A spirited, far-sighted guide to politics, Star Wars, the Avengers, David Lynch, and the lost highways between them, for today's capitalist-realist age.
“We've met before, haven't we?” The grand illusion of our era is that we're at the end of history and cinema is now no more than tranquilizing entertainment. What we've lost sight of is the political undercurrent running through movies and their potentially redemptive power, whether they're Hollywood mega blockbusters like Star Wars or off-kilter indies and art films like Blue Velvet.
This is the premise and the challenge of the wide-ranging essays that make up Screen Captures, in which Dennis Hopper, Nicholas Cage, Valerie Solanas, and even Donald Trump all have a starring role. The book tells, as much as it shows, what lies just out of frame: the impacts of COVID on theatres, the class war of the 1% upon the rest, the climate crisis, the ongoing Disney-fication of franchises, and the audience's active participation in the rewriting and reproduction of their capture by screens. Throughout, subliminally, Stephen Lee Naish rings his urgent call: occupy the screen!

Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.Stephen studied media and filmmaking at Leicester college in the late ’90s. He then went on to form a one-man film company called FrameDropFilms, which produced music videos, music documentaries, and video installations for local, and visiting bands and artists. When the smell of stale beer and dirty cigarette smoke got too much, he turned his attention to writing about film and popular culture. He continued his studies with The Open University in the fields of creative writing, essay writing, and contemporary politics.Stephen’s writing explores film, politics, and pop culture and the places where these entities meet. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and periodicals, including Candid Magazine, The Quietus, 3:AM, Empty Mirror, Gadfly, and Everyday Analysis. He also writes book reviews for Review 31, Hong Review of Books and LSC Review of Books.He is the author of several books, the essay collection ‘U.ESS.AY: Politics and Humanity in American Film (Zero Books, 2014), Create or Die: Essays on the Artistry of Dennis Hopper’ (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), ‘Deconstructing Dirty Dancing’ (Zero Books, 2017). Riffs and Meaning (Headpress, 2018), and recently contributed to the music series Modern Music Masters.

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