New Books in Film

Shadows. Smoke. Dark alleys. Rain-slicked city streets. These are iconic elements of film noir visual style. Long after its 1940s heyday, noir hallmarks continue to appear in a variety of new media forms and styles. What has made the noir aesthetic at once enduring and adaptable? Sheri Chinen Biesen's Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style (Columbia UP, 2024) explores how the dark cinematic noir style has evolved across eras, from classic Hollywood to present-day streaming services. Examining both aesthetics and material production conditions, she demonstrates how technological and industrial changes have influenced the imagery of film noir. Biesen considers the persistence of the noir legacy, discussing how neo-noirs reimagine iconic imagery and why noir style has become a touchstone in the streaming era. Drawing on a wealth of archival research, she provides insightful analyses of a wide range of works, from masterpieces directed by Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock to New Hollywood neo-noirs, the Coen brothers' revisionist films, and recent HBO and Netflix series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

n this special Star Trek Day episode on the New Books Network, hosted by Dessy Vassileva from Vernon Press, we celebrate over 55 years of Star Trek with a deep dive into the book Star Trek: Essays Exploring the Final Frontier (Vernon Press, 2023). Co-editors Emily Strand and Amy H. Sturgis join the discussion to explore how Star Trek has shaped science fiction and contributed to broader academic and cultural conversations around speculative fiction.The anthology, unlike many works that focus on specific parts of the franchise or narrow perspectives, offers a multidisciplinary look at Star Trek, with contributions from scholars across disciplines. From the franchise’s 1966 debut to its latest incarnations, the book covers its influence on fandom, its philosophical and societal implications, and its exploration of contemporary issues such as post-humanism and conspiracy theories in Voyager. The co-editors emphasize Star Trek’s unique ability to address diverse topics and inspire action, both in academic circles and fan communities.The origins of the book trace back to an invitation from Vernon Press, when Emily approached Amy for a collaboration that eventually resulted in two separate volumes—one on Star Wars and one on Star Trek. Both books have garnered significant academic interest, and the co-editors aimed to create works accessible to scholars, students, and fans alike.In this episode, Amy and Emily also reflect on their personal journeys into science fiction, from Amy’s early exposure to Star Trek through her family, to Emily’s adult discovery of the franchise after a passion for speculative fiction ignited by Harry Potter. Their conversation highlights Star Trek’s ability to continue resonating with global audiences, addressing issues of diversity, social justice, and human potential in an ever-evolving narrative universe.Listeners interested in the sister volume on Star Wars can check out the related podcast episode here: Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away.Vernon Press – Bridging Scholarly Ideas and Global Readership Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit, 1940–1960 (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers a new history of the partition. Based on previously unexamined archives and rare films, it investigates key questions around film production, partition and the provenance of the nation in South Asia: How did partition transform the dynamic and transcultural film industry of undivided India? What has been the relationship between Pakistani and Indian Cinema? Could the cinematic rendition of Pakistan have preceded its territorial realisation? Focussing on the unravelling of artistic and economic ties between two formerly intimate film cities of colonial India, Bombay and Lahore, this book follows their transition into the nationally discrete production centres of independent India and Pakistan. Pursuing inflections, migrations and shifts across national lines, Evacuee Cinema explains how filmmaking interpreted national danger and examines the expulsion and rehabilitation that went into the making of ‘Indian’ and ‘Pakistani’ cinema.Dr Salma Siddique is research faculty at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, specializing in South Asian popular cinema, Islamicate screen cultures and immigrant media. Her research has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Third Text, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is a core editor at BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, published by Sage.Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore. Her interdisciplinary academic interests lie at the intersection of social media and internet studies, platforms and film studies, disability studies, production cultures, affect studies, creative media industries and cultural studies. She can be reached at here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

From television to travel bans, geopolitics to popular dance, The Subject of Revolution: Between Political and Popular Culture in Cuba (UNC Press, 2024) explores how knowledge about the 1959 Cuban Revolution was produced and how the Revolution in turn shaped new worldviews. Drawing on sources from over twenty archives as well as film, music, theater, and material culture, this book traces the consolidation of the Revolution over two decades in the interface between political and popular culture. The "subject of Revolution," it proposes, should be understood as the evolving synthesis of the imaginaries constructed by its many "subjects," including revolutionary leaders, activists, academics, and ordinary people within and beyond the island's borders. The book reopens some of the questions that have long animated debates about Cuba, from the relationship between populace and leadership to the archive and its limits, while foregrounding the construction of popular understandings. It argues that the politicization of everyday life was an inescapable effect of the revolutionary process, as well as the catalyst for new ways of knowing and being.Jennifer Lambe is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Katie Coldiron is the Outreach Program Manager for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and PhD student in History at Florida International University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

