New Books in Film

Victoria Sturtevant's It’s All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2024) is about how changing depictions of pregnancy in comedy from the start of the twentieth century to the present show an evolution in attitudes toward women’s reproductive roles and rights. S

'All art is propaganda,' wrote George Orwell, 'but not all propaganda is art.' Moving from World War I to the 'War on Terror' and beyond, The Story of British Propaganda Film (Bloomsbury, 2024) shows how the emergence of film as a global media phenomenon reshaped practices of propaganda, while new practices of propagan

In this episode of High Theory, Laura Stamm talks about the biopic. One of the oldest forms of narrative cinema, biographical pictures are a mainstay of the medium today. Early biopics played an important role in public health discourse, representing the discoveries of science and the lives of scientists, which in turn

It’s no secret that superhero comics and their related media perpetuate a model of a straight, white, male hero at the expense of representing women and other minorities, but other narratives exist. Searching for Feminist Superheroes: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Marvel Comics (University of Texas Press, 2024) by Dr.

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (Edinburgh UP, 2024), edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermani, Corrado Neri, and Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley, is a landmark contribution to studying Taiwanese cinema. The book revisits Taiyupian, a thriving yet overlooked segment of Taiwan’s cinematic history produced betw

In Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024), Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay enact a dialogue between cinema, philosophy, and ecocriticism to tarry with the question of ecological catastrophe. Taking as one of their conceptual points of departure Freud’s writing on negation, the authors