All posts tagged: Silent Cinema

Skirts and Pants and Everything In Between: Laura Horak on Girls Will Be Boys

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Laura Horak’s first monograph, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908–1934, is refreshing and invigorating. In a moment when pop culture is ablaze with stories of the “novelty” of transgender and gender nonconforming people, FQ Associate editor Regina Longo was delighted to sink into a thoroughly researched book on this subject that was ten years in the making. Read the column and then download the free chapter of the book offered here for FQ readers.

An Interview with Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan on The Promise of Cinema

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FQ Associate Editor Regina Longo interviews film scholars and theorists Anton Kaes, Nicholas Baer, and Michael Cowan on their latest labor of love. The Promise of Cinema is an extraordinary anthology of primary source texts of German-language film theory, originally published between 1907 and 1933, with well over 250 carefully curated texts appearing for the first time in English-language translation. Read the column then read selects from the anthology chosen by its editors for FQ’s readers.

Historian Cara Caddoo Discusses Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life

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When FQ Associate Editor Regina Longo interviewed Cara Caddoo for this column, they talked about the current state of racial politics in the United States. Despite the long road ahead and the critical, collective work that must be done to achieve equality, historians like Cara Caddoo are bringing to the surface narratives that will become part of a larger conversation of the history of race and media in the US. Read the column and a selected excerpt from Chapter 3: “Colored Theaters in the Jim Crow City.”

A Conversation with Eric Smoodin and Jon Lewis on The American Film History Reader

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Eric Smoodin and Jon Lewis first met on a college campus as film studies graduate students in 1979. When the opportunity arose to talk to them about their latest collaboration, FQ Associate Editor Regina Longo welcomed the chance to learn about the process behind putting together an anthology that is very likely to become a staple in college classrooms. Read the column, then download the Introduction to the book to learn more about the editors’ motivations for this anthology.

Summer 2012: Volume 65, Number 4

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FEATURES: Melancholia and the Comedy of Abandon; The Hunger Games and other Precarious Dystopias; the Arts of Imitation, Information Managers, and Several Sides of Errol Morris.

READ: Interview with Manuel Alberto Claro, Paul Julian Smith on Cabin in the Woods, a review of the book Film: A Very Short Introduction, and a tribute to Film Quarterly founding editor Ernest “Chick” Callenbach.

Vertov’s World

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“Soviet cinema is currently experiencing an unforgettable turning point,” wrote Dziga Vertov in 1926, in an April 12 letter . . . Judging by the two short films, A Sixth Part of the World (1926) and The Eleventh Year (1928), Vertov was doing little more than stating the truth.

Passio

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The first image we see is of a dead body, probably from a film of a concentration camp but, like every other archival image in this film, it does not fit into familiar paradigms. A skeletal, naked corpse of a man lies face up on the ground, arms and legs splayed out—the whole cadaver fills the screen. Where can we possibly go from here?