First Reformed

Amrita Ghosh's book Kashmir's Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts (Lexington Books, 2023) is an interdisciplinary book that studies literary texts, film, photography, and art to understand the different forms of violence represented in the cultural productions from and on Kashmir. The author argues that selected texts present how the long conflict in the postcolonial nation-state transforms the Kashmiri body, the space, setting, the relationship between the subject and its natural world under different forms of violence. Each chapter showcases a form of representational and textual violence that emphasizes the shifts from biopolitical to necropolitical violence and also includes specific forms of violence such as epicolonialism, horrorism, and hauntings in Kashmir’s landscape. The book also delves into how the concepts of agency, resistance, and resilience in these different texts necessitate new poetics of looking at Kashmir. The conflicted space of Kashmir has always been located within the politics of representation and this book investigates a problem in taxonomy within postcolonial discourses to articulate unique forms of violence in such a conflicted space. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

If you’ve seen Hearts of Darkness, you can better appreciate what Coppola endured while making Apocalypse Now; if you’ve seen River of Dreams, you can watch in wonder as Herzog talks about the shooting Fitzcaraldo and really moving that boat through the jungle. American Movie (1999) aims to do the same thing for Mark Borchardt’s low-budget independent horror film Coven. How you respond to American Movie depends on how you respond to Borchardt: is he simply a pretentious jerk who thinks he’s the next George A. Romero? Or is he what Thomas Gray would call “some mute inglorious Milton,” whose work deserves a wider audience? In this episode, the guys mention the work of English poet Thomas Gray, whose famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is applied to Mark Borchardt. 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 the new Substack site, Pages and Frames, for more film-related material. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

This fifth edition of Film, Form, and Culture (Routledge, 2024) offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film. With extensive analysis of films past and present, this textbook explores how films are constructed from part to whole: from the smallest unit of the shot to the way shots are edited together to create narrative. Robert P. Kolker and Marsha Gordon demystify the technical aspects of filmmaking and demonstrate how fiction and nonfiction films engage with culture. Over 265 images provide a visual index to the films and issues being discussed. This new edition includes: an expanded examination of digital filmmaking and distribution in the age of streaming; attention to superhero films throughout; a significantly longer chapter on global cinema with new or enlarged sections on a variety of national cinemas (including cinema from Nigeria, Senegal, Burkina Faso, South Korea, Japan, India, Belgium, and Iran); new or expanded discussions of directors, including Alice Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber, Oscar Micheaux, Agnès Varda, Spike Lee, Julie Dash, Jafar Panahi, Ava DuVernay, Jane Campion, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and Penny Lane; and new, in-depth explorations of films, including Within Our Gates (1919), Black Girl (1966), Creed (2015), Moonlight (2016), Wonder Woman (2017), Get Out (2017), Black Panther (2018), Parasite (2019), Da 5 Bloods (2020), The French Dispatch (2021), The Power of the Dog (2021), RRR (2022), and Tár (2022). Robert P. Kolker is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA. He is the author/editor of several books on film including The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies (2008), A Cinema of Loneliness, 4th edition (2011), The Cultures of American Film (2014), The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema (2016), Politics Goes to the Movies (2018), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (2019), and, with Nathan Abrams, Kubrick: An Odyssey (2024). Marsha Gordon is Professor and Director of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, USA. She is the author of Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (2023), Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (2017), and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (2008), and co-editor of Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (2019) and Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (2012). Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (2016), he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found here on the New Books Network and on X. His work also appears on Pages and Frames. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In a recent interview, Paul Schrader said he was lucky with Taxi Driver because he “caught the zeitgeist.” He may have done so again with First Reformed (2017), a film that reflects the age of extremism in which we now live. Join us for a long conversation about a person who might be called the “green Travis Bickle” and who trades in one religion for another, only to find that he can’t give his new set of beliefs as much as he thought he could. Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) is an admirer of Thomas Merton; his renown The Seven Story Mountain (1948) tells the story of his entering Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky. Follow us on X or Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

'Star Wars' is a global phenomenon that in 2022 celebrated its 45th year of transmedia storytelling, and it has never been more successful than it is today. More 'Star Wars' works than ever are currently available or in simultaneous development, including live-action and animated series, novels, comics, and merchandise, as well as the feature films for which the franchise is best known. 'Star Wars' fandom is worldwide, time-tested, and growing; academic interest in the franchise, both inside and outside of the classroom, is high. This accessible and multidisciplinary anthology covers topics across the full history of the franchise. With a range of essays by authors whose disciplines run from culture and religious studies to film, feminism, and philology, Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away (Vernon Press, 2023) speaks to academics in the field, students in the classroom, and anyone looking to broaden their understanding and deepen their appreciation for 'Star Wars'. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

