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CONTENTS
FILM FOR THE FUTURE
Guest Editors: Michelle Baroody and Maggie Hennefeld
Michelle Baroody and Maggie Hennefeld
Introduction
Section 1: Conjuring Film for the Future: Archives and Histories
Sarah Keller
Islands in the Stream
Genevieve Yue
Nanook of the North’s Pasts and Futures
Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
Bombed Pasts, Burning Futures: Notes on Demolition and Exhibition
Mary Ann Doane and Doron Galili
Unreal Time: A Conversation on Film Theory, Media Historiography, and the Scales of Pandemic Catastrophe
Section 2: Virtual Bodies, Digital Platforms, Uncanny Experiments
Girish Shambu
Making a Home for Film, Making Film a Home: The Nomadic Cinephilia of Ruun Nuur
K. J. Relth-Miller
How Not to Disappear Completely: The Emergence of Underground Moving-Image Curation on Twitch
Alanna Thain and Dayna McLeod
Cinema’s Missing Bodies (with Laurent Lafontant of Massimadi Afro LGBTQ+ Film and Arts Festival, Bradford Nordeen of Dirty Looks, So Mayer of Club des Femmes, and Gary Varro of Queer City Cinema) AUDIO for the essay
Peter Labuza
Under the Electric Cloud: Cinema at Paramount’s Twilight
Section 3: Film Festivals, Activist Curating, and Pandemic Collectivity
FIC-Silente Collective: Alejandra Calleja Toxqui, Roxana Hernández Martínez, Ana Gabriela Hernández Rodríguez, Rosa María Licea Garibay, Enrique Moreno Ceballos, Julio Cesar Quiterio Morales, Ana Belén Recoder López, Cecilia Ramírez Morales, Lluvia Soto Rodríguez, Laetitia Vigneron
Mexico Silent Film Festival’s Journey of Cultural Resistance: Tracing a Path of Community Survival
Michelle Baroody and Alison Kozberg
The Politics of Collective Programming and the Virtual Arab Film Festival
Umayyah Cable
Cinematic Activism: Grassroots Film Festivals and Social Movements in Pandemic Times
Vivian Hua 華 婷 婷
Art-house Cinemas as Sites of Resistance: From “Safe Space” to “Safe House”
INTRODUCTION
Film for the Future
Lovers of film all know it as “an invention without a future,” to quote the notorious, alleged proclamation by Louis Lumière in 1895. The medium has since survived its initial obsolescence, the insistent rise of a slew of rival technologies (television, video, internet streaming, etc.), multiple global pandemics, and the ongoing destruction of its volatile archives, among other existential catastrophes. Yet, despite film’s resilient object lessons for futurity, the Covid-19 pandemic has somehow felt different: a final nail in the coffin? With the indefinite closure of movie theaters, cancelation of international festivals, and hemorrhaging revenue losses across the global industry, film’s elasticity has at last reached its breaking point. Or has it? Despite the recession of collective viewing experiences, innovative new experiments proliferate in the pandemic’s wake, emphasizing the virtues of virtual curation, the digitization of obscure and overlooked archives, and increasing accessibility of on-site events (such as special screenings, festivals, and panels) for spectators worldwide.
These hopeful turns are exemplified by Another Screen: the “free streaming project by Another Gaze journal, created to foreground rare film work we deem worthy of feminist interrogation, across geographies and modes of production.” Another Screen’s collaborative programs spotlight the politics of feminist film collectivity, such as: “For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women,” “Hands Tied / Eating the Other,” and “[Silence] [. . .] [Laughter],” all curated with historical context, multilingual translations, and critical feminist essays. Shasha Movies launched globally in 2021; it is the first virtual platform dedicated to streaming films by and for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) makers and audiences, conjuring the power and reach of virtual programming toward transformative feminist ends. This unprecedented service realizes the open-access objectives of Habibi Collective, Shasha’s organizers, an online archive founded in 2018 that is committed to elevating the voices of women and nonbinary SWANA artists and making film accessible to those who might not see these works otherwise. If the canon has too long been dominated by white, male, cishet auteurs and their on-again/off-again relationship with big Hollywood industry, the death of film has created space for collective voices, different perspectives, wayward formats, greater accessibility, and activist mobilizations. This is the story of the future of film, which is mischievously unfolding before our very eyes.
(Continued in the print edition; also available on EBSCO, JSTOR, and Project Muse)
—Michelle Baroody and Maggie Hennefeld
