Category: Media Studies

December 10, 2013

New Book Tuesday: Watchdogs, Buddhists, and More!

Our weekly list of new titles: The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism Dean Starkman Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice (Now available in paper)...

November 28, 2013

Contemporary Romanian Cinema and the Romanian Film Festival

November 8, 2013

Wang Renmei and Mao Zedong

We conclude our week-long feature on Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai , by Richard J. Meyer with a look not at her film career but her early days living in Hunan Province. Though she later suffered during the Cultural...

November 7, 2013

Wang Renmei, The Wildcat of Shanghai in Photographs

The following images are stills from the films of Wang Renmei, with commentary by Richard J. Meyer author of Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai. Wang Renmei plays Black Clown, who is killed at the end of Soaring Aspirations. Her...

November 6, 2013

Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai

Wang Renmei, the subject of our featured book this week, Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai, was on the fast track to become one of China’s leading film stars of the 1930s. Her career and life, however, fell prey to...

November 5, 2013

Interview with Richard J. Meyer, author of "Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai"

The following is an interview with Richard J. Meyer, author of Wang Renmei: The Wildcat of Shanghai. In the interview Meyer discusses Wang’s onscreen career as well as her turbulent off-screen life and his own interest in Chinese film: Question:...

October 31, 2013

Philip Kitcher on Luchino Visconti's Morte a Venizia

This week our featured book is Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher. Today, we have a couple brief excerpts from Deaths in Venice, in which Kitcher discusses Luchino Visconti’s film version of Mann’s novella,...

October 30, 2013

Philip Kitcher on Benjamin Britten's Opera

This week our featured book is Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher. Today, we have a brief excerpt from Deaths in Venice, in which Kitcher discusses the opera, Death in Venice, by Benjamin Britten,...

September 12, 2013

Hollywood and Hitler Reviewed in The New Yorker

The debate continues. Writing for The New Yorker, David Denby weighs in on the competing interpretations of Hollywood’s complicity with Nazism advanced in two new books: Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939, by Thomas Doherty and The Collaboration Hollywood’s Pact with Hitler,...

August 7, 2013

Salmon, Starkman, and Chittum on Bezos's Purchase of the Washington Post

What did some of the editors of The Best Business Writing think about Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post, which will surely be one of the biggest business and journalism stories of the year. The Audit, a feature on...

July 29, 2013

Between Sunrise and Sunless — Film by Rob Stone, Author of The Cinema of Richard Linklater

In this beautiful short film, Rob Stone, author of The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run, searches for Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in Vienna on Bloomsday, 16 June 2013. As their absence reveals the city, so...

July 15, 2013

Thomas Doherty and the Debate over Hollywood and Hitler

“I’m always leery of history that allows the present to feel smugly superior to the past.”—Thomas Doherty Thomas Doherty, author of Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 has recently been involved in a well-covered and somewhat contentious scholarly debate. As reported in...