An Expansive View

I recently received the thoughtful gift of a copy of Film Quarterly from 1977. The issue is slim—only sixty-six pages—and its small quarto size—roughly seven by ten inches—compact. The cover image, of Jeanne Dielman doing dishes in her housecoat, her back to the audience, fills the entire cover apart from the Film Quarterly logo, discreetly placed in the top right corner. In its format and presentation, Film Quarterly was very much of its time, signaling its affinity with other publications for serious cinephiles—most notably, the similarly petite Cahiers du Cinéma, whose July 1977 issue featured an interview with Chantal Akerman.Just as Film Quarterly’s format has evolved since 1977 to include a full-size print version, downloadable PDFs, and a public-facing website, so has the journal’s content. The summer 1977 issue was exclusively focused on film, both narrative and documentary, reflecting the medium’s cultural prominence and dominance. Fast-forward to the summer of 2024, and Film Quarterly’s current issue showcases the field’s expansion in the intervening years. From the features to the book reviews, forms of visual culture—from apps and video games to VR and AI-assisted computational imaging—share space with film and television as objects of study.This disciplinary profusion was on full display in Boston in March at the annual conference of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, where panels on topics ranging from mediating carcerality to classical Hollywood competed in any given time slot. The Film Quarterly editorial team spent a busy few days scouting material for future issues, ensuring that the journal continues to be in conversation with new developments in academic film and media studies. At the reception that the journal hosted, I was delighted to hear of Film Quarterly’s value in the classroom, where its accessible style makes it well suited to teaching undergraduates. Comments such as these emphasize the journal’s important role and significant legacy as a crossover journal that conveys scholarly insights to a wider audience.To that end, I am excited to announce that Amy Herzog and Ramzi Fawaz have joined Film Quarterly as contributing editors. In the two extraordinary features she has written for the journal—the first on reenactment as feminist praxis in Maria Schneider, 1983 (Elisabeth Subrin, 2022) and My Name Is Andrea (Pratibha Parmar, 2022) and the second on the language of fascism in The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)—Herzog combined a deep theoretical engagement with a clarity of prose that unpacked and illuminated these complex films. Fawaz, who works at the intersection of feminist and queer media and American popular culture, brings his distinctive and highly engaging voice to the journal with his new column, Imagination Unbound, premiering in this issue. As its title suggests, the column revels in media that escapes rigid ideologies through the power of sheer creativity. Welcome!David Bordwell, an exemplary scholar who also excelled at writing for the general reader, passed away in late February. His influence on the field cannot be understated. Film Art: An Introduction, the classroom textbook he coauthored with his wife, Dr. Kristin Thompson, has provided countless undergraduates with a foundation in film history and a starter kit for film analysis. His magisterial The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, coauthored with Thompson and Janet Staiger, detected and defined the shared stylistic elements of Hollywood cinema during the studio era, as determined by the technological and industrial practices of the time. Reviewing the book for Film Quarterly shortly after its publication in 1985, John Fell predicted that The Classical Hollywood Cinema “will undoubtedly itself establish a standard against which subsequent research must be measured.”1 Indeed.A pioneer of American independent cinema who directed twenty feature films in addition to numerous television episodes over the course of a fifty-year career, Robert M. Young passed away in early February at the age of ninety-nine. His remarkable personal and professional longevity reflect the vitality of a spirit for whom making films was a way of engaging with the world. After getting his start making scientific films and TV documentaries, Young won a Peabody for his 1960 film Sit-In, about civil rights activists in the South (including a young John Lewis), made for NBC. This project led to Young’s move into independent features a few years later with Nothing But a Man (Michael Roemer, 1964), which he shot, cowrote, and coproduced. Young went on to explore his concern with social issues in both his documentaries and feature films, including Alambrista! (1977) and The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), both of which were added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in recent years and are available through the Criterion Collection.Shortly before the journal went to press, Lourdes Portillo passed away in late April. A Mexican-American filmmaker and activist, Portillo was nominated for an Oscar for her documentary Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo (1985) about the mothers of the “disappeared” protesting Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-1983). Her concern for Latin American social issues was likewise on display in Missing Young Woman (2001) about the rape and murder of over 300 women in Juárez, Mexico. The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), an investigation into the mysterious death of her uncle and among the best-known of Portillo’s more than 18 films, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2020.Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece launches the summer issue with an exhilarating call to arms. In “The Right to Sit Still,” she argues that spectatorship has become less about leisure and more about work in a late-capitalist society that values productivity over reflection. From TikTok film and television reviews to YouTube video essays, social-media platforms have replaced film criticism with content creation that encourages viewers to approach film and television as puzzles to be actively decoded rather than narratives to be passively consumed and contemplated. Aux barricades! Or rather, aux chaises.The issue’s next feature switches gears completely. Contributing editor Emma Wilson provides a lyrical appreciation of the films of Alice Rohrwacher, a filmmaker whose singular vision defies ready categorization. On the occasion of Rohrwacher’s fourth feature, La Chimera (2023), Wilson charts the director’s critique of patriarchy and machismo, in Italy and beyond, as expressed through her films’ explorations of alternative forms of social and gender relations. Created in close collaboration with Hélène Louvart, her longtime cinematographer, Rohrwacher’s films imagine the wondrous possibilities and enchantments of a world beyond the patriarchal: a cinema of poetry.Kris Fallon begins his essay, “Faith in Fakes: BeReal and the Posttruth Backlash,” with an anecdote about Umberto Eco’s tour of America in the mid-1970s (during which time Eco coincidentally contributed an essay to the summer 1977 issue of Film Quarterly). Visiting locales ranging from Disneyland to Las Vegas, Eco marveled at these “instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”2 