All posts tagged: Spanish Cinema

Turning Sixty

B. Ruby Rich From Film Quarterly Summer 2018, Volume 71, Number 4 Turning sixty is a landmark. No, not mine: it is Film Quarterly that this year marks its ripe old age and can reassert its claim as the oldest continuing film journal in the United States. Thanks to its dedicated contributors, staff, editorial boards, and, of course, the University of California Press, its publisher and steward, FQ remains young and vital even today, alive and kicking, and, I’d like to think, better than ever. Anniversary celebrations kicked off in Toronto in March, where the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference offered an occasion for the FQ reception at SoHo House. The gathering was a wonderful mix of Toronto locals, FQ contributors and masthead notables, Criterion moguls, UC Press staff, and a kinship network of FQ friends and family. A slideshow of Film Quarterly through the ages was assembled and presented by FQ editorial assistant, Marc Francis. A first run of postcards drawn from four different editorial eras (Ernest Callenbach, Ann Martin, …

Letter from Madrid

FQ columnist Paul Julian Smith reflects on his recent trip to Madrid and the films he saw while there. The financial crisis is grinding into its sixth year in Spain, with youth unemployment reaching a record fifty percent. Given these urgent problems, it would be little surprise if Spaniards were to turn away from the investigation of the troubled legacy of the past that preoccupied their politics and cinema until recently. Yet I myself was in Madrid to take part in a new collective research project on cinema of the 1980s. And during a chilly January three theaters were showing period pieces set in different historical moments, revealing different attitudes to those moments, and aspiring to different levels of cultural distinction. Varied in form but surprisingly similar in content, three of my favorites that winter week were a crowd-pleasing comedy, a worthy middlebrow drama, and an experimental art movie.

Summer 2009: Volume 62, Number 4

Mediating Torture, Vampyr, Film Culture in Madrid, New Paths for German Cinema, and the 2008 Films of the Year

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