It is commonly proposed that since the mid-2000s, the slasher subgenre has been dominated by unoriginal remakes of "classics". Consequently, most original slasher films have been ignored by academics (and critics), leaving the field with a limited understanding of this highly popular subgenre. The Metamodern Slasher Film (Edinburgh UP, 2024) corrects that mischaracterisation by analysing contemporary slasher films that sincerely attempt to innovate within the subgenre. I argue that these films reflect broader cultural turns towards sincerity, optimism in the face of crisis, and an emphasis on felt experience that are indicative of a metamodern sensibility. This is the first book to use metamodernism to analyse film in a sustained way, and the first academic work to use metamodernism to examine horror. The Metamodern Slasher offers readers new ways to understand the slasher film, the horror genre, and also the cultural moment we find ourselves in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

If L. A. Confidential (1997) were two degrees campier, it would seem like Dick Tracy–but Curtis Hanson made sure to capture the spirit of James Ellroy’s novel while making its labyrinth plot understandable to viewers. Join us for a conversation about how the film examines the need for heroes yet seems to only offer them in a way to which the movies have made us accustomed. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but how much sunlight do we really want illuminating the institutions that hold society together? Do we want to live in Chinatown or on the set of Badge of Honor?If you haven’t read James Ellroy’s novel, you can find it here, as well as Steven Powell’s new biography of James Ellroy, Love Me Fierce in Danger. You can also listen to Dan’s interview with Steven Powell here on the New Books Network, as well as a conversation between Dan and Steven about L. A. Confidential on the page and screen.Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In Batman and The Joker: Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture (Routledge, 2020), Chris Richardson presents a cultural analysis of the ways gender, identity, and sexuality are negotiated in the rivalry of Batman and The Joker. Richardson's queer reading of the text provides new understandings of Batman and The Joker and the transformations of the Gotham Universe throughout its 80-year existence. In particular, Richardson investigates how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations of this influential and popular rivalry. Fans of Batman and The Joker will find this work engaging and applicable across a range of scholarly fields and popular interests. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) are collectively known as “The Man with No Name” trilogy and are often thought of as one long movie about the hero’s adventures, much like we think of the original three installments of Indiana Jones. Quentin Tarantino has called the third film the most well-directed film ever made, but Mike contends that For a Few Dollars More is superior to the other two. Join us for a conversation about this most dreamlike of Westerns that operates like a buddy-cop movie and reminds us the question posed by classicists, “Could Achilles beat Odysseus in a fight?” In other words, who would be more afraid of angering: Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef?If you’re interested in learning more about Leone’s work, you might want to read Alireza Vahdani’s The Hero and the Grave: The Theme of Death in the Films of John Ford, Akira Kurosawa and Sergio Leone.Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Accounting for the unique characteristics of Taiwan’s cinema from 2008 to 2020, Mapping Taiwanese Cinema, 2008-2020: Environments, Poetics, Practice (Edinburgh UP, 2024) examines how filmmakers have depicted and imagined the island’s diverse environments. Drawing on cinema, cartography, and cultural studies, Christopher Brown argues that by refocusing attention on how films are shaped through a process of construction, the tradition of film poetics enables us to think about Taiwanese cinema differently: as a form of mapping. Wide-ranging in scope and drawing on original interviews with contemporary filmmakers, the analysis appraises case studies including works of popular entertainment, genre cinema such as comedies and horror, films about indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ cinema, and arthouse work. By asking what it means to map an environment onscreen, the book offers new insights into a critically neglected, yet creatively dynamic, period in Taiwan’s film history.Christopher Brown is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Filmmaking at the University of Sussex. He has written and directed several short films including “Remission” (2015), “Soap” (2015), and “Coccolith" (2018). As a researcher, Chris has written on contemporary Taiwanese film, practice-based research, and American cinema. His research has appeared in journals such as the Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Asian Cinema, Film Criticism, Film International, Performance Matters, Bright Lights Film Journal, Media Practice & Education, East Asian Journal of Popular Culture, and Senses of Cinema.Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944) is more Hollywood than Hemingway–something for which we should all be grateful. The film is a wonderful example–perhaps the best–of onscreen chemistry and remains wildly entertaining even aside from the onscreen courtship of Bogart and Bacall. Join us as we talk about banter as a tool of seduction, the ways in which films let us “borrow the nature” of their actors, how To Have and Have Not feels like Casablanca II, and if Howard Hawks has an odd obsession with Hoagy Carmichael.In this episode, Dan mentions William J. Mann’s recent book Bogie and Bacall, a terrific dual biography of the stars. You can hear Dan’s interview of the author here. And if you don’t believe that the source material for the film is as bad as we say it is, you can find Hemingway’s novel here.Follow us on X and Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Also check out Dan’s new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film