To explore whether contemporary, “posttruth” America, traumatized by the specter of “deep fakes” and “fake news,” has lost the “faith in fakes” that captivated Eco, Fallon considers the photo-sharing app BeReal. BeReal centers authenticity as its entire raison d’être, positioning itself as an antidote to the manipulated images of Instagram and other social-media platforms. For Fallon, BeReal’s viral popularity and subsequent decline present a revealing object lesson on the “status of social-media representation within the context of the larger, persistent questions that animate photographic media around fact and fiction, truth and lies, authentic and fake.”Returning to film, the issue’s final feature, discussing the recent 4k restorations of Edward Yang’s A Confucian Confusion (1994) and Mahjong (1996), shares an unexpected thematic concern with Fallon’s exploration of the BeReal app: the challenge of authenticity in contemporary capitalist society. In both films, Yang uses dark comedy and ironic distance to critique the hypocrisy and materialism of Taiwanese society in the grip of rapid modernization. Ruochen Bo suggests that this departure in tone from the cool rationality of Yang’s more celebrated films (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991; Yi Yi, 2000) may explain the lack of critical attention A Confucian Confusion and Mahjong have received—a lacuna that the recent restorations aim to address.In his inaugural column, Ramzi Fawaz reflects upon his experience playing the video game The Last of Us Part II. With the second season of the eponymous hit HBO show currently in production, Fawaz unpacks what the game accomplishes both in terms of the players’ political imagination and their affective experience. By forcing players to expand their imaginative capacity and viscerally embody different viewpoints, The Last of Us Part II, Fawaz argues, becomes an explicit statement of what Hannah Arendt calls “representative thinking.” Laurie Ouellette takes a slant view toward Todd Haynes’s May December (2023), looking at the tabloid TV coverage and television movies about the real-life scandal that inspired the film. Noting the distance that Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch have claimed from the film’s source material and living subjects, Ouellette asks whether May December exposes the sensationalist and extractive cultural logic of tabloid media—or reiterates it. Wrapping up the columns, Caetlin Benson-Allott turns the spotlight on Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, whose films ask what it means to want attention and be subject to unwanted attention in the era of social media and viral fame. In his most recent film, Dream Scenario (2023), Borgli makes good use of the US star system, exploiting the contrasting filmic reputations of his leading actors Nicholas Cage and Julianne Nicholson to add depth to his critique of postcinematic celebrity culture.With Sundance celebrating its fortieth anniversary, FQ editor-at-large B. Ruby Rich reflects upon the history of the festival, which she first attended in 1988. Noting that Sundance’s reputation for kingmaking often overshadows its influence in other domains, Rich calls attention to the festival’s long-standing focus on documentary. Highlights this year included Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Johan Grimonprez, 2024), about the machinations of world powers, and the United States in particular, in overthrowing the government of the Congo in 1961; and Yance Ford’s Power (2024), a chilling examination of the US police force’s evolution and tainted presence. Moving on to Berlin, Rich found that the political turmoil over the war in Gaza couldn’t dim the incandescence of Mati Diop’s Dahomey, winner of the festival’s Golden Bear. The latest installment in Diop’s “ongoing cinematic saga of displacement and return,” Dahomey documents the return to Africa of twenty-six sacred objects from the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac in Paris; in giving voice to these long-imprisoned figures, Diop has created what Rich considers a “masterpiece.”Staying in northern Europe, Violeta Kovacsics delivers a report from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where festival director Vanja Kaludjercic—whose appointment coincided with the pandemic years—finally was able to showcase her vision for the festival’s future. Maintaining Rotterdam’s reputation for new discoveries (almost half its screenings were world premieres), along with its commitment to avant-garde and political cinema, Kaludjercic amplified the presence of animation and made world cinema a focus, not a sidebar.Bruno Guaraná begins this issue’s Page Views with the startling question “Buried or cremated?” Relating an anecdote about an early, disappointing experience with virtual-reality media (in this instance, a film that narrated the final moments of a man’s life), Guaraná credits Marina Hassapopoulou’s new book, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation, with reviving his interest in cinema’s interactive frontiers. In a work that Guaraná predicts will become a standard reference in digital-media scholarship, Hassapopoulou not only expands the history and theory of cinema through the inclusion of its interactive dimensions, but makes a persuasive case for further attunement between scholarship and practices of (new) media preservation and remediation.The books section roams across continents and approaches, genres and theories. Postwar Latin American film history is presented from a new, transnational perspective in Rielle Navitski’s Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture between Latin America and France, 1945–1965, reviewed by Irene Rozsa. Giovanni Vimercati looks at Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches, an edited collection that examines the history and politics of moviegoing in the Arab world. Leonardo Cabrini assesses neorealism’s influence on architecture in his review of Neorealist Architecture: Aesthetics of Dwelling in Postwar Italy, by David Escudero, which explores the links between architecture, filmmaking, and the built environment in postwar Italy. Andrew Utterson reviews Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture, John Powers’s new volume on the role of technology in postwar experimental cinema, while Evelyn Shih considers David Humphrey’s “ambitious” The Time of Laughter: Comedy and the Media Cultures of Japan, which explores the influence of comedy and laughter on Japanese media culture. In her review of Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation, Da Ye Kim praises the “theoretical depth, historical breath, and heightened awareness of aesthetic potential” that Brooke Belisle brings to her rethinking of media aesthetics. Diana Flores Ruíz finds Juan Llamas-Rodriguez’s Border Tunnels: A Media Theory of the U.S.–Mexico Underground to be a “compelling transmedia analysis of border tunnels and the political functions of their (over)representation,” while Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield closes out the issue with her review of Rizvana Bradley’s hotly anticipated Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

Art · Composite material · Expansive · Cinema and Media Studies · Materials Science · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism · South Asian Cinema and Culture