Dossier on the New Brazilian Cinema: Aesthetics and Emergencies from Lula to Dilma to Bolsonarismo
Dawn Hudson’s Documentaries and Civil Rights History
Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You
Latin American’s Women’s Pictures
Page Views: the Ethics of Appropriation
B Ruby Rich and João Luiz Vieira survey recent trends in contemporary Brazilian cinema.
Over the first months of the pandemic, the internet filled with streaming playlists, Zoom masterpieces, and classic revivals. The litany of canceled or virtual film festivals had become the new normal, with everything from SXSW to Cannes to Telluride called off or moved entirely online, and then evolving into hybrids or customized drive-ins.
Marc Francis on the resurgence of drive-ins, and the possibilities they hold.
On September 25th, Film Quarterly launched PAGE VIEWS LIVE, its new webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications. The series kicked off with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Samantha N. Sheppard about her highly anticipated new book, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen.
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 the Last Poets—recites on the soundtrack, “The white man is cuttin’ off their balls.” Glancing toward the white spectators in the bleachers, the ballplayer seems to experience an epiphany, comprehending his objectification and commodification as an athlete.
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 recount the dark underbelly of outrageous acts by rich and powerful people who eventually get their comeuppance—such as Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005), Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), The Armstrong Lie (2013), Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010), and Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015).
Elizabeth Alsop on expressions of solidarity in recent TV.
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, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, Gillespie et al. explore the ways in which Watchmen remediates American history, starting with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 that serves as the historical and ideological trigger that sets the series in motion. In a wide-ranging conversation that encompasses subjects including fan fiction, adaptation, cultural mythology, and black superheroes, the authors argue for Watchmen’s significance as some of the most consequential television of the century so far.
Isaac Julien’s Lessons on the Hour
Reinventing the Archive: Susana de Sousa Dias
Watchmen: The Conversation
El Mar La Mar, Coco, 1917
Patricio Guzman’s Autobiographical Turn
Golden Age of Parisian Cinemas