Film & TV

A film without a villain, unless the villain is eighty years of farming policy. Why the loss of birds and insects outside our own windows matters more than cute penguins, and what happens if struggling farmers go under.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Filming a year aboard a Doctors Without Borders ship, an anthropologist witnessed a militia seize women and children at sea. The film follows one family through what came next, and traces the European money behind the kidnapping.

A documentary that leaves out every painting and looks instead at the fascination itself: the merchandise, the lawsuits, the lookalikes. Who gets to own an icon, and what happens to an artist once she becomes a brand?

The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...

Until this book, I never wrote about or taught anything related to childhood. I came to this project initially through my interest in film and urbanism. As I wrote and...

I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

This is a book about the equipment that James Bond uses: its origins, function, and the essential role it plays in Bond’s missions. The book also describes the role these...

A film about women being replaced turns out to have replaced a good many of them behind the camera too — an actress fired after sixty-five scenes were already shot, a costume designer, a casting director, a sound editor, an electronic music pioneer, all written out of the story since. Archival production records show how those swaps happened and who won the fights that caused them. The erasure rhymes uncomfortably with the film's own plot.

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

Melville's obsessive use of close-ups of the protagonist's face in Le Samouraï also emphasizes the protagonist's subjective viewpoint. These close-ups not only function to represent his psychological state but also reject the viewer's identification with his emotions.

A stone-cold classic that has quietly slipped out of the critical conversation, respectfully cited and no longer really studied. Look again and it is still teeming — a film everyone believes they know backwards, whose famous simplicity turns out to be a sleight of hand covering something far more complicated about postwar Europe, deprivation and care.

As a film studies scholar, I believe cinema has an ethical purpose for the world. I began seriously thinking about the relationship between myself as a film viewer and the reality of the world for the first time when I co-translated Kiju Yoshida's Ozu's Anti-Cinema, one of the foundational works of Ozu studies in Japan, into English in 2003.

Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than...

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

The idea behind How Film Became History was to trace the origin of the motion picture genre that is now the central repository for our shared history--the archival documentary. “Films beget films,” declared the film historian Jay Leyda, but only in the 1930s would they become fruitful and multiply.

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

I became interested in this topic because of previous research I had done on postcolonial theory. The book engages deeply with postcolonial theory and the interest in that discipline in...

I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book. The archival images that...

In Cuba, the prominence of culture and its centrality to political and economic forces can surprise those unfamiliar with it. I recall one consulting trip early in this century, when...

Crash explores the role of the car crash in film history and contemporary art practice. I begin by recognizing that the histories of cinema and the automobile, born at the same...

Twilight of the Idols is ultimately a book about the central importance of deviance to the formation of American mass culture during the 1920s. Given our current media obsessions with unusual...

This memoir is an inside account of the New Yorker Theater that my husband Dan and I opened on March 17, 1960. An Art Deco relief of Diana the Huntress...

This book is about Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, which is a quintessential 1975 film, but also relevant for the present moment of political cynicism, polarization, and violence. While the...

This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them.

This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...

Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were...

The book is a study of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally… written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. It’s one in a series of books...

In Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006), Gael García Bernal plays a frustrated artist with a penchant for quirky handmade objects and stop-motion animation who falls in love with...

Embodied Visions is a pathbreaking explanation of how films are crafted to activate innate features of our brains and bodies. The book is based on cutting edge neuropsychology and evolutionary...

The French philosopher Henri Bergson famously described laughter as a “social gesture.” It’s a quote that has been a watchword in my own thinking about comedy. Why people laugh, who...

A film without a villain, unless the villain is eighty years of farming policy. Why the loss of birds and insects outside our own windows matters more than cute penguins, and what happens if struggling farmers go under.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Filming a year aboard a Doctors Without Borders ship, an anthropologist witnessed a militia seize women and children at sea. The film follows one family through what came next, and traces the European money behind the kidnapping.

A documentary that leaves out every painting and looks instead at the fascination itself: the merchandise, the lawsuits, the lookalikes. Who gets to own an icon, and what happens to an artist once she becomes a brand?

The chapter entitled “Ground Zero in Focus” examines several documentaries composed of candid, amateur footage shot by witnesses in Manhattan and New Jersey as the World Trade Center burned and...

