New Books in Film

It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we conclude our series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we have set his eight most highly regarded movies in single-elimination competition. Today, we consider Heat (1995) and Collateral (2004). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work. And we conclude the series by ranking the top Michael Mann movies.
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Cinema Before the World: The Global Routes of the Lumière Brothers (Fordham UP, 2026) investigates the transnational origins of filmmaking by focusing on a case study in world cinema—the 1896-1897 voyage of one of the Lumière Brothers camera operators, Alexandre Promio, across North Africa and the Middle East. The book shows how the sites in these early films are not simply backdrops, but integral to film form and its global history.

Connecting a series of filmic principles (framing, tracking shots, close-ups) to the sites where they are made visible (a rooftop in Algiers, a train station and the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem), Allan unsettles a familiar narrative of imperial vision. In the interplay of local history and global media, he highlights tensions between ethnography, observation, and visual capture, revealing how the Lumière Brothers films persist as living archives.

The book evokes a formative moment when cinema stood before the world—both as a technological marvel and as a medium that shaped how space and time were perceived. Tracing a journey from Algeria to Egypt and Palestine, and moving across media from lithography to photography and panoramas, Allan shows how in the hands of later filmmakers, such as Egyptian director Youssef Chahine and the Syrian collective Abounaddara, the Lumière films continue to enrich and inform visions of what cinema—and the world—can be.

Cinema before the World offers a critical historical intervention in the global story of the cinematograph and a visionary method for film scholarship grounded in transnational analysis across languages, regions, and media.

Michael Allan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton, 2016, winner, MLA First Book Prize) and serves as editor of the journal Comparative Literature.
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It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we start a series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we set his eight most highly regarded movies single-elimination competition. Today, we consider Ali (2001) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

It’s the Pop Culture Professors, and in this show we start a series on the films of Michael Mann. Structured as a knock-out tournament, we set his eight most highly regarded movies single-elimination competition. Today, we consider Ferrari (2023) and Manhunter (1986). We ask what makes a Michael Mann movie distinctive, and what themes and ideas seem to capture his attention and bring out his best work.
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Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from filmed landscape-portraits of women in Los Angeles, Orkney, and the Navajo Nation to Indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia. Proposing "land cinema" as an urgent genre for our time, this book reveals how images and ideas produced half a century ago sowed the seeds for climate justice movements today.

Becca Voelcker is Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024.

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: here
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