New Books in Film

What happens when we assume women’s presence in film history instead of their absence? This is the question at the heart of Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978, the newest addition to the Feminist Media Histories book series at the University of California Press.

The first book by Aurore Spiers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Texas A&M University, Archiving the Past is a fascinating account of some of the many women in France whose labor had a decisive role in the formation of cinema history across the twentieth century. Aurore shows that the film-historical archive has always been a site of feminist agency and power, even if women’s work in and around the archive has been diminished, interrupted, erased, or ignored.

In this conversation with fellow feminist film scholar Alix Beeston, Aurore shares about the historical, methodological, and political stakes of her work, from the archive to the classroom. She describes her process for discerning the traces of women’s archival labor, however fleeting, contingent, or speculative they may be. She reflects on how gendered ideas and norms have defined—and limited—our sense of what counts as film-historical labor. And she ruminates on what it means for feminist scholars, in and beyond film and media studies, to collect and recollect the past—for the sake of the feminist present and its still-possible futures.

Alix Beeston is Reader in Literature and Visual Culture at Cardiff University. She's the author of In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen (Oxford UP, 2018) and the co-editor of the award-winning volume Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (University of California Press, 2023).
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Feng Xiaogang's New Year Films: Industry, Regulation, Humour and Authorship (Routledge, 2025) offers not only an in-depth study of Feng Xiaogang as a cinematic auteur but also a comprehensive and informative discussion of the industrial transformation of mainstream Chinese cinema under party-state regulation from the 1990s to the 2010s.

Ai Qi is a lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication, Shandong Normal University, China. Qi holds a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Nottingham, UK. His current research mainly focuses on Chinese cinema, new media and cultural studies, non-human celebrities in the digital age in particular. Recently, he published an article on Capybara, discussing why this animal species becomes popular online with attention to Chinese Sang culture.

Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Boom to Bust is a timely investigation into the rise of Peak TV and the perfect storm that caused a rapid decline in Hollywood work.

When Hollywood writers and actors went on strike in 2023, they drew attention to the rapidly changing nature of film and television production. In Boom to Bust, media industry experts Miranda Banks and Kate Fortmueller combine economic and cultural analysis and interviews with industry workers to capture the lived experience of Hollywood in crisis. Tracking major disruptions of the preceding decade—including the transformation of streaming services into studios, the overproduction of series during Peak TV, as well as #MeToo and COVID—the authors explain how the conflicting interests of studio executives, creative workers, and workers' unions compelled a renegotiation of the terms of work. Grounding readers in the history of Hollywood labor negotiations, the authors provide a road map to make sense of Hollywood’s present—and what comes next.

Miranda Banks is Professor of Film, Television, and Media Studies at Loyola Marymount University, author of The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild, and coeditor of Production Studies.

Kate Fortmueller is Associate Professor of Film and Media History at Georgia State University and author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production and Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

How can an entirely foreign cast perform the American “The Shawshank Redemption” in the Chinese language across China? In this episode of the Nordic Asia podcast, Julie Yu-Wen Chen talks with Matti E. Lehtonen, a Finnish national who shares his journey from a decades-long career in engineering and business to a starring role in the first Chinese-language stage production of The Shawshank Redemption performed by an all-foreign cast.

Directed by the legendary Zhang Guoli, this production marks a cultural milestone in Chinese theater. Matti discusses his portrayal of the librarian, a tragic figure who represents the “saddest role” in a story otherwise defined by hope.

This episode dives into why Zhang Guoli insisted on foreign actors to avoid stereotypical and slightly fake portrayals of foreigners and how this choice may have helped the play navigate censorship. Matti also discusses the complexities of proactive self-censorship, securing government approvals for every city, and performing with a censor in the audience. Join us for a fascinating look at cross-cultural artistic collaboration and the evolving landscape of performance art in contemporary China.

Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies and Asian studies coordinator at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland).

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

In Queer Indigenous Cinemas, scholar Gabriel S. Estrada offers an analysis of queer Indigenous media from the Americas, the Pacific, and the Caribbean. This groundbreaking work uses Indigenous directional space and sovereign mapping methods to uncover the emotional, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of queer Indigenous lives. The book's seven chapters--each one of the directions--look closely at media such as cinema and streaming videos that draw on Indigenous concepts from diverse nations such as Diné, Caxcan, Kanaka Maoli, and Nehiyawak.

Gabriel S. Estrada is a Caxcan/Xicanx professor in religious studies at California State University Long Beach, where ze teaches queer spirituality, Indigenous graduate classes, and Nahuatl literature.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film