Season 4, "The Aesthetics of Hollywood and Beyond: A Conversation with Todd Berliner"

Inside this Episode with Mitch Hampton My very first familiarity with Todd Berliner comes from a single book: his book on 70s movies, “Hollywood Incoherent”. Although my incentive to read this was partly due to ongoing research for my own book, there were many things I found intriguing about Berliner's book. Only gradually over time did I begin to realize that my commonality with him was wider than interest in 1970s cinema: we also tended to look at movies and, most generally art, in very similar ways - ways we were fortunate to get into in this episode. Like all my favorite scholars Berliner gets "inside" of what he discusses, rather than distract us with relatively irrelevant or unimportant material. I enjoyed talking movies with him during this episode and it certainly brought me back to the days when I was around "haunts" like the Brattle, Film Forum, Coolidge Corner, or even the days of Cinema 5 and 16! I hope the audience  enjoys listening to this episode as much as we did creating it. Professor Berliner’s Bio Todd Berliner, Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, teaches film style, storytelling, and aesthetics and American film history. He is the author of Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2017), Hollywood Incoherent: Narration in Seventies Cinema (University of Texas Press, 2010), and many articles and book chapters. He was elected a Fellow of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image in 2010 and currently serves as a board member. Professor Berliner was the founding chairman of UNCW’s Film Studies Department and the recipient of two Fulbright Scholar awards, including the Laszlo Orszagh Distinguished Chair in American Studies. He holds a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley. Links to Todd's beautiful work:  http://people.uncw.edu/berlinert/