Noah Tsika is a Ph.D. candidate in Cinema Studies at New York University, Tisch School of the Arts and the author of numerous articles and book chapters on film, television, and new media. He lives in New York.

Med Hondo's debut feature, Soleil Ô (1970), follows an unnamed African immigrant as he travels to Paris in search of work and a better life. Instead, he faces unemployment, exploitation and a deep sense of isolation from French society. Told through a non-linear structure and blending surrealist and satirical elements, the film is a searing critique of racism and the broader legacies of colonialism.Noah Tsika's study situates Soleil Ô within its h...

An examination of director Todd Haynes and his Bob Dylan biopic.As the first and only Bob Dylan “biopic,” I’m Not There caused a stir when released in 2007. Offering a surreal retelling of moments from Dylan’s life and career, the film is perhaps best known for its distinctive approach to casting, including Cate Blanchett and Marcus Carl Franklin, a Black child actor, as versions of Dylan though none of the characters bear his name. Greenlit by Bob Dylan h...

WINNER, SOCIETY FOR MILITARY HISTORY DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARDS - FIRST BOOKThis book informs the public for the first time about the impact of American psychiatry on soldiers during World War II.Breaking Point is the first in-depth history of American psychiatry in World War II. Drawn from unpublished primary documents, oral histories, and the author’s personal interviews and correspondence over years with key psychiatric and milit...

American police departments have presided over the business of motion pictures since the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence is evident not only on the screen but also in the ways movies are made, promoted, and viewed in the United States. Screening the Police explores the history of film's entwinement with law enforcement, showing the role that state power has played in the creation and expansion of a popular medium. For the New Jersey State Police in the 1930s, film o...

Forced to contend with unprecedented levels of psychological trauma during World War II, the United States military began sponsoring a series of nontheatrical films designed to educate and even rehabilitate soldiers and civilians alike. Traumatic Imprints traces the development of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches to wartime trauma by the United States military, along with links to formal and narrative developments in military and civilian filmmaking. Offering close rea...

Over the past decade, as digital media has expanded and print outlets have declined, pundits have bemoaned a “crisis of criticism” and mourned the “death of the critic.” Now that well-paying jobs in film criticism have largely evaporated, while blogs, message boards, and social media have given new meaning to the saying that “everyone’s a critic,” urgent questions have emerged about the status and purpose of film criticism in the twenty-first century.In Film Criticism in the Di...

African Media in an Age of Extraction takes a fresh, site-specific look at the relationship between moving images and the mining of natural resources, arguing that where we “place” Nollywood and other industries has important practical and conceptual consequences. Such locations are not just spatial metaphors but also tangible geographies with material connections to extractive economies. Sites of film production are often spaces of oil prospecting, timber harvesting, and mineral ...

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

“The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.”—Alfred HitchcockIt is remarkable how infrequently, over a period of more than fifty years, Alfred Hitchcock spoke about the beautiful, legendary and talented actresses he directed. And when he did, his remarks were mostly indifferent and often hostile. But his leading ladies greatly enriched his films, even as many of them achieved international stardom precisely because of their work for Hitchcock—among the dozens o...

Elia Kazan was the twentieth century’s most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan’s list of Broadway and Hollywood successes—A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, On the Waterfront, to name a few—is a testament to his profound impact on the art of directing. This remarkable book, drawn from his notebooks, letters, interviews, and autobiography, reveals Kazan’s method: how he uncovered the “spi...

A brilliantly insightful and witty examination of beloved and little-known films, directors, and stars by one of America’s most esteemed critics.In his illuminating new work, Gary Giddins explores the evolution of film, from the first moving pictures and peepshows to the digital era of DVDs and online video-streaming. New technologies have changed our experience of cinema forever; we have peeled away from the crowded theater to be home alone with classic cinema. Re...