Author: Film Quarterly

Winter 2020: Volume 74, Number 2

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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

Zoom Out: The Melancholic Screens of 2020

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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.

PAGE VIEWS LIVE: A Conversation with Samantha N. Sheppard

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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.

Sporting Blackness: A Conversation with Samantha Sheppard

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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.

Loving the Lie: Elizabeth Holmes, Thomas Edison, and Alex Gibney

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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).