The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies: Understanding Mental Illness through Film (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters' inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness.

Based on the highly popular course that Charney taught at Yale University and the American University of Rome, Madness at the Movies introduces readers to films that may be new to them and encourages them to view these films in an entirely new way. Through films such as Psycho, Taxi Driver, Through a Glass Darkly, Night of the Hunter, A Woman Under the Influence, Ordinary People, and As Good As It Gets, Charney covers an array of disorders, including psychosis, paranoia, psychopathy, depression, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety. He examines how these films work to convey the essence of each illness. He also looks at how each film reflects the understanding of mental illness at the time it was released as well as the culture that shaped that understanding.

Charney explains how to observe the behaviors displayed by characters in the films, paying close attention to signs of mental illness. He demonstrates that learning to read a film can be as absorbing as watching one. By viewing these films through the lens of mental health, readers can hone their observational skills and learn to assess the accuracy of depictions of mental illness in popular media.

Melek Firat Altay is a neuroscientist, biologist and musician. Her research focuses on deciphering the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders.

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In this episode, our host Sim Gill discusses the book Dislike-Minded: Media, Audiences, and the Dynamics of Taste (2021) by Jonathan Gray.

You’ll hear about:

• A brief history of the book and its connection to global studies of media and communication;
• The role of media and cultural studies in amplifying the voices of dislikers, and how can scholars in these fields better understand and appreciate the register of dislike;
• The method of refractive audience analysis as a way to understand how adaptations of media texts affect people's perceptions of the original texts;
• How paratexts can shape audience perceptions and understanding of a media product;
• How the gendered norms may hinder women from expressing dislike, and how this relates to larger cultural systems of dislike, including political contexts;
• Some recent developments that have added to or changed the initial arguments/findings in the book.

About the book

Dislike-Minded draws from over two-hundred qualitative interviews to probe what the media’s failures, wounds, and sore spots tell us about media culture, taste, identity, representation, meaning, textuality, audiences, and citizenship. The book refuses the simplicity of Pierre Bourdieu’s famous dictum that dislike is (only) snobbery. Instead, Jonathan Gray pushes onward to uncover other explanations for what it ultimately means to dislike specific artifacts of television, film, and other media, and why this dislike matters. You can find the book here by NYU Press.

Author: Jonathan Gray is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work examines how media entertainment and its audiences interact, and examines how and where value and meaning are created. He is now Chief Editor of The International Journal of Cultural Studies, co-editor, with Aswin Punathambekar and Adrienne Shaw, of NYU Press’ Critical Cultural Communication book series, and I was recently nominated as an International Communication Association Fellow.

Host: Sim Gill is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests concern the social and subjective effects of discourse and institutional politics as well as the interrelationships between discourse, epistemology, and subjectivity. Her master's thesis evaluated the meaning-making behind the term BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic), commonly used to describe minority ethnic communities in Britain.

Editor & Producer: Jing Wang

Keywords: Dislike, audience studies, media cultures, identity, representation, citizenship

Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues.

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The Western as a genre is alive and vibrant, argues University of Maine - Farmington professor of English literature Michael K. Johnson. In Speculative Wests: Popular Representations of a Region and a Genre (U Nebraska Press, 2023), Johnson explains how authors, directors, and storytellers are pushing the classic genre into new directions by hybridizing Western tropes with science fiction, horror, and fantasy storytelling. These new speculative Westerns are revitalizing a genre, which has grown incredibly popular in recent years through television series like The Last of Us and Westworld, as well as many examples in film and literature. Speculative Westerns have also allowed space for Native and African American writers and storytellers to expand the genre into more inclusive spaces, telling stories about people often left out or stereotyped in more traditional Western stories. By including time travel, zombies, and vampires, Johnson argues that the Western has cemented itself with a new generation of Americans as one of the critical cultural narratives for understanding the United States.

Dr. Stephen R. Hausmann is an assistant professor of history at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.

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An explosive inside look at The Dirty Dozen, the star-studded war film that broke the rules, shocked the critics, thrilled audiences, and became an all-time classic.

The year was 1967. A cinematic blockbuster exploded across American popular culture. The Dirty Dozen didn’t just reinvent the “men on a mission” war story, it blew the genre to pieces. Like its ragtag team of misfits, it defied authority, mocked the military, and still managed to deliver action, adventure, and no-holds-barred Nazi-killing. It also received four Oscar nominations, launched the careers of many Hollywood legends, and inspired generations of filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah, Quentin Tarantino, and James Gunn.

