Author: Film Quarterly

PAGE VIEWS LIVE: A Conversation with Jaimie Baron

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Film Quarterly’s new webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications continued on December 14th, 2020 with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Jaimie Baron about her new book, Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era (Rutgers University Press, 2020).  In this era of fake news and digital manipulation, Reuse, Misuse, Abuse offers an urgent discussion of the ethical and political stakes involved in the repurposing of audiovisual media.  Introduced by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich. Bruno Guaraná’s interview with Jaimie Baron appears in the Winter 2020 issue of Film Quarterly. A pdf download of the introduction from Reuse, Misuse, Abuse will be available through the webinar and at https://filmquarterly.org.

Webinar: In Conversation–B.Ruby Rich, Kass Banning, Warren Crichlow, and Isaac Julien

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On the occasion of the exhibition of Isaac Julien‘s celebrated 10 screen installation, Lessons of the Hour, Film Quarterly collaborated with the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts on a webinar to mark this meditation on Frederick Douglass and his times. On October 28th, FQ editor B. Ruby Rich moderated a discussion of Julien’s genre-breaking and immersive moving-image practice with the artist himself as well as with professors Kass Banning (University of Toronto) and Warren Crichlow (York University, Toronto), authors of the first major study of the exhibition, “A Grand Panorama: Isaac Julien, Frederick Douglass, and Lessons of the Hour,” (FQ 73.4).

Editor’s Introduction: Documenting Conspiracy and Conning in the Age of Misinformation

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It’s been called many things: the Golden Age of Fraud, the Golden Age of Conspiracy Theories, the Age of Fake News. Call this moment what you will, but one thing is clear: studying fabrication has perhaps never been more pressing in US history. Trump’s administration has brought with it an onslaught of lies, from the turnout figures at the 2017 inauguration to the sugar-coating of its family-separation policy; then its lies started killing people en masse with the advent of COVID-19. The blatant months-long governmental repudiation of lockdowns and mask-wearing has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and counting. It’s time not to simply turn away from the false, or to try to combat it with truth, but to study it, regardless of the election results of November 2020.

The Screening Life, Once Removed

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This editorial was written on the Fourth of July, that annual orgy of barbecues and tin-hat patriotism made worse this year by the unprecedented arrival in US cities of bomb-grade fireworks—explosives that shook the ground, sending dogs cowering and possibly softening up the urban population for a battlefield future. This appears, however, in the FQ issue emerging just prior to the 2020 US presidential election, an event destined to change the future of this country and the world and, yes, the film and TV world, in ways that are equally unpredictable, confusing, and terrifying.

Conspiracy, Paranoia, #MeToo, and the Reparative Work of Sean Young’s Catwoman

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Hollywood will be the first to tell you that Hollywood is an abuser of women. Whether showcasing the sadism and control of the Big Bad Studio System that led to the human wreckage of Judy (Rupert Goold, 2019) or the pre-#MeToo casting-couch antics of Bombshell (Jay Roach, 2019), the ever-inventive industry has been ingenious in learning how to exploit even its sins. As these superficial “demystifications” of the industry’s past abuses perform showy and lucrative mea culpas, they facilitate protracted displays of the industry’s time-honored specialty: the humiliation of its female stars.

Under Fyre: Debt Culture in the Streaming Era

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In what trade papers termed an escalation of the so-called streaming wars, Hulu “rush released” Fyre Fraud (Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, 2019) on January 14, 2019, four days before Netflix debuted Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened (Chris Smith, 2019). Both of these documentaries, each racing to be first, provide insider knowledge about the infamous Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, a fraudulent luxury concert experience turned notorious social-media disaster. Festivalgoers, who had paid anywhere from $450 to $250,000, went to the Bahamas expecting the “once-in-a-lifetime musical experience” promised by Fyre’s glitzy advertising, only to find a logistics and public-relations disaster: canceled musical acts, disaster-relief tents as accommodations, and dysfunctional management.