Who is America? On Truth, Lies and Laughter
Maggie Hennefeld on Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary series, and political satire in the age of post-truth politics.
Author: Film Quarterly
Time’s Up for the Male Canon
Girish Shambu asks: “What will it take to break the stranglehold of male domination in filmmaking?”
Cinema of the Palestinian Revolution: A Conversation with Nadia Yaqub
The terrain of history is perhaps nowhere more fraught than in the Israeli/Palestinian context, a highly charged force field of ethno-religious identities, political ideologies, and conflicting territorial claims. Overlaid with collective memories and symbolic meanings, the landscape has borne witness to war and imperial conquest, shifting regimes and borders, perpetual occupation and injustice, and overlapping yet seemingly irreconcilable narratives of past experience. Take 1948: celebrated by Zionists for the establishment of the State of Israel in the wake of the Holocaust, the year is remembered by Palestinian Arabs as the Nakba (“catastrophe”), given the forcible dispossession and expulsion of an estimated 750,000 native inhabitants. And where many Israeli Jews have cast their nation’s founding as a return to political sovereignty after nearly two millennia in the diaspora, Palestinians have sought to assert a counterhistory in a condition of subjugation and exilic dispersal from their land.
The Handmaid’s Tale as Ustopian Allegory: “Stars and Stripes Forever, Baby”
Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (2017¬–) resonates strongly as an allegorical, science-fictional response to the Trump administration. The show refuses to accept the “new normal” as normal and acknowledges its audience’s simultaneous feelings of resistance and exhaustion. The program ultimately argues that, while hope alone is not enough to sustain anyone through the Trump years, it is the right place to start. Above all, the program points to the power of collective resistance. As Americans face down a fascist president, as they contend with babies torn from their mother’s bosoms at the border, as they confront a powerful resurgence in White Nationalist activism, the country has perhaps never felt more divided, or threatened. And yet the only way to defeat Trumpism is by standing together and collectively pushing back. The Handmaid’s Tale may not show viewers exactly how to do that, but it does show its audience exactly what it would feel like.
A Deer in the Headlights
First things first: this issue marks the arrival of Rebecca Prime as Associate Editor of Film Quarterly. Rebecca first published a book review in FQ back in 2006 and also had one in the last issue, with articles in other journals in the interim. Rebecca is a film historian, editor of Cinematic Homecomings: Exile and Return in Transnational Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2014), and author of Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2014).
Lucrecia Martel in Conversation with B Ruby Rich
Lucrecia Martel – In conversation – April 22, 2018. This page contains documentation of excerpts from Lucrecia Martel’s appearance at the BAMPFA Pacific Film Archive, in conversation with FQ’s B. Ruby Rich. Video recorded and edited for Film Quarterly by Juan Carlos Davíla and Rana Jarbou. Thanks to Kathryn McKay and Marcus Hu. Support from the Ford Foundation JustFilms initiative.
Cinema and the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Jennifer Fay
For many critical theorists, it has become second nature to view science with a degree of suspicion. Complicit in the most egregious offenses of the modern era, science has been identified with everything from positivism and instrumental reason to essentialism and biopolitical control. Such skepticism came to a head in the late twentieth century, as leftist thinkers in the humanities sought to undermine a realist approach to scientific knowledge; social transformation seemed to hinge on the unsettling of epistemic certainty and the subversion of all normative, objectivist validity claims. Yet, as philosopher Bruno Latour has argued, the “science wars” now appear outdated in light of geopolitical exigencies, particularly the accelerating process of climate change. The language of social construction and cultural relativism must give way to an emphatic defense of scientific consensus and global, albeit inconvenient, truth.
Searching for Nelly Kaplan
Critic Joan Dupont went in search of filmmaker Nelly Kaplan, whom she had met at an awards ceremony in Paris over a decade ago. She was famous for one film, La Fiancée du Pirate (A Very Curious Girl, 1969), which had taken France and the international world of women’s film festivals by storm. She had slipped out of sight; nobody seemed to know where she was or why. At the Cinémathèque Française, there was only a kind of embarrassment when her name was mentioned and no plan to show her films. This past year has seen a resurgence of interest in the work of Kaplan, and the restoration and rerelease of some of her work by Lobster Films. Dupont met with Kaplan at her Paris apartment to discuss past, present, and future.
Turning Sixty
B. Ruby Rich From Film Quarterly Summer 2018, Volume 71, Number 4 Turning sixty is a landmark. No, not mine: it is Film Quarterly that this year marks its ripe old age and can reassert its claim as the oldest continuing film journal in the United States. Thanks to its dedicated contributors, staff, editorial boards, and, of course, the University of California Press, its publisher and steward, FQ remains young and vital even today, alive and kicking, and, I’d like to think, better than ever. Anniversary celebrations kicked off in Toronto in March, where the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference offered an occasion for the FQ reception at SoHo House. The gathering was a wonderful mix of Toronto locals, FQ contributors and masthead notables, Criterion moguls, UC Press staff, and a kinship network of FQ friends and family. A slideshow of Film Quarterly through the ages was assembled and presented by FQ editorial assistant, Marc Francis. A first run of postcards drawn from four different editorial eras (Ernest Callenbach, Ann Martin, …
Summer 2018: Volume 71, Number 4
FROM THE EDITOR Turning Sixty B. Ruby Rich FEATURES Unrest: Gender, Chronic Illness, and the Limits Of Documentary Visibility Megan Moodie Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama, A Virtual Report Linda Williams INTERVIEWS Searching For Nelly Kaplan Joan Dupont “I Was Never Afraid,” An Interview with Lucrecia Martel Gerd Gemünden and Silvia Spitta COLUMNS Letter from Madrid | La Llamada, Paquita Salas, And The Javis Paul Julian Smith Elsewhere | The War for Nostalgia: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat Bilal Qureshi On Platforms | What It Means to be High Maintenance Caetlin Benson-Allott FESTIVAL REPORTS Report From Tbilisi Jerry White A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself: Berlinale 2018 Selina Robertson The Scales of Justice: Sundance 2018 B. Ruby Rich PAGE VIEWS Cinema and the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Jennifer Fay Nicholas Baer BOOK REVIEWS Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist by Thomas Doherty Carrie Rickey The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, Media Ecologies by Alexander Zahlten Rea Amit A Dance with Fred Astaire by Jonas Mekas Girish Shambu Going Viral: Zombies, …
