Episodios

  • Michael Allan, "Cinema before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers" (Fordham UP, 2026)
    Mar 29 2026
    Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers (Fordham UP, 2026) investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history. Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives. The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be. Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media. Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016, winner, MLA First Book Prize) and serves as editor of the journal Comparative Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    36 m
  • Michael Mann Reconsidered: Ali and The Last of the Mohicans
    Mar 27 2026
    It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we start a series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we set his eight most highly regarded movies single-elimination competition. Today, we consider Ali (2001) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    30 m
  • Michael Mann Reconsidered: Ferrari and Manhunter
    Mar 22 2026
    It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we start a series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we set his eight most highly regarded movies single-elimination competition. Today, we consider Ferrari (2023) and Manhunter (1986). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    30 m
  • Becca Voelcker, "Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction" (U California Press, 2025)
    Mar 21 2026
    Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from filmed landscape-portraits of women in Los Angeles, Orkney, and the Navajo Nation to Indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia. Proposing "land cinema" as an urgent genre for our time, this book reveals how images and ideas produced half a century ago sowed the seeds for climate justice movements today. Becca Voelcker is Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    1 h y 10 m
  • Karen McNally ed., "Women in Hollywood's Dream Factory: Tales of Inequality, Abuse, and Resistance" (U Illinois Press, 2026)
    Mar 18 2026
    The #MeToo revelations put a twenty-first-century stamp on the age-old story of women’s mistreatment in Hollywood. In Women in Hollywood's Dream Factory: Tales of Inequality, Abuse, and Resistance (U Illinois Press, 2026) Karen McNally edits a collection focused on examining and revising film history in the aftermath of the women’s stories, past and present, that have come to light.The collection begins with essays on the interplay between reality and imagination in narratives and representations of women’s experiences of unequal treatment. In Part 2, contributors discuss how the gendered attitudes of the media’s stories enable inequality in Hollywood and look at the forces that arise whenever women resist these media assaults. The next section addresses the structures that built the inequalities and mistreatment while Part 4 revisits established narratives to challenge, renew, and expand upon our understanding of film history through women’s stories. Essays in the final section address the combination of inequality and resistance that defines women’s experiences in Hollywood. Editor of book: Karen McNally is Professor of American Film, Television and Cultural History at London Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on issues of stardom, gender, race, and American identity as they relate to Hollywood, Amer­ican television, and US history, culture, and politics. She has published widely in volumes and journals including Journal of American Studies and European Journal of American Culture, and she is the author, editor, or co-editor of five books, in­cluding, most recently, The Stardom Film (2020) and American Television during a Television Presidency (2022). Professor McNally was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2023 for the three-year interdisciplinary research project “Lana Turner, a Historical Biography.” Bio note of host Dr Priyam Sinha is an Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests lie at the intersection of critical media industry studies, disability studies, gender studies, affect studies, production culture studies, and anthropology of the body. So far, her articles have been published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Media, Culture and Society; Communication, Culture and Critique; South Asian Diaspora, among others. She is also a regular podcast host at NewBooksNetwork and has been published in public writing forums like the Economic and Political Weekly, FemAsia, Asian Film Archive, among others. More information on her ongoing projects can be found on her website www.priyamsinha.com and you can follow her on X here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Michael Mann Reconsidered: Thief and The Insider
    Mar 17 2026
    It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we start a series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we set his eight most highly regarded movies single-elimination competition, starting with Thief (1981) Vs. The Insider (1999). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    29 m
  • A Star Is Born (1937)
    Mar 16 2026
    A Star Is Born has been filmed four times, but the first version is the best: a combination of Singin’ in the Rain and Death of a Salesman, David O. Selznick’s production drips with “movie” and artificiality, yet still delivers an ending that seems taken from Greek tragedy. No stars were harmed in the making of this film–yet the film also dramatizes the harm inflicted by a steady diet of fame. It’s not an indictment of Hollywood, but an illustration of how the machine works. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. If you’re interested in reading Dorothy Parker, Robert Carson, and Alan Campbell’s excellent screenplay, you can find it here. The collection Memo from David O. Selznick is an addictive edition of hundreds of memos, telegrams, and letters from the producer about the films he helped create, A Star Is Born among them. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on Letterboxd and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Check out Dan Moran’s substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as his many film-related author interviews on The New Books Network. Read Mike Takla’s substack, The Grumbler’s Almanac, for commentary on offbeat topics of the day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
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    26 m
  • Stephen Lee Naish, "Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency" (Lever Press, 2026)
    Mar 10 2026
    Movies open a window into our collective soul. In Screen Captures: Film in the Age of Emergency (Lever Press, 2026), Stephen Lee Naish guides us through recent cinematic phenomena that reflect/refract our contemporary political existence. Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. He is the author of several books on film, politics, music, and pop culture. He lives in Kingston, Ontario. He has appeared on the New Books Network three times for previous books: Create of Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper (2016), Deconstructing Dirty Dancing (2017), Riffs and Meaning (2018) From Star Wars-scope blockbusters and Hollywood coming-of-age comedies to independent horror productions, Naish draws out the ways these movies shape, and are shaped by, their audience's own dissatisfactions. In his discussion of the Star Wars franchise, Naish highlights a conflict between internet discussion-fueled fandom vs the Disney Empire that shares features with the ongoing rebellions depicted in the films themselves. A passionate fan base who can now voice their discontent via the internet is feeding back into the studio's agenda and criticizing the actions of characters within the film and the actors alike. Chapters on the super-heroes genre and disaster movies draw out the climate-based social tensions these reflect. Depictions of masculinity ("Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown") on screens large and small bleed into discussions of the work and presence of Nicholas Cage, David Lynch, and Dennis Hopper -- with a side-excursion into Valerie Solanas's strikingly prescient SCUM Manifesto. Stephen Lee Naish's Screen Captures adds a sharpening filter to the film-goer's experience on the big and little screen. 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
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    1 h y 9 m