Author: Film Quarterly

On July 18th, Film Quarterly Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) joined Marina Hassapopoulou (New York University) for a conversation about her new book Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). In this exciting new work of digital media scholarship, Hassapopoulou expands the history and theory of cinema through the inclusion of its interactive dimensions. This webinar, moderated by outgoing Film Quarterly editor-in-chief Rebecca Prime, is now available on FQ's YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/93s6zqmVY9M, and is embedded below. Guaraná's print interview with Hassapopoulou appears in FQ's Summer 2024 issue (Volume 77, Number 4). It is available online at www.filmquarterly.org together with a link to the introduction of Interactive Cinema, courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press.

Page Views Live: Interactive Cinema – A Conversation with Bruno Guaraná and Marina Hassapopoulou moderated by Rebecca Prime

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On July 18th, Film Quarterly Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) joined Marina Hassapopoulou (New York University) for a conversation about her new book Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). In this exciting new work of digital media scholarship, Hassapopoulou expands the history and theory of cinema through the inclusion of its interactive dimensions. This webinar, moderated by outgoing Film Quarterly editor-in-chief Rebecca Prime, is now available on FQ’s YouTube Channel (https://youtu.be/93s6zqmVY9M), and is embedded below. Guaraná’s print interview with Hassapopoulou appears in FQ’s Summer 2024 issue (Volume 77, Number 4). It is available online at http://www.filmquarterly.org together with a link to the introduction of Interactive Cinema, courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press.

Dis-Orienting Media: The Creative Vision of Arab American Cultural Production

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On June 12th, 2024, this webinar explored the cultural histories, formal innovations, and political interventions of Arab media in the US. FQ columnist and contributing editor Ramzi Fawaz (University of Wisconsin) moderated the discussion with Maytha Alhassen (co-executive producer, Ramy), Thomas S. Dolan (ACLS Fellow, Emory University), and William Youmans (George Washington University). Introduced by FQ editor-in-chief Rebecca Prime.

“You’re my people”: Accounting for the “Us” in The Last of Us

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In The Last of Us Part II, the second installment in the hit video game series, players are made to reckon with the moral consequences of its protagonist Joel’s disastrous actions in the previous game. For his inaugural column, Ramzi Fawaz argues that the sequel “is one of contemporary popular culture’s most explicit statements of what political theorist Hannah Arendt calls ‘representative thinking.’” The video game as a medium makes representative thinking an embodied experience, forcing players into a range of perspectives and moral positions as they both commit and become victims of virtually enacted violence. In doing so, the game functions a critique of “the ceaselessly spreading network of human violence and its unforeseen consequences,” and testament to the forms of collectivity and connection that are forged in its wake.

Alice Rohrwacher’s Cinema of Poetry

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Alice Rohrwacher’s La chimera (La Chimera, 2023), the director’s fourth feature, opens with a young woman’s face, her glow, her blondeness. Part of the screen is dark, the frame transversally bisected. The shot is a shard of light, a memory retrieved from the recesses of the mind. The image is miraculous, real, yet vanishing with the thin ethereality of a flashback. The film’s first words are in English, as Arthur (Josh O’Connor), a lover, speaks in hushed tones: “So it’s you.” He seems to label the image of his lover Beniamina (Yle Vianello) as he says: “My last woman’s face.” The end of the film is in its beginning. An exquisite shot shows the skin of her back, its liveness, its tattooed sun or star. Her body is glimpsed from different sides, the camera circling her as if she were a statue. In the darkness, I recall the films of Chris Marker, the leaking of memory, tantalizing images of happiness appearing in a postapocalyptic world.

PAGE VIEWS LIVE: A Conversation with Kartik Nair

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Film Quarterly’s original webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media publications continued this spring with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) and Kartik Nair (Temple University) about his new book Seeing Things: Spectral Materialities of Bombay Horror (University of California Press, 2024). Taking the materiality of the filmic image as a starting point for investigating gaps in the historical record, Nair brings a welcome spotlight to Indian cinema’s forgotten horror wave of the 1970s and 1980s. Moderated by FQ editor-in-chief Rebecca Prime.

Seeing Things: A Conversation with Kartik Nair

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Directed by two members of family of filmmakers known as the Ramsay Brothers, pioneers of Indian horror cinema, the 1988 film Veerana (Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay) centers on the figure of the chudail, or witch, as she haunts the surroundings of a mansion. She seduces men while in womanly form, only to later reveal her horrific nature.

Proximities of Violence: The Zone of Interest

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Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) takes an unorthodox approach to Holocaust cinema, studying the everyday life of the Commandant of Auschwitz and his family in their home just outside the wall of the camp, while never directly representing the violence inside. Voyeurism, extended takes, and unstable points of identification create an ethical crisis for the viewer, who is left questioning the mechanics, and the limits, of empathy. The film offers a sensory bounty: tactile images, pastoral greenery, and heightened sounds. These surface-rich images in particular function in dialogue with a history of Holocaust cinema, complicating already vexing questions of cultural memory and political framing. And the pointed focus on the administration of fascism within the home exposes both the domestic implementation of a “blood and soil” ideology, and the ways in which intimacy and proximity can both uphold and erode the frameworks of war.