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Fall 2020: Volume 74, Number 1
ASIAN AMERICANS, THE SERIES INTERVIEW: RENEE TAJIMA-PEÑA SPECIAL FOCUS: FRAUD AND DOCUMENTARY TRIGONOMETRY AND SEX EDUCATION VIRTUAL DOC MARKET TRANSITIONS THE WANDERING EARTH AND NOVA ZENG JINYAN WITH AI XIAOMING PAGE VIEWS: SPORTING BLACKNESS
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Conspiracy, Paranoia, #MeToo, and the Reparative Work of Sean Young’s Catwoman
Hollywood will be the first to tell you that Hollywood is an abuser of women. Whether showcasing the sadism and control of the Big Bad Studio System that led to the human wreckage of Judy (Rupert Goold, 2019) or the pre-#MeToo casting-couch antics of Bombshell (Jay Roach, 2019), the ever-inventive industry has been ingenious in learning how to exploit even its sins. As these...
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Loving the Lie: Elizabeth Holmes, Thomas Edison, and Alex Gibney
The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (2019), about the infamous biotech company Theranos and its enigmatic founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is the latest documentary from Alex Gibney. The Theranos/Holmes story is a perfect vehicle for Gibney, a writer-director who specializes in essayistic films that detail the complex nexus of dishonesty, ruthlessness, hubris, and painful reckonings. His filmography is filled with documentaries that fastidiously...
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Under Fyre: Debt Culture in the Streaming Era
In what trade papers termed an escalation of the so-called streaming wars, Hulu “rush released” Fyre Fraud (Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, 2019) on January 14, 2019, four days before Netflix debuted Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (Chris Smith, 2019). Both of these documentaries, each racing to be first, provide insider knowledge about the infamous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, a...
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Smoke and Mirrors: The Bio-Con Documentary in the Age of Trump
Back in 2016, when Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States, there was considerable public discussion about whether or not he would be able to govern by trafficking in the same falsehoods and public prejudices that he peddled as a candidate. To much horror and dismay, four years later, he has proven unequivocally that he can. Popular film and television have...
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Editor’s Introduction: Documenting Conspiracy and Conning in the Age of Misinformation
It's been called many things: the Golden Age of Fraud, the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories, the Age of Fake News. Call this moment what you will, but one thing is clear: studying fabrication has perhaps never been more pressing in US history. Trump's administration has brought with it an onslaught of lies, from the turnout figures at the 2017 inauguration to the sugar-coating...
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Sporting Blackness: A Conversation with Samantha Sheppard
A Black man wearing a noose around his neck, filmed from a low angle. This brief, cryptic shot opens Haile Gerima's short film Hour Glass (1971). A cut, and the character is reintroduced as a college basketball player, first at practice, then in a game, surrounded by other Black athletes. They work the ball while, as Umar Bin Hassan—member of the legendary Harlem collective...
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The Screening Life, Once Removed
This editorial was written on the Fourth of July, that annual orgy of barbecues and tin-hat patriotism made worse this year by the unprecedented arrival in US cities of bomb-grade fireworks—explosives that shook the ground, sending dogs cowering and possibly softening up the urban population for a battlefield future. This appears, however, in the FQ issue emerging just prior to the 2020 US presidential...
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From the Archives: Albert Johnson
Black film scholar, critic, and curator, Albert Johnson is hardly a household name--but he should be. In 1965, at the height of the civil rights era, Johnson offered this dissection of the representation of African-Americans in Hollywood cinema of the time.
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Thinking about Watchmen: A Roundtable
Michael Boyce Gillespie leads a roundtable with scholars Jonathan W. Gray, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Kristen Warner to discuss issues of medium, genre, fandom, and African American history in the highly regarded HBO series Watchmen. Characterizing the HBO series as a disobedient adaptation that modifies, extends, and redirects the world making of its source material, the famed twelve-issue comic-book series of the same name,...