Based on exclusive interviews with the surviving cast and crew, friends and families of the stars, and other Hollywood insiders, Killin' Generals: The Making of The Dirty Dozen, the Most Iconic WW II Movie of All Time (Citadel Press, 2023) is a riveting must-read for film buffs, military fans, and anyone who loves a down-and-dirty adventure tale. Detailed, insightful, and gossipy, Epstein’s homage spotlights the movie’s endless barrage of cinematic gold.

During a time when America was reeling from turmoil, Hollywood held an indelible mirror up to a changing society. Films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Cool Hand Luke, and In the Heat of the Night would define the era. But it was a gritty, violent, darkly comic World War II movie called The Dirty Dozen that would really strike a chord with audiences—and become the year’s biggest box office success. Heading up the all-star cast were Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, John Cassavettes, Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, Jim Brown, Robert Ryan, Clint Walker, and at his most terrifying best, Telly Savalas, propelling many of them to stardom.

Dwayne Epstein is the author of several young adult biographies, covering such celebrity personalities as Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Hilary Swank, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Denzel Washington for Lucent Books' People in the News series. Epstein also contributed to Bill Krohn's bestselling books Hitchcock at Work and Joe Dante and the Gremlins of Hollywood. His biography Lee Marvin: Point Blank was a New York Times bestseller.

Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm.

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Cinegogía is an open-access website devoted to the teaching and study of Latin American cinemas. Bridget Franco, an associate professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross, founded and coordinates the website. Cinegogía contains a database of Latin American film as well as resources for teaching and researching film. Teaching resources include syllabi, teaching activities and assignments, and film guides. Cinegogía has a considerable selection of films by and about Black and Indigenous communities in Latin America. Bridget Franco and I discuss how she founded the site, teaching with Latin American film, and digital humanities projects.

Bridget Franco is Associate Professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross.

Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).

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A trailblazing figure in film and popular culture, Netherlands native Sylvia Kristel became one of the biggest stars in the world as Emmanuelle in 1974. Alongside her most famous role, directed by Just Jaeckin, a little-known fact is that Sylvia Kristel also appeared in over 20 films between 1973 and 1981 featuring exceptional work with some of the greatest directors in film history including Walerian Borowczyk, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Roger Vadim and Claude Chabrol. 

Now the story of Sylvia's astonishing career in the '70s is told in Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol (Cult Epics, 2022). Featured are new interviews with Just Jaeckin, Pim de la Parra, Robert Fraisse, Joe Dallesandro and Francis Lai among others. Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol is a film-by-film guide to one of the most distinctive and uncompromising careers in modern cinema, and a celebration of a most remarkable woman in a fully illustrated coffee-table book written by author Jeremy Richey.

A recollection of Sylvia Kristel's most exciting period as an actress. Beginning with her early Dutch film roles in Frank & Eva, Because of the Cats, and Naked over the Fence, this book covers all 22 movies Sylvia starred in between 1973 and 1981 including the European films Emmanuelle, Julia, No Pockets in a Shroud, Playing with Fire, Emmanuelle II, Une Femme fidele, La Marge, Alice, Rene the Cane, Goodbye Emmanuelle, Pastorale 1943, Mysteries, Tigers in Lipstick, The Fifth Musketeer, Love in First Class, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the American films The Concorde.... Airport '79, The Nude Bomb, Private Lessons, plus a chapter on the unmade films, dozens of iconic roles that she was offered but declined written with in-depth detail. Sylvia Kristel: From Emmanuelle to Chabrol also contains many vintage reviews and interviews with Sylvia Kristel never before translated into English, and takes a look at Sylvia's brief music recording career as well.

Jeremy R. Richey is a film and music historian and writer originally from Kentucky. The creator of the long-running blogs Moon in the Gutter and Fascination: The Jean Rollin Experience, Richey was also the publisher of the print-only journals Art Decades and Soledad. His work has appeared in a variety of books and magazines as well as on various home video supplements, including audio commentaries for Cult Epics’ releases Madame Claude and the upcoming Julia and Mysteries. Richey currently resides in Bremerton, WA with his beloved dog Ziggy.

Jeremy’s website and Instagram.

morgan.com/">Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM, serves as a co-chair of the associate board at the Gene Siskel Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and volunteers in the music archive at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Bradley Morgan on Twitter.

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The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library, 2022) looks at threats to forest life across the globe. Dr. John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value.

The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – through Refuge, Sacredness, Horror and Hope – making fascinating links between emotion and genre. For Henry David Thoreau, the woods are places beyond civilisation; for Ursula LeGuin and C S Lewis, they are loaded with otherworldly potential; and for those fleeing captivity, they can provide a welcome sanctuary. Woods can strike fear, they can inspire wonder, they can be lovely, dark and deep.