While American television has long relied on a strategic foregrounding of feminist politics to promote certain programming's cultural value, Woman Up: Invoking Feminism in Quality Television (Wayne State University Press, 2022) by Dr. Julia Havas is the first sustained critical analysis of the twenty-first-century resurgence of this tradition. In Woman Up, Dr. Havas’ central argument is that postmillennial "feminist quality television" springs from a rhetorical subversion of the (much-debated) masculine-coded "quality television" culture on the one hand and the dominance of postfeminist popular culture on the other. Postmillennial quality television culture promotes the idea of aesthetic-generic hierarchies among different types of scripted programming. Its development has facilitated evaluative academic analyses of television texts based on aesthetic merit, producing a corpus of scholarship devoted to pinpointing where value resides in shows considered worthy of discussion. Other strands of television scholarship have criticised this approach for sidestepping the gendered and classed processes of canonization informing the phenomenon. Woman Up intervenes in this debate by reevaluating such approaches and insisting that rather than further fostering or critiquing already prominent processes of canonization, there is a need to interrogate the cultural forces underlying them. Via detailed analyses of four TV programs emerging in the early period of the "feminist quality TV" trend—30 Rock (2006–13), Parks and Recreation (2009–15), The Good Wife (2009–16), and Orange Is the New Black (2013–19)—Woman Up demonstrates that such series mediate their cultural significance by combining formal aesthetic exceptionalism and a politicised rhetoric around a "problematic" postfeminism, thus linking ideals of political and aesthetic value. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Hobson’s Choice (1954) is the perfect example of a very specific genre: the capitalist romance. Filled with a Dickensian love of humanity and featuring one of Charles Laughton’s best performances, it’s a perfect film about a deeply complicated topic: what makes the world go round and how individual family units come together, function, and roll on. Dan compares it to The Honeymooners; Mike compares it to 2001. Give it a listen on your way to Moonraker’s! If you love the film, you’ll want to read the original play by Harold Brighouse, subtitled “A Lancashire Comedy in Four Acts.” Follow us on X or Letterboxd–and let us know what you’d like us to watch! Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Herman J. (1897–1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture’s only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture. In The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics (University of Mississippi Press, 2019), Sydney Stern draws on interviews, letters, diaries, and other documents still in private hands to provide a uniquely intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of the lives, loves, work, and relationship between these complex men. The book is part of the Hollywood Legends Series of the University of Mississippi Press. Despite triumphs as diverse as Monkey Business and Cleopatra, and Pride of the Yankees and Guys and Dolls, the witty, intellectual brothers spent their Hollywood years deeply discontented and yearning for what they did not have—a career in New York theater. Herman, formerly an Algonquin Round Table habitué, New York Times and New Yorker theater critic, and playwright-collaborator with George S. Kaufman, never reconciled himself to screenwriting. He gambled away his prodigious earnings, was fired from all the major studios, and drank himself to death at fifty-five. While Herman drifted downward, Joe rose to become a critical and financial success as a writer, producer, and director, though his constant philandering with prominent stars like Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Gene Tierney distressed his emotionally fragile wife who eventually committed suicide. He wrecked his own health using uppers and downers in order to direct Cleopatra by day and finish writing it at night, only to be very publicly fired by Darryl F. Zanuck, an experience from which Joe never fully recovered. Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

The astonishing behind-the-scenes story of the 1963 film Cleopatra and how it changed the face of Hollywood makes it one of the most fabled films of all time.  Starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the film’s making soon became a cautionary tale, for the lavish extravagance of production on Cleopatra all but bankrupted 20th Century Fox and almost singlehandedly set in motion the decline of the major Hollywood movie studios. By the time the film was finally released, 20th Century Fox and the world watched as it died at the box office. Cleopatra and the Undoing of Hollywood: How One Film Almost Sunk the Studios (History Press, 2023) is an epic tale of love and lust, gossip, money, sex, movie-star madness, studio politics, and the birth of paparazzi journalism. Within the saga of Cleopatra lies the end of the era of Hollywood's studio system, the seeds of the Swinging Sixties, and the stuff of timeless movie legend. Patrick Humphries has been a writer and journalist for over forty years and has published numerous books on musical artists such as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Pink Floyd, and Bruce Springsteen. Latoya Johnson is an editor, writer, and bibliophile with a master's in Humanities. Her research and writing delve into various aspects of popular culture. She is particularly interested in exploring the public history of women's fiction and the portrayal of femme characters in Greco-Roman mythology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. John Powers examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture. By reasserting the physicality of the body in making time-lapse and kinesthetic sequences with the Bolex, filmmakers conversed with other art forms and integrated broader spheres of humanistic and scientific inquiry into their artistic process. Drawing from the photographic qualities of stocks such as Tri-X and Kodachrome, they discovered pliant metaphors that allowed them to connect their artistic practice to metaphysics, spiritualism, and Hollywood excess. By framing film labs as mystical or adversarial, they cultivated an oppositionality that valorized control over the artistic process. And by using the optical printer as a tool for excavating latent meaning out of found footage, they posited the reworking of images as fundamental to the exploration of personal and cultural identity. Providing a wealth of new detail about the making of canonised avant-garde classics by such luminaries as Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, and Stan Brakhage, as well as rediscovering works from overlooked artists such as Chick Strand, Amy Halpern, and Gunvor Nelson, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film