On December 13, 2016, a month after the presidential election, Film Quarterly organized an emergency panel with the sponsorship of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Staged amid the political aftershocks, the event at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center’s Amphitheater brought together eight panelists from wildly divergent arenas to engage a rapt audience with its central theme: “Film & Media in A Time of Repression: Practices and Aesthetics of Resistance.” This video documentation, courtesy of FSLC, includes the entirety of the evening’s proceedings including both halves of the panel and the discussion that followed. Thanks are due to FQ’s Regina Longo and Eugene Hernandez, Brian Brooks, and other FSLC staff for key support.
With the evening introduced by the Film Society’s Dennis Lim and with FQ editor and panel organizer B. Ruby Rich as moderator, the panel is divided into two sections. The first panel consists of Walter Bernstein, age 97, survivor of the Hollywood Blacklist; Susana de Sousa Dias, the Portuguese filmmaker known for 48 (2010), Natureza Morta (2005) and Luz Obscura (2016); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, New York University professor, author of Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (2015) and Fascist Modernities (2001), and CNN commentator for the 2016 campaign; and Natalia Brizuela, UC Berkeley professor of Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature & Culture and Film and Media, author of Fotografia e Imperio: Paisagens para um Brasil Moderno (2012), among many texts, and Contributing Editor at Film Quarterly.
Walter Bernstein and B. Ruby Rich. Photo courtesy of Jean-Philippe Voiron
The second panel consists of Michael Boyce Gillespie, City College of New York (CUNY) professor of film and author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (2016); Angela Zito, New York University professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies, co-founder and co-director of its Center for Religion and Media, filmmaker (Writing in Water, 2012), and co-editor of DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations After Independent Film (2015); Imani Perry, Princeton University professor of African American Studies affiliated with its programs in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies, author of More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (2011), Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (2004), and numerous other articles; and Beau Willimon, playwright, screenwriter, and producer, best known as creator-showrunner of the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning House of Cards, and, after the election, founder of the Action Group Network, a nationwide grassroots organizing network.
The recording is available on Film Quarterly‘s YouTube channel here
You can also listen to the audio stream via the Film Society’s podcast The Close-Up
Header Image: Beau Willimon and audience member. Courtesy of Jean-Philippe Voiron.
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