Film Quarterly. Fall 07.

Four pieces from the new issue of Film Quarterly are available online, beginning with Rob White's "Editor's Notebook," in which he explains a few tweaks in the format: "[A]s well as timely essays of about three thousand words, book reviews, and articles, Film Quarterly now includes columns, each of them with a clear brief.... The model is something like a civic meeting - a structured forum for conversation and contention in which seminar-room topics mingle with wider debates."

One of the new columns is Adrian Martin's; this one celebrates the release of Stephen Dwoskin 14 Films. "It is easy to bemoan the lack of attention which Dwoskin's work has so far received within the institutions of international film culture - to wonder why he is not routinely put up alongside Brakhage, Snow, Frampton, Rainer, and all the rest in the long-established Mount Rushmore of avant-garde cinema. Dwoskin himself seems to view this DVD project in a different, altogether positive spirit, with nothing of what would be an understandable ressentiment."

"[N]o candidate has yet demonstrated the innovative aptitude for Internet communication that Roosevelt showed for radio or Kennedy for television," writes Ben Walters; in a sense, his piece is an astute collection of online viewing tips.

"[H]istory is a nightmare from which movies cannot awaken," writes Joshua Clover. "The least (perhaps the only) thing one can do is ask what fi lms of the current killing season have made something interesting of history's most recent maneuvers, and how? And try not to feel too proud of ourselves for discovering a subtext that can't help but be there."

Posted by dwhudson at October 16, 2007 4:22 PM