All posts tagged: Page Views

Political Camerawork A Conversation with D. Andy Rice

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The trailer for Meghan O’Hara and Mike Attie’s In Country (2014) opens with archival footage of the Vietnam War accompanied by a voice-over whose source is quickly revealed to be that of a man dressed in fatigues. The contrast between the grainy look of the archival footage and the crisp audio of the interview signals a dual temporality that is central to the film’s subject matter: an annual reenactment of the Vietnam War in the Oregon woods.

PAGE VIEWS LIVE: A Conversation with Jean Ma

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Film Quarterly’s original webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications continued on March 6th with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná (Boston University) and Jean Ma (Stanford University) about her new book, At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators (University of California Press, 2022). Moderated by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.

Queer African Cinemas: A Conversation with Lindsey B. Green-Simms

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The first romantic sequence in Rafiki, by the Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu, opens with a close-up of a pair of sneaker-clad feet on a skateboard, its wheels thumping along the asphalt. The feet belong to the teenage Makena, who arrives at her friend Ziki’s apartment building to take her out around town for the day. After Ziki’s mother answers the door, an elliptical cut thrusts the viewer into a montage sequence in which the two teenage girls sit close together on a tuk-tuk ride around the streets of Nairobi.

PAGE VIEWS LIVE: A Conversation with Lúcia Nagib

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Film Quarterly’s webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications, continued on April 2nd with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Professor Lúcia Nagib (University of Reading) about her groundbreaking new book, Realist Cinema as World Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), introduced by FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich.

PAGE VIEWS LIVE: A Conversation with Samantha N. Sheppard

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On September 25th, Film Quarterly launched PAGE VIEWS LIVE, its new webinar series showcasing the best in recent film and media studies publications. The series kicked off with a conversation between Page Views editor Bruno Guaraná and Samantha N. Sheppard about her highly anticipated new book, Sporting Blackness: Race, Embodiment, and Critical Muscle Memory on Screen.

Sporting Blackness: A Conversation with Samantha Sheppard

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A Black man wearing a noose around his neck, filmed from a low angle. This brief, cryptic shot opens Haile Gerima’s short film Hour Glass (1971). A cut, and the character is reintroduced as a college basketball player, first at practice, then in a game, surrounded by other Black athletes. They work the ball while, as Umar Bin Hassan—member of the legendary Harlem collective the Last Poets—recites on the soundtrack, “The white man is cuttin’ off their balls.” Glancing toward the white spectators in the bleachers, the ballplayer seems to experience an epiphany, comprehending his objectification and commodification as an athlete.

Cinematic Archives of the Present: A Conversation with Gustavo Procopio Furtado

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On the morning of August 20, 2019, a man hijacked a bus with thirty-five passengers in Rio de Janeiro, causing a standoff with the police on the bridge that connects that city with its neighbor to the east, Niterói. As the hijacker threatened to burn down the bus with gasoline, helicopters hovered over the scene, and news channels recorded every move they could capture from both parties. A few hostages had been released by the time the hijacker was shot—and killed—by a sniper in the police force.

Moving Hollywood: A Conversation with Daniel Steinhart on Runaway Hollywood: Internationalizing Postwar Production and Location Shooting

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Paramount was so nervous about the on-location production of Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1956) that dailies filmed in the South of France were flown first to London for processing at the Technicolor lab and then to Los Angeles. After executives had reviewed the footage, a cable was dispatched back to France: Hitchcock’s shallow-focus closeups were playing to the weaknesses, rather than the strengths, of the studio’s new and expensive wide-screen format, VistaVision. It fell to the local production manager, C. O. “Doc” Erickson, to mediate the request for wider shots and sharper focus, which would also allow the camera to take in more of what they were all there for: the sunlit French Riviera.