These are fraught days. As I have written in this space too often, it’s past time for filmmakers, curators, producers, exhibitors, distributors, and online platforms to step up to the demands of their historic moment, stop proceeding on automatic pilot, and summon the courage to offer visions of a different future.
This dossier has been inspired by an unprecedented and exciting surge in New Disability Media, a movement in which disabled filmmakers are at the forefront of the repositioning of figurations of disability, acting as both creators and subjects while deploying new aesthetic strategies. The following essays take up films, videos, online media, and installations, as well as the emergent theoretical approaches to evolving disability representations and authorship.
Film Quarterly’s webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications continued on September 24th with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) and Rashna Wadia Richards (Rhodes College) about her new book, Cinematic TV: Serial Drama Goes to the Movies (Oxford University Press, 2021), introduced by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.
As the year 2021 crept along, it became increasingly schizophrenic. Emerging from pandemic lockdowns was euphoric—until news of the redubbed Delta variant began to dash hope and cause doubt or panic. Still, theaters announced their reopenings and cinephiles flocked, some nervously, some exuberantly. The Pacific Film Archive, profiled in this issue, set September 1 as its indoor reopening date.
On July 15th, Film Quarterly brought together filmmakers and scholars of Asian-American film and media for an urgent and dynamic webinar discussion of the spate of (renewed) violence against AAPI peoples.
Film Quarterly’s webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications continued on June 22nd with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Philip Scepanski (Marist College) about his new book Tragedy Plus Time: National Trauma and Television Comedy (University of Texas Press, 2021), introduced by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.
It has been more than a year since this editorial space filled with speculations about streaming films and the closing of theaters. It was with distinct excitement, then, that I began to read the reopening announcements. The beloved Paris Theater in New York City, with its lease now held by Netflix and with programming selected by former Museum of the Moving Image curator David Schwartz, trumpeted an Al Pacino retrospective. The Film Forum, that mainstay of downtown New York tastemaking, announced its theater’s reopening while retaining its virtual marquee, too.
B Ruby Rich and João Luiz Vieira survey recent trends in contemporary Brazilian cinema.
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.
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).