Until this book, I never wrote about or taught anything related to childhood. I came to this project initially through my interest in film and urbanism. As I wrote and...

I started writing this book in a period when the political position of Asian Americans seemed to be oscillating between appearing either as threats to middle America or tokens of...

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American...

This is a book about the equipment that James Bond uses: its origins, function, and the essential role it plays in Bond’s missions. The book also describes the role these...

A film about women being replaced turns out to have replaced a good many of them behind the camera too — an actress fired after sixty-five scenes were already shot, a costume designer, a casting director, a sound editor, an electronic music pioneer, all written out of the story since. Archival production records show how those swaps happened and who won the fights that caused them. The erasure rhymes uncomfortably with the film's own plot.

This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we...

Melville's obsessive use of close-ups of the protagonist's face in Le Samouraï also emphasizes the protagonist's subjective viewpoint. These close-ups not only function to represent his psychological state but also reject the viewer's identification with his emotions.

A stone-cold classic that has quietly slipped out of the critical conversation, respectfully cited and no longer really studied. Look again and it is still teeming — a film everyone believes they know backwards, whose famous simplicity turns out to be a sleight of hand covering something far more complicated about postwar Europe, deprivation and care.

As a film studies scholar, I believe cinema has an ethical purpose for the world. I began seriously thinking about the relationship between myself as a film viewer and the reality of the world for the first time when I co-translated Kiju Yoshida's Ozu's Anti-Cinema, one of the foundational works of Ozu studies in Japan, into English in 2003.

Unhomed examines America’s ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of mobility in film. The book examines films that show characters as unhomed and placeless, mobile rather than...

For more than half a century, one folk singer's face has been quietly rewriting the movies it appears in — as actor, documentary subject, music-video fixture, and even unreleased director. This is an argument for taking that filmography seriously, and a corrective to the tidy myths a recent hit biopic spun around the night an icon “went electric.”

A debut feature from 1970 that is a documentary, an essay film, a work of autofiction, live action and animation at once — African, French, both, neither. Out of circulation for decades, it left behind a literature that cannot agree on what year it was made or which country made it. Sorting the record out turns out to matter, because the complications are the point.

The idea behind How Film Became History was to trace the origin of the motion picture genre that is now the central repository for our shared history--the archival documentary. “Films beget films,” declared the film historian Jay Leyda, but only in the 1930s would they become fruitful and multiply.

The book addresses a few different fields of inquiry. These include film genre, and writing on genre by people like Rick Altman. They also include ideas about urbanism. I focus...

I became interested in this topic because of previous research I had done on postcolonial theory. The book engages deeply with postcolonial theory and the interest in that discipline in...

I would hope that the browser who picked up Through Amateur Eyes in a bookstore would turn to the image section in the middle of the book. The archival images that...

In Cuba, the prominence of culture and its centrality to political and economic forces can surprise those unfamiliar with it. I recall one consulting trip early in this century, when...

Crash explores the role of the car crash in film history and contemporary art practice. I begin by recognizing that the histories of cinema and the automobile, born at the same...

Twilight of the Idols is ultimately a book about the central importance of deviance to the formation of American mass culture during the 1920s. Given our current media obsessions with unusual...

This memoir is an inside account of the New Yorker Theater that my husband Dan and I opened on March 17, 1960. An Art Deco relief of Diana the Huntress...

This book is about Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville, which is a quintessential 1975 film, but also relevant for the present moment of political cynicism, polarization, and violence. While the...

This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them.

This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others...

Picturing American Modernity is about how the early American cinema represented major changes taking place in American society, politics, and culture in the early twentieth century, particularly changes that were...

The book is a study of the 1989 romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally… written by Nora Ephron and directed by Rob Reiner. It’s one in a series of books...

In Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006), Gael García Bernal plays a frustrated artist with a penchant for quirky handmade objects and stop-motion animation who falls in love with...

Embodied Visions is a pathbreaking explanation of how films are crafted to activate innate features of our brains and bodies. The book is based on cutting edge neuropsychology and evolutionary...

The French philosopher Henri Bergson famously described laughter as a “social gesture.” It’s a quote that has been a watchword in my own thinking about comedy. Why people laugh, who...