New Books in Film

By: Marshall Poe
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  • Summary

  • Interviews with Scholars of Film about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film
    New Books Network
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Art
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Episodes
  • Failed Passing

    Failed Passing
    Feb 12 2025
    Ian Fleishman develops the concept of failed passing in his new book Flamboyant Fictions, which reimagines free will in queer lives as an accidental affirmation of identity despite efforts towards adherence to standards and norms. In this, he works with his predecessors in queer theory like Judith Butler, José Muñoz, Leo Barsani, Lee Edelman and others. In our conversation, Ian also gives us a glimpse of his readings of failed passing in widely varying texts such as the works of André Gide and Jean Genet and the films of Luchino Visconti, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Todd Haynes, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, to the music and public persona of Shawn Mendes and Troye Sivan. Ian Fleishman is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing (Northwestern 2024). His previous books are An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino (Northwestern 2018) and Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Hupert (Edinburgh 2023), co-edited with Iggy Cortez. Image: From the cover of Flamboyant Fictions, by Monograph / Matt Avery 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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    20 mins
  • American Made

    American Made
    Feb 10 2025
    Imagine you’re in a bar, holding forth about the news of the day–maybe it’s 1985 and, like everyone else, you’re talking about Iran-Contra, Oliver North, and the CIA. As you signal to the bartender that you’re ready for another, an unassuming, somewhat chubby guy next to you smiles and says, “You really want to know how all of that went down?” Then he begins a two-hour monologue that gets crazier every twenty minutes. American Made is that monologue, shot with all the speed and adrenaline as its artistic model, Goodfellas. Mike and Dan talk about why the immediacy of first-person narrative works so well here and why it wouldn’t work at all with other people’s stories. So bury that duffel bag of cash and then give it a listen! Those interested in a less cinematic look at Iran-Contra may want to read Firewall by Lawrence E. Walsh or Del Hahn’s Smuggler’s End:The Life and Death of Barry Seal. 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 essays and short pieces about books and films. 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 mins
  • Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

    Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
    Feb 9 2025
    From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from antiquity to the nineteenth century. This book reveals how Iranian cinema preserves the legacy of this vast and yet long-overlooked history that has come to be known as Indian Ocean slavery. How does a focus on blackness complicate traditional understandings of history and culture? Parisa Vaziri addresses this question by looking at residues of the Indian Ocean slave trade in Iranian films from the second half of the twentieth century. Revealing the politicized clash between commercial cinema (fīlmfārsii) and alternative filmmaking (the Iranian New Wave), she pays particular attention to the healing ritual zar which is both an African slave descendent practice and a constitutive element of Iranian culture, as well as to cinematic sīyāh bāzī (Persian black play). Moving beyond other studies on Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan slavery, Vaziri highlights the crystallization of a singular mode of historicity within these cinematic examples—one of “absence” that reflects the relative dearth of archival information on the facts surrounding Indian Ocean slavery. Bringing together cinema studies, Middle East studies, Black studies, and postcolonial theory, Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive (U Minnesota Press, 2023) explores African enslavement in the Indian Ocean through the revelatory and little-known history of Iranian cinema. It shows that Iranian film reveals a resistance to facticity representative of the history of African enslavement in the Indian Ocean and preserves the legacy of African slavery’s longue durée in ways that resist its overpowering erasure in the popular and historical imagination. Parisa Vaziri is associate professor of comparative literature and Near Eastern studies at Cornell University. 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. Twitter. 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 hr and 27 mins

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