With full-colour illustration throughout, this book branches out into the British Library to find both the haunting and the hopeful in an unparalleled collection of books, manuscripts and photography. It tells a global story of how we understand trees, and its beautifully illustrated pages present a moving argument for conservation and renewal.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Nostalgia for the 1980s is in the air. From Stranger Things to the relaunch of 80s franchises like Top Gun, the American entertainment industry casts the period as an age of simpler things, clearer dichotomies, and less technology. Yet not all was simple. The 1980s were the heyday of the Cold War. They were the decade of rapid social change, of deregulation and selfish consumption, of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were also the decade when a new technology swept the world, setting the stage for our all-too-digital present.

A lot has been written about the rise of video in the United States, the format wars, the impact it had on the entertainment industry, on personal entertainment consumption habits, and new business models. But the rise of video was not a uniquely American phenomenon, nor was the American experience normative. In fact, wherever the new technology arrived, from the US, to the Middle East, to Eastern Europe, it reshaped social and business practices, as well as government responses to it, in ways that reflected the political, social, and economic arrangements of each space.

Johnny Walker’s Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1972-1992 (Edinburgh UP, 2022) tells the story of Britain’s vide boom in the 1980s by focusing on the first video distributors who took chances on a wide range of films, from documentaries, to horror, to kids entertainment, in order to attract consumer interest. The new video shops that mushroomed across Britain turned video rental into a common practice among the public. Soon, despite a crushing recession, more and more industry players started to invest into what media at the time was dismissing as a mere ‘plaything.’ Rewind, Replay chronicles the idiosyncratic ways in which British distributors and store owners navigated various local political and economic pressures including piracy, the infamous video nasties moral panic and the government crackdown on the industry, as well as the corporate expansion of the industry which, by the end of the decade, eliminated independent distributors, and turned the pre-recorded videocassette from morally questionable enterprise into a staple of high street retail.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy is Teaching Professor of American Studies at Miami University of Ohio. Her book, Between Empire and Republic: America in the Colonial Canadian Imagination, came out in 2022. Twitter: @OanaGodyKenw. Oana’s webpage.

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Traditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees this relationship as an impasse. To illustrate this theory, Resmini turns to Italian cinema to explore how films have reinvented the link between popular art and radical politics in Italy from 1968 to the early 1980s, a period of intense political and cultural struggles also known as the long ’68.

Italian Political Cinema: Figure of the Long '68 (U Minnesota Press, 2023) conjures a multifaceted, complex portrayal of Italian society. Centered on emblematic figures in Italian cinema, it maps the currents of antagonism and repression that defined this period in the country’s history. Resmini explores how film imagined the possibilities, obstacles, and pitfalls that characterized the Italian long ’68 as a moment of crisis and transition. From workerism to autonomist Marxism to feminism, this book further expands the debate on political cinema with a critical interpretation of influential texts, some of which are currently only available in Italian.

A comprehensive and novel redefinition of political film, Italian Political Cinema introduces its audience to lesser-known directors alongside greats such as Pasolini, Bertolucci, Antonioni, and Bellocchio. Resmini offers access to untranslated work in Italian philosophy, political theory, and film theory, and forcefully advocates for the continued artistic and political relevance of these films in our time.

Mauro Resmini is associate professor of cinema and media studies and Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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.

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Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Science Fiction: Amazing Antiquity (Liverpool UP, 2022) by Dr. Ross Clare introduces and analyses the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary science fiction. By using up-to-date methods from classical reception theory, science-fiction analysis and fictional-world studies, the book will help furnish the reader's understanding of the ways in which the literature, culture, history and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome are appropriated and represented across multiple media platforms in the science-fiction genre today. The book will therefore serve as an entry point into several areas of study: the reception of classics in popular culture, antiquity in modern media, the uses of the ancient world in science-fiction, and broader science-fiction criticism. The chapters, structured by medium, principally offer a roughly chronological overview of that medium and its treatment of ancient history, mythology, literature, and culture. An abundance of case studies from literature, film, television, and videogames—including Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Bill and  Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Fallout: New Vegas—show how classical antiquity is reused, encountered, and re-encountered by creators and consumers of the present. Clare shows how we bounce off images of this history, and it bounces off us, a reciprocation that creates new visions of Greece and of Rome.

In addition to this book, Ross Clare is the author of Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames, with Bloomsbury Academic Press, as well as having written some short stories, and video game scripts. He used to teach at the University of Liverpool.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca">carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland

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