All posts tagged: Documentary

A Vocation in Film

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FQ Editor-in-Chief B. Ruby Rich’s roundup of the Summer 2016 issue: Volume 69, Number 4. Rich recalls the early years of university-level film history courses, assesses the barrage of industry news that lands on her desk daily, and pays homage to Richard Dyer, who was honored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at their annual conference. Dyer’s first published monograph, GAYS AND FILM (1977), came into the world in a vacuum. There was simply no such field. Today, it is difficult to comprehend the force of imagination and courage required to launch such a career at such a time. Forty years ago, a grand ballroom would not have filled with people and applause for a gay scholar; today, it was unremarkable that one did.

Tribute to Eduardo Coutinho

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Joao Moreira Salles & Natalia Brizuela – In conversation – April 14-15, 2016. This page contains documentation of the final two nights of the Eduardo Coutinho retrospective presented by the Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA) in conjunction with the publication of FQ Volume 69, Number 3, with its special dossier on Coutinho.

Conversation and Duration in Eduardo Coutinho’s Films

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I am not interested in the short take. I want the temporal dimension of things.—Eduardo Coutinho

Dossier co-editor (and FQ Contributing Editor) Natalia Brizuela takes up the much-debated theme of conversation in the films of Eduardo Coutinho, and juxtaposes the conversational to the questions of temporality and duration that occur across Coutinho’s entire body of work.

An Introduction to Coutinho

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FQ Editor-in-Chief B. Ruby Rich and guest issue editor Natalia Brizuela introduce FQ’s dossier on the work of Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, who died unexpectedly in 2014. Eduardo Coutinho, the greatest documentary filmmaker in the last half-century of Brazilian cinema, is woefully underrecognized in the United States and has not been adequately incorporated into the global history of documentary cinema. This dossier aims to open up conversations about the work of Coutinho in Anglophone cinema studies, and to encourage more scholarship on the subject.

Evidence of Visibility

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“People need a screen.” With those words, author/activist Naomi Klein galvanized the room at the CBC Glenn Gould Theatre, where a daylong documentary discussion was held in September in conjunction with the Toronto International Film Festival [see “Toronto Turns Forty” in this issue]../

New Visions, Old Crises

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Documentary has been in the grip of a shape-shifting transformation, thanks to shifts in technologies, genre, journalism, and the status of evidence and veracity. Not since the 1980s—when the invention of camcorders, VHS tape, and VCR machines, alongside the debut of cable television, fueled the last great upheaval—has the field been so explosively inventive and destabilized

Preface To Concerning Violence

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s preface to the film Concerning Violence (2013) is offered for the first time in print. Readers can also watch the trailer for the film, which is a tribute to and an illustration of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Spivak states that she ends this preface as Fanon would end his writing: I end it in Fanon’s own way, turning around for our own use what a European philosopher wrote for the use of Europe over 200 years ago: turning Kant around for our purposes as he did Hegel: “anything which the people (i.e. the entire mass of subjects) cannot decide for themselves and their fellows cannot be decided for the people by the sovereign either.”

Film [sic]

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New FQ Editor-in-Chief B. Ruby Rich announces her arrival at a moment of transformation in the field of media studies and the media industry at large. “Assuming the editorship of Film Quarterly at a time when nearly every element of the medium of cinema is up for reinvention is no small burden. For those of us who love cinema and live by its precepts, happily, there’s as much reason to feel exalted as daunted by the transformations underway within and outside its domain…Of one thing I am certain: Film Quarterly has a crucial role to play. Since 1958, FQ has been a lodestone guiding the development and best ideas of an emergent field, discipline, and locus of attention. Its future calling can be no less.”