Author: Film Quarterly

Cinema and the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Jennifer Fay

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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 Yet, as philosopher Bruno Latour has argued, the “science wars” now appear outdated in light of geopolitical exigencies, particularly the accelerating process of climate change.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

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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

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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

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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, …

Archiveology

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As Catherine Russell observes in her new book, Archiveology: Walter Benjamin and Archival Film Practices, countless moving images are now easily accessible for recycling and remixing. No longer the primary domain of experimental artists, the retrieval and reassembling of audiovisual fragments have become widespread creative practices in contemporary media: “The death of ‘film’ and the rise of digital media,” she notes, “have effectively enabled and produced a new critical language that we are only really learning to speak.”

Bong’s Song

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Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (2017) hops across genres and moods. Part Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943) with a girl and her giant pig instead of a boy and his loyal dog; part Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), also a comic and nightmarish sci-fi; part Capitalism, a Love Story (Michael Moore, 2009) for its lessons in greed, with Tilda Swinton playing twin heads of a transnational biotech corporation; it pleads a serious case for animal rights and vegetarianism as well. Bong has an eccentric genius for songs and scoring, few other living directors make musical choices that are as boldly unconventional. Bong goes musically hog wild in this pig movie. When the apotheosis arrives halfway through the film, it is with a song: John Denver’s “Annie’s Song.” Almost every review of Okja mentions this outlandish pairing of music and visuals. Bong has frequently employed songs cleverly in his films, but never in as deep and many-layered way as in Okja. Gorman pursues Bong’s particular use of songs in his oeuvre to unearth other surprises, and notes that there is a still deeper auteurist vein to be mined for further insight on how “Annie’s Song” works in Okja.

She Can Do It

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Editor in Chief, B. Ruby Rich, weighs in on the latest in film and media culture. She recaps the recent “Dimensions in Black” event that FQ hosted at Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City to launch our December 2017 issue; reviews the content of the current issue; pays tribute to notable voices in the field that have passed on; and hints at things to come in FQ’s 60th anniversary year.

Dimensions in Black

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“Dimensions in Black: Perspectives on Black Film and Media.”  The live launch of FQ 71.2 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on December 5, 2017. This event featured the dossier authors and editor in conversation with each other and the audience.