The New Butch Middlebrow
Streaming Streets: Hong Kong’s Digital Media
Helena Ignez, Brazil’s Unknown Superstar
Mediterranean Border Crossings
Interview with Michelle Porte
Churails: Revenge and Censorship
Queer Revolutionary Docs, From Puto to Bixa
Lucia Nagib’s Realist Cinema
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
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.
Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná interviews Jaimie Baron about her new book, Reuse, Misuse, Abuse: The Ethics of Audiovisual Appropriation in the Digital Era.
Asian Americans, the Series
Interview: Renee Tajima-Peña
Special Focus: Fraud and Documentary
Trigonometry and Sex Education
Virtual Doc Market Transitions
The Wandering Earth and Nova
Zeng Jinyan with Ai Xiaoming
Page Views: Sporting Blackness
Black film scholar, critic, and curator, Albert Johnson is hardly a household name–but he should be. In 1965, at the height of the civil rights era, Johnson offered this dissection of the representation of African-Americans in Hollywood cinema of the time.
Michael Boyce Gillespie leads a roundtable with scholars Jonathan W. Gray, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Kristen Warner to discuss issues of medium, genre, fandom, and African American history in the highly regarded HBO series Watchmen. Characterizing the HBO series as a disobedient adaptation that modifies, extends, and redirects the world making of its source material, the famed twelve-issue comic-book series of the same name, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, Gillespie et al. explore the ways in which Watchmen remediates American history, starting with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 that serves as the historical and ideological trigger that sets the series in motion. In a wide-ranging conversation that encompasses subjects including fan fiction, adaptation, cultural mythology, and black superheroes, the authors argue for Watchmen’s significance as some of the most consequential television of the century so far.
In February 1968, at the West Indian Students’ Centre in London, James Baldwin delivered a now-famous lecture on black experience and identity in Britain and America. Boldly rejecting simplistic notions of race and color by elucidating the history of racial mixing in the United States and the colonies, he also led a discussion with civil rights activist and comedian Dick Gregory on the role of white liberals in the black struggle. The event was brilliantly captured by Trinidadian-British photographer and recently trained filmmaker Horace Ové in Baldwin’s Nigger (1969), a forty-eight-minute black-and-white documentary made in a simple but intimate cinema verité style.
On June 5th, Brian Hu and FQ editor B. Ruby Rich moderated a virtual roundtable on Asian American filmmaking in New York during the 1980s and 1990s. With FQ special dossier contributors Roddy Bogawa, Shu Lea Cheang, Daryl Chin, Vince Schleitwiler, and Rea Tajiri.