New Books in Film

Feb 01 2025 746 ep. 55 mins 1.3k

New Books in Film Podcast artwork

Interviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books

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James Fenwick, "Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive" (Liverpool UP, 2024)

Feb 01 2025 36 mins

What can archives tell us about the film industry? In Archive Histories: An Archaeology of the Stanley Kubrick Archive (Liverpool UP, 2024), James Fenwick, a senior lecturer in cultural and creative industries at the University of Manchester examines the range of possibilities offered by The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of London. The book draws on the experience of be

A.I. is Spielberg & Kubrick’s Dark Twisted Fantasy

Jan 28 2025 84 mins

It’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Centering on David, an artificial child who is embraced and then abandoned by his adoptive human mother, the movie has the structure of a fairy tale and the sensibility of a horror film. We found the text to have significant things to sa

The Rainmaker

Jan 27 2025 36 mins

All of the nearly three hundred episodes we’ve done so far have been enthusiastic celebrations of artists whose work we admire so greatly that we had to invent a podcast to talk about it. But in this very strange episode, we talk about a film so awful in so many ways that we are baffled by how it came from the same man who directed four unquestionable masterpieces in a row. The R

What Ex Machina Tell Us About Human-AI Psychology

Jan 11 2025 71 mins

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a hor

Marina Hassapopoulou, "Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)

Jan 10 2025 71 mins

Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) engages with a multitude of unconventional approaches throughout the history of motion pictures to offer insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production. Through an exploration of radically inventive app

Oishik Sircar, "Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Dec 29 2024 96 mins

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel int

Vincent Haddad, "The Detroit Genre: Race, Dispossession, and Resilience in American Literature and Film, 1967-2023" (Lever Press, 2024)

Dec 24 2024 69 mins

Detroit has an essential relationship to genre in American literature and popular culture. The contemporary formations of the suburban sitcom, the post-apocalyptic genre, the sci-fi dystopia, crime fiction, the superhero genre, and contemporary horror would not exist in the way they do today without the aesthetic material and racial history of Detroit. When DC Comics wanted to comp

The Big Heat

Dec 23 2024 30 mins

Just as horror films are filled with characters who never seem quite enough afraid, crime films are filled with protagonists who, at the end of the movie, never seem quite enough affected by what they have seen or unleashed. Not here. Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) follows the attempts of one cop, Steve Bannion (Glenn Ford), to clean up his department and city’s corruption. H

Scott Huver, "Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210" (Post Hill Press, 2024)

Dec 22 2024 52 mins

Beverly Hills Noir: Crime, Sin, & Scandal in 90210 (Post Hill Press, 2024) explores the city’s true crime history, delving deep inside cases that made headlines, scandals that engulfed Hollywood legends, and more strange-but-true tales that could only happen in the 90210. Beverly Hills Noir chronicles an assortment of jaw-dropping true crime stories spanning the legendary city’

Jeremy Dauber, "American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond" (Algonquin Books, 2024)

Dec 22 2024 71 mins

From the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie thea