Here's how to join Tuesday's Substack Live event with Professor Catherine Liu

We're discussing Eddington, a COVID drama that's divided opinion.

Send me your questions - about Eddington, about the political and social situation in the USA, about movies and ideology - for Professor Liu. Reply to this email or email me direct. I’ll put them to her.

Tuesday 16 September, 11am PDT/2pm EDT/7pm BST

Okay, our Substack live is confirmed. Click the link to add it to your calendar and get a reminder.

My guest for the chat is Professor Catherine Liu, a film studies academic and an influential communicator on what’s sometimes called the ‘post-liberal left’. She came to my attention when I started to see people raving about her pamphlet Virtue Hoarders on Twitter back in 2021. The book was a surprise and a revelation for me because it suggested the possibility of a viable left politics beyond the stupid to-and-fro of the culture wars and identity politics.

Lately she’s been running an online seminar series for her Substack subscribers about gangster capitalism in the movies. She’s written about melodrama and Sinophone cinema and she has a book coming out about ‘trauma capitalism’ (also lately I was thrilled to learn that she’s translated Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - now waiting for my attention on the Kindle). You should subscribe to her Substack.

Add the event to your calendar. You’ll get a reminder.

The Live event will be available to all subscribers, paying or otherwise, but I’d love it if you’d take this opportunity to support the project here - a journey through the history of the world’s primary movie culture - Hollywood - starting in 1913.

If you’d like to watch the movie ahead of our discussion, it looks like it is available to stream on Amazon Prime and Apple TV+ but only in the USA, not in the UK, where it’s still in cinemas.