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.
FROM THE EDITOR Turning Sixty B. Ruby Rich FEATURES Unrest: Gender, Chronic Illness, and the Limits Of Documentary Visibility Megan Moodie Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama, A Virtual Report Linda Williams INTERVIEWS Searching For Nelly Kaplan Joan Dupont “I Was Never Afraid,” An Interview with Lucrecia Martel Gerd Gemünden and Silvia Spitta COLUMNS Letter from Madrid | La Llamada, Paquita Salas, And The Javis Paul Julian Smith Elsewhere | The War for Nostalgia: Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat Bilal Qureshi On Platforms | What It Means to be High Maintenance Caetlin Benson-Allott FESTIVAL REPORTS Report From Tbilisi Jerry White A Mechanism Capable of Changing Itself: Berlinale 2018 Selina Robertson The Scales of Justice: Sundance 2018 B. Ruby Rich PAGE VIEWS Cinema and the Anthropocene: A Conversation with Jennifer Fay Nicholas Baer BOOK REVIEWS Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC, and the Birth of the Blacklist by Thomas Doherty Carrie Rickey The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, Media Ecologies by Alexander Zahlten Rea Amit A Dance with Fred Astaire by Jonas Mekas Girish Shambu Going Viral: Zombies, …
Gianfranco Rosi’s Intimate Stories
Slow Violence in Heli
Dissecting the Okja soundtrack
The Business of Exhibition at 100
Interviews: Kenya Bariss and Kevin Jerome Everson
Film Festivals: Yamagata and Thessaloniki
This special dossier for Film Quarterly comprises a selection of essays that share the central idea that the work ahead for scholars in the current moment must be to appreciate what has been an ever-increasing complication of the idea of black film and media over the last ten years. This dossier considers significant trends, film and media objects, and clusters of work related to issues of blackness and questions of aesthetics, historiography, industrial practice, collectivity, politics, and culture. It is compelled by a shared belief that requires scholars to remain open to contemporary and future enactments while at the same time recognizing the momentum of the past.
The idea that a struggle can be waged via cinema is an appealing one today, as so many other battlefields seem already lost. For me, there is always hope lurking in film and television and, increasingly, online media. Political obstacles may seem insurmountable, but as I am fond of declaring: nobody has to elect a film. You can buy your ticket or download the new season or share the latest upload or streaming evidence and—at press time, at least—no one can stop you.
David Sterritt reviews this smart and concise introduction to cinema, the latest entry in Oxford’s “Very Short Introduction” series.
The typical challenge of any film festival report is to create a fictional narrative out of thin air, or a meaningful proposition out of chaos. And this becomes even harder in an era when layoffs of various film reviewers have coincided with a continuing erasure of any clear line separating criticism from advertising in most mainstream venues.
For the last six months or so the idea that film criticism is undergoing an identity crisis has been gaining momentum. I carry some of the blame for this, having edited a “Who Needs Critics?” special issue of Sight and Sound, and organized and participated in public debates, some of which were even entertaining.
When the editor told me that this was em>Film Quarterly’s fiftieth anniversary issue I was surprised — surprised not that the magazine had been going so long, but that it was not in fact even older
Founding editor Ernest Callenbach looks back on the first 50 years of Film Quarterly.