The Train Is Always Leaving

Director Barry Jenkins’s body of work to date demonstrates an exquisite devotion to the art of blackness as an aesthetic and cultural practice. On the occasion of Jenkins’ latest work—the television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 book, The Underground Railroad—Film Quarterly contributor Michael Gillespie speaks with Jenkins about his craft, his process, and his acutely cinephilic attention to black visual and expressive culture. The series poses a stunningly exacting sense of the slave narrative coupled with an ambitious charting of antebellum nineteenth-century America, at once familiar and uncanny. As visual historiography, The Underground Railroad enacts an irreconcilable challenge to the writing of history and, furthermore, to the political and aesthetic capacities of televisual seriality. Jenkins’s conception of the series resonates as a fantastical and haunting restipulation of the idea of America—and a crucial reimagining of the rendering of blackness.

Trump’s Ironic Effect on Political Satire

This essay analyzes how the presidency of Donald Trump presented a challenge to satirists. It argues that the ironic complexities of the Trump figure itself created an unusual situation for satire, one which required it to adapt and change in novel ways. Because Trump was both absurd and terrifying, because he was both parody and credible threat, he created a unique situation for satirists, one where many of the common tools they carry in their comedic toolkit didn’t work. Satirical irony of Trump was not a matter of irony everywhere or ironic post-truthiness; when Trump satire was at its best, it worked in two competing, yet intertwined, representational directions because it was at once a return to sincerely using irony to reveal the truth while also using irony to reveal that reality had become grotesquely and ironically absurd. This essay explores two key examples of this new satirical aesthetic, Sarah Cooper’s interpretations of Trump and Jimmy Kimmel’s use of satire to defend democracy.

From Binge-Watching to Binge-Scrolling

This article approaches the paradigm of binge-watching from within a wider ecology of networked media forms and practices, which have collectively reinforced a relationship between staying home, staying connected, and staying safe during the pandemic. It explores how the short form video platform TikTok has strategically tapped into the pleasures associated with the binge model, in order to construct the nascent concept of binge-scrolling as one means of addressing the thorny problem of lockdown boredom. The piece suggests that the paradigm of bingeing now exists across a spectrum of media forms and practices, operating as one specific means of organizing time and attention in an age of digital psychopolitics.

Be Wary of Anniversaries

The uprisings categorized as the “Arab Spring” were not spontaneous events. To make them seem so is to marginalize the lineage of activism that brought them into being. Within cinema, this decades-long struggle has been invigorated by militant manifesto writing, collective film production, and the development of viewing communities dedicated to Third World liberation, often infrastructurally supported by now vanquished nationalized post- and anticolonial institutions. Barra fi al-Shari‘/Out on the Street (Jamina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, 2015) catalyzes many of these revolutionary histories. Drawing on archival and shared footage dedicated to fighting for workers’ rights, the film’s communally conceived plot pivots around a factory takeover. The narrative is carried by contributors whom the filmmakers call “en-actors.” These en-actors both restage the violence exerted upon them by managers and the police and exemplify how cinema can become a form of training–for those on screen and in the audience–for future revolutionary action.

The Ennui of the Scroll

Inspired by her difficulty selecting a film as the subject for her column, Film Quarterly regular Caetlin Benson-Allott explores the concept of the “paradox of choice” in relation to contemporary film culture. A common feature of late-stage capitalism with its characteristic consumer abundance, the paradox of choice afflicts people with too many options, decreasing their happiness and increasing anxiety. In her column, Benson-Allott explores the paradox of choice as a condition of the current streaming era, while also historicizing television culture’s ideology of plenty. She traces this notion of superabundance, which undergirds digital cable and streaming culture today, back to the 1950s when print media such as TV Guide pioneered a print-heavy layout that stupefied the eye into an impression of excess. Arguing that browsing print program guides and its more recent corollary, channel surfing, are numbing experiences that discourage risk-taking, Benson-Allott ultimately finds relief from the ennui of the scroll in the pleasures—both expected and unexpected—of the genre film.

On Virtuality and the Diasporic Imagination

This report covers the 10th edition of BlackStar Film Festival (BSFF), which took place virtually and in person over a week in early August 2021. The independent festival features work by Black, Brown and Indigenous makers, and aims to reach a wide audience whose identities and experiences are reflected in the films. Johnson considers the multifaceted symbolism of the Black Star as it is realized in the curatorial and institutional vision of the festival, and considers the affordances (and limitations) of virtuality toward greater distribution of, and access to, independent films in the places they represent. An extensive review of the shorts program includes reporting on category winners Lizard (Akinola Davies Jr), Dear Philadelphia (Renee Maria Osubu) and Elena (Michèle Stephenson). This is the first review of BSFF for Film Quarterly.

Telluride and After

FQ editor-in-chief B. Ruby Rich reports from the 48th edition of the Telluride Film Festival. Unlike most of its peer festivals, Telluride opted not to hold a virtual edition in 2020, a decision entirely in keeping with its emphasis on the tactile and experiential aspects of cinema, and which made its return in 2021 all the more giddy for first-time attendees and long-term devotees alike. Rich reviews the many festival highlights, from Jane Campion’s reinvention of the Western in The Power of the Dog to Todd Haynes’ archival documentary The Velvet Underground. Childhood takes center stage in new films from Céline Sciamma and Kenneth Branagh while misunderstood masculinity emerges as a theme in Michael Pearce’s Encounter, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero, and Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon. Including a coda on the New York Film Festival, Rich concludes that the masterful riches of the two festivals augur well for the fall 2021 season.