Books
Superheroes, Movies and the State: How the US Government Shapes Cinematic Universes
University of Kansas Press. Jan 2022.
“Hollywood teems with the US national security state! Like one of the crowd-pleasing multi-superhero crossover movies discussed herein, this book unites two compelling subjects in one remarkable narrative. Jenkins and Secker show how the US military, NASA, and the CIA have successfully shaped the superhero genre even as that genre became a key mechanism by which Americans imagine and reimagine their relationship with the world. Lively, perceptive, and based on painstaking research, including specially declassified documents, this is a vital contribution to the understanding of post-9/11 culture in the United States.”
—Nicholas J. Cull, professor of communication, University of Southern California, and coauthor of Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema
“This is the best book on the US federal government’s hand in Hollywood’s production of Marvel and DC superhero movies. Jenkins and Secker shed light on a sometimes collaborative and sometimes conflicted relationship between the state’s public affairs offices and the Hollywood studios behind the world’s most globally popular entertainment genre. This is a one-of-a-kind contribution to scholarly and public knowledge about the US state-Hollywood relationship and the geopolitics of creating, telling, selling, and watching superhero movies.”
—Tanner Mirrlees, president, Canadian Communication Association
The CIA in Hollywood: How The Agency Shapes Film and Television
University of Texas Press. 2016. Translated into Farsi, French, Mandarin and Turkish.
“Jenkins’s book raises serious ethical and legal questions about the relationship between the CIA and Hollywood and the extent to which we consume propaganda from one through the other. . . . Should the CIA be authorized to target American public opinion? If our artists don’t confront [the question] more directly, and soon, the Agency will only continue to infiltrate our vulnerable film and television screens―and our minds.”―Tom Hayden, Los Angeles Review of Books“
The book makes a strong case that the CIA should not be in Hollywood at all, but that if it is, it cannot pick and choose which movies it wishes to support. Well written and researched, this study examines a subject that has not received enough scholarly or critical attention. Highly recommended.”―Choice
“A fascinating, highly readable, and original new work. . . . Incorporating effective, illustrative case studies, The CIA in Hollywood is definitely recommended to students of film, media relations, the CIA, and U.S. interagency relations.”―H-Net Reviews
International Film Festivals: Contemporary Culture and History Beyond Venice and Cannes
I.B. Tauris
More than 5,000 film festivals take place globally and many of these have only been established in the last two decades. International Film Festivals collects the leading scholarship on this increasingly prominent phenomenon from both historical and contemporary perspectives, using diverse methods including archival research, interviews and surveys and drawing widely from fields like sociology, urban studies and film criticism to patent technology and history. With contributors from across the world and covering the major festivals - Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Berlin - as well as niche, genre and online film festivals, this book is an authoritative and exemplary guide to the evolution of these key sites for film distribution, exhibition and reception. Chapters unravel topics such as the relationship between corporations and festivals, the soft power function they can perform for their host nations and the changing identities of audiences on arrival at, and during exploration of, a given festival venue. Tricia Jenkins' edited volume reconceives the film festival for the global, digital age whilst drawing out its historic importance and ultimately makes a major intervention in film festival studies as well as film and cultural studies more widely.