the images are presented, leading the reader through a variety of popular culture venues. Double Negative presents a careful typology of negativity, with extensive and diverse examples of each distinct variation. This analysis also integrates texts that are often dismissed or undermined. Instead, Gates provides valuable and nuanced interpretations of genres, reclaiming popular culture artifacts that are often excluded from scholarly or critical analysis. Gates explores many of the less respectable images and presentations of African-Americans, considering not only the images themselves and the narratives in which they are presented, but also the historical context in which the popular culture artifacts are engaged and consumed. Double Negative also takes up a metanalysis of celebrity in context of representation, especially in the entwining of race and gender. This is a fascinating book, examining important political questions and understandings through popular culture texts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Most of the time, this podcast focuses on the products of those who create historical fiction—specifically, novels. But what goes into producing a work of historical fiction—especially in a dictatorship where the wrong choice, or even the right choice at the wrong moment, can send the unwitting author to the Gulag? And what if the creator is not an unknown toiling in the dark to produce manuscripts “for the desk drawer,” as the Soviet literati used to say, but the nation’s foremost filmmaker operating at the personal behest of Joseph Stalin? Such is the dilemma that faces Sergei Eisenstein in 1941, when he begins his unfinished trilogy Ivan the Terrible, an epic ordered by the Soviet government to glorify the Russian past and justify state terror.Often written off, especially in the West, as a toady to Stalin, Eisenstein—as Joan Neuberger nimbly shows in her new and fascinating study, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia (Cornell University Press, 2019)—approached his complicated and risky project with a mixture of enthusiasm and caution. Over the course of five years, despite complaints about budget overflows and production delays, through exile and war and shifts in the party line, personal conflicts and health problems, Eisenstein skillfully alternated between tactics of submission and defiance in support of his idiosyncratic but richly textured portrayal of a tortured autocrat whose childhood traumas led him to ever more extreme exercises of power, even as his excesses stripped him of friends and family, leaving him alone against the endless, unstoppable waves—of progress? of the future? of his own battered conscience? Only the viewer can decide.Part I won the Stalin Prize, the USSR’s highest honor, although not without controversy. Stalin personally banned Part II before release, and Eisenstein died with Part III unfinished. In this master work about a master filmmaker, Neuberger shines a light on all three. In doing so, she highlights the many decisions any author must make while balancing historical accuracy against dramatic potential and character motivation against a verifiable past. Fortunately, for most of us the stakes are nowhere near as high as they were for Sergei Eisenstein.C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contribute to this process? This podcast addresses this issue. We interview Professor Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick, whose book, The Good Drone: How Social Movements Democratize Surveillance (forthcoming with MIT Press) is undergoing a Massive Online Peer-Review (MOPR) process, where everyone can make comments on his manuscript. Additionally, his book will be Open Access (OA) since the date of publication. We discuss with him how do MOPR and OA work, how he managed to combine both of them and how these initiatives can contribute to the democratization of knowledge.You can participate in the MOPR process of The Good Drone through this link: https://thegooddrone.pubpub.org/Felipe G. Santos is a PhD candidate at the Central European University. His research is focused on how activists care for each other and how care practices within social movements mobilize and radicalize heavily aggrieved collectives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In the early days of film, female comedians appeared in films that included both strange activities and slapstick. In her new book Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018), Margaret Hennefeld, Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, reviews the role of these women, as well as how their appearances had a cultural and political effect, particularly in the feminist movement leading to universal suffrage. She illustrates how these films still have important meanings to modern day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film