Hollywood Archives - Public Seminar

Film

Good Versions of the Right Film

2025’s summer blockbusters are, like those before them, oversized ploys for maximum profit. They’re still not big enough for Hollywood.

November 5, 2025 • by Amelia Nonemacher

At any point this summer, you could take refuge from the heat in one of the nation’s chain movie theaters and enjoy a good old summer blockbuster. Whether you chose to watch the “most authentic” racing movie ever made (F1); a heroic tale of human kindness triumphing over tech moguls-turned-arms-dealers ...

Film & Performing Arts

Netflix Revives the Genre of the “Blaxploitation” Film to Attract Black Subscribers

They Cloned Tyrone tries to turn the colonization of Black Americans into a LOL comedy

December 18, 2023 • by Zenzelé Soa-Clarke

As a genre, Blaxploitation films were often morally ambiguous: though made for and by Black filmmakers and audiences, and sometimes depicting a kind of dead-end domestic colonialism, the films often normalized misogynistic treatment of Black women and uncritical ideals of Black capitalism....

Film

Nihilism for the Whole Family!

How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once

April 18, 2023 • by Ken Hu

Evelyn’s response to the multiverse reflects an existentialist resolution that builds upon a particular version of nihilism: if the universe is inherently meaningless, then we are at liberty to create our own meanings within it....

Film & Performing Arts

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

The new film from George Miller doesn’t do humanities scholars any favors

October 5, 2022 • by Hannah H. Kim

The problem of Three Thousand Years of Longing isn’t just that Alithea, our unfortunate representative, is unimaginative; the plot suggests the humanities have no natural home in the twenty-first century....

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

Climate & Ecology

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Alexandra Kleeman chats with Helen Schulman about her new book, Something New Under the Sun

September 10, 2021 • by Alexandra Kleeman and Helen Schulman

_____ Upon the publication of her new novel, Something New Under the Sun (Hogarth, 2021), New School faculty Alexandra Kleeman sat down with Helen Schulman, faculty and fiction chair at the Creative Writing program, to talk about Los Angeles, the climate crisis, and writing about the very near future. The interview was presented by the Creative Writing ...

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Feature

The Formal Ethics of Metony#metoo

Poetics, Power, Primal Scene

April 18, 2018 • by Jamieson Webster and Kyoo Lee

Last year the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality published a panel called "The ontology of the rape joke," organized around a performance by Vanessa Place of her piece, "Rape joke." The panel included responses from Jamieson Webster, Jeff Dolven, Gayle Salamon, Kyoo Lee, Katie Gentile, and Virginia Goldner, and ended with ...

Feature

Is Alex Israel for Real?

Sun, sincerity and simulacra in SPF-18

April 2, 2018 • by Nicola Sayers

The campy, nostalgic, Hollywood-inspired works of young(ish) artist Alex Israel would not be out of place as the scenery for a nineties-California-themed party, yet they regularly sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars – sometimes more – and he has had solo exhibitions in prestigious galleries globally. Israel’s first major ...

Hollywood

Good Versions of the Right Film

2025’s summer blockbusters are, like those before them, oversized ploys for maximum profit. They’re still not big enough for Hollywood.

Netflix Revives the Genre of the “Blaxploitation” Film to Attract Black Subscribers

They Cloned Tyrone tries to turn the colonization of Black Americans into a LOL comedy

Nihilism for the Whole Family!

How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once

Three Thousand Years of Longing—And One Hour and Forty-Eight Minutes of Regret from This Humanities Professor

The new film from George Miller doesn’t do humanities scholars any favors

A Near-Future Novel for Our Gorgeous and Beleaguered Present

Alexandra Kleeman chats with Helen Schulman about her new book, Something New Under the Sun

Is Alex Israel for Real?

Sun, sincerity and simulacra in SPF-18

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