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This editorial marks my fond farewell to Film Quarterly. After six years at the journal and one year as editor, I am stepping down from the top of the masthead. Moving up is the journal’s longtime contributing editor J. M. Tyree. Josh is an associate professor in the Cinema Program at Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author or coauthor of many works of cinephilic fiction and nonfiction. His contributions to the BFI Film Classics series include Salesman (2012) and The Big Lebowski (2020, with Ben Walters); his fiction includes the highly acclaimed story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (2014, with Michael McGriff) and the forthcoming novella The Haunted Screen (2024). Josh is also a contributing editor to the New England Review, where he was formerly nonfiction editor.Josh first contributed to Film Quarterly in 2008, with an expansive consideration of The Wire’s fourth season. Since then, he has written for the journal across a remarkable range of topics and genres, from superhero blockbusters to cinema verité. I have worked with Josh on his more recent essays on contemporary British cinema, including Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz, David Lowery’s The Green Knight, Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men, and Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter; in each instance, his interpretations were notable for their intellectual breadth and creative insights. Josh describes himself as a “generalist’s generalist” who is “unabashedly interested in everything cinematic.” Sounds like an ideal combination for ensuring a robust future for the journal.My arrival at Film Quarterly in 2018 corresponded with the five-year anniversary of B. Ruby Rich’s editorial tenure and the promotion of Marc Francis to assistant editor. At the time, Marc was a newly minted PhD; he now manages film programming for Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and has a book under contract at Duke University Press. Marc became associate editor at the journal last year, taking on additional responsibilities across Film Quarterly’s operations. He conceived and helped convene the journal’s panel discussion “Franchise Everything!,” which was held at USC in January; he also led a cosponsored screening and panel discussion with the Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk at Yale this past March. His astute editorial feedback has shaped numerous articles published in the journal, and his nose for tracking exciting new material is superb (as anyone who has seen him in action at SCMS conferences will attest). Marc’s contributions to the journal are too numerous to list here, but suffice to say, he has been both a secret weapon and an unsung hero throughout his time at the journal. After eight years, Marc has decided it’s the right moment to move on as well. Finally, Film Quarterly says goodbye to Girish Shambu, who has edited the journal’s online QUORUM feature since 2018. Girish’s efforts to bring new voices to Film Quarterly along with his joyous cinephilia enriched the journal’s content and culture. It’s been our great good fortune to work together and in partnership with B. Ruby Rich in producing issue after issue that expanded the boundaries of film and media scholarship. We’re very proud of this legacy and excited about the journal’s next chapter under Josh’s leadership.Roger Corman, who died in May at the age of ninety-eight, is best known for the low-budget, high-schlock B movies he directed (over fifty) and produced (over three hundred) over the course of his long career. His influence, however, exceeds the exploitation genre that his films helped define. With a knack for identifying talent, Corman launched the careers of countless actors and directors. A young Jack Nicholson appeared in eight Corman films (including the original The Little Shop of Horrors, in which he played a masochistic dental patient), and Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern were also part of Corman’s “repertory company” during the 1960s. The screenwriter Robert Towne, who passed away on July 1, just as this issue was going to print, got his start as an actor and writer for Corman. As his interest in directing began to wane, Corman offered young directors, including Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Peter Bogdanovich, both opportunities and mentorship, in this way playing an important role in launching the New American Cinema of the 1970s. In a similar vein, as the American distributor of auteur directors including Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Federico Fellini, and Akira Kurosawa, Corman’s New World Pictures helped popularize foreign art-house films, in part through innovative tactics such as booking them at drive-ins. As Corman observed to the Hollywood Reporter in 2013, “Motion pictures have always been part art, part business.” His expansive and incongruous legacy embodies that truth.Born four months after Corman, the trailblazing Venezuelan director Margot Benacerraf steered a very different course, directing just one feature film over the span of her career. That film, Araya—a documentary about salt workers on Venezuela’s northeastern coast—premiered at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the FIPRESCI Critics’ Award with Hiroshima Mon Amour. Benacerraf had trained in France at the prestigious Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), making the award-winning short Reverón (1952)—about the reclusive Venezuelan artist Armando Reverón—while still a student. Araya’s poetic style and concern for the dignity of the salt workers, whose way of life was under threat from industrialization, would prove influential to the New Latin American Cinema movement. But despite its international acclaim, the film was dismissed as “too intellectual” for Venezuelan audiences and was not distributed until the later 1970s. Benacerraf instead directed her energies toward fostering film culture in Venezuela, founding the country’s Cineteca Nacional de Venezuela, modeled on Paris’s Cinémathèque française, in 1966. The institution would grow to include Venezuela’s first film archive and introduced generations of Venezuelans to global cinema.Morgan Spurlock, who put his health at the center of his super-successful documentary Super Size Me (2004), died of cancer this past May at the age of fifty-three. Super Size Me, which won the Grand Jury Prize for directing at Sundance and was later nominated for an Academy Award, chronicled the toll on Spurlock’s body of consuming a monthlong diet of only McDonald’s. While the results (not good) were later thrown into question by Spurlock’s admission of alcohol abuse and refusal to share his diet log, the film caught the zeitgeist and launched a national conversation around fast food, nutrition, and obesity. Spurlock went on to direct or produce almost seventy films, covering issues ranging from US foreign policy (Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, 2008) to modern masculinity (Mansome, 2012) to the reprise Super Size Me 2: Holy Chicken! (2017), this time focusing on the fast-food chicken industry. The latter film’s scheduled Sundance premiere was canceled after Spurlock admitted to a history of sexual misconduct; “I am part of the problem,” he wrote in reference to the #MeToo movement. The confession ended his career as a documentary provocateur, but not the conversations his films on the food industry helped spark.In the days before this issue closed, two iconic actors of the late twentieth century passed on. Anouk Aimée and Donald Sutherland both had careers that spanned decades and the good fortune to work with many of the great directors of their time, including Federico Fellini (Aimée in La Dolce Vita and 8 ½ and Sutherland in Casanova) and Robert Altman (Aimée in Pret-à-porter [Ready to Wear] and Sutherland in M.A.S.H.). RIP.The fall issue of Film Quarterly begins with Eliot Dunn’s consideration of recent trans cinema in the context of the political backlash against trans people in the United States and abroad. Noting that representation doesn’t mean “the revolution is over,” Dunn argues that “transgender cinema must experiment with new forms of cinematic visibility” that model and foster community solidarity and care. The trans documentaries Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul Preciado, 2023) and Desire Lines (Jules Rosskam, 2024) move beyond mere representation, Dunn suggests, through experimenting with traditional filmmaking techniques. By foregrounding their process, these films remind the audience that—much like gender—the cinematic image is constructed, and move toward a t4t (trans-for-trans) ethos of trans care in cinematic form.The one hundredth birthday of the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, who was born on January 1, 1923, prompted numerous retrospectives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere celebrating the groundbreaking films of this proverbial “father of African cinema.” This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Xala (1974), Sembene’s biting satire of Senegal’s postindependence elites, and the subject of this issue’s Special Focus section, “Ousmane Sembene’s Xala at Fifty,” edited by James S. Williams. A contributing editor at Film Quarterly, Williams is also the author of the new BFI Film Classics volume on Xala. As he notes in his introduction, the availability of new, digitally restored versions of Sembene’s features, including Xala, in addition to the establishment of Sembene’s archive—along with that of his longtime producer, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra—at Indiana University, make it an opportune moment to reconsider Xala’s legacy.The three essays in the section “move beyond the standard framings and periodizations of Sembene and recapture his experimental drive and visionary energy,” as Williams observes. First, Akin Ades·o·kan takes a fresh look at Xala through the lens of the production’s archival history as revealed by the Sembene and Vieyra collections at Indiana. Akin’s careful consideration of documents relating to the film’s pre- and postproduction sheds light on both Sembene’s relationship with Vieyra and the broader challenges in African cinema—the hardscrabble conditions of making films in the face of limited resources and official indifference that Sembene termed “mégotage” (literally, “gathering cigarette butts”). Elena Razlogova also takes an archival approach to Sembene’s legacy, mining a rich vein of historical writing on Sembene—including materials from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art—to examine how his oeuvre was received on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the period around Xala’s production. Demonstrating Sembene’s talent for self-fashioning across ideological lines, Razlogova argues that this Cold War context complicates and extends Sembene’s significance beyond his position in the Western canon as an African auteur. Wrapping up the Special Focus, Vlad Dima reads Xala through the prism of African futurity, as understood by the Senegalese philosopher Felwine Sarr and others. Focusing on the film’s final scene and female characters, he probes the tension between optimism and pessimism present in Xala for what it reveals about the future of African cinemas.This issue has two interviews with powerhouse female directors. As Lisa Parks’s interview with Erica Tremblay recounts, the path toward filmmaking can be circuitous. Tremblay was fascinated by storytelling as a young girl, but it took seeing Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998) when she was in her early twenties for her to realize that directing films could be an option for her as a woman. After years spent working in advertising, Tremblay recommitted to film at the same time she immersed herself in the Cayuga language. (She is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation.) The results were the Sundance-acclaimed short Little Chief (2020), starring Lily Gladstone; and now Fancy Dance (2023), Tremblay’s debut feature—also with Gladstone—about the plight of missing and murdered Native women.The Ukrainian filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk likewise spent some time in advertising before making the decision to focus on her films. As she explains to Masha Shpolberg, her initial work benefited from the surge in interest in Ukrainian cinema in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan Revolution, and her breakthrough documentary, The Earth is Blue as an Orange (2020), swept the international festival circuit. Two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Tsilyk reflects on the state of cultural production in Ukraine, her growing role as a cultural ambassador, and what the country’s postwar cinematic future might look like.FQ columnist Laurie Ouellette takes on Lulu Wang’s Amazon series Expats (2024), or rather, its penultimate episode, “Central.” In shifting the focus from the lives of privileged American expat women to those of the domestic workers they employ, the feature-length special episode disrupts the arc of the series and reframes its thematic concerns in notable ways. Ouellette discusses “Central” in the context of the televisual tradition of the issue-oriented “very special episode” and its reinvention for the streaming era. By acknowledging the gendered global politics of domestic service, Wang takes the special episode as a form of popular education in an innovative new direction, subverting women’s prestige television from within.In his second column for the journal, Ramzi Fawaz once again runs toward the darkness. (He promises lighter fare next time!) Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024) imagines an America in which political differences have devolved into warring factions, split across varying ideological lines. Drawing upon literary theorist Deborah Nelson’s notion of unsentimentality—“a clear-eyed point of view willing to stand apart from popular opinion, ideological and party lines, and the self-satisfaction of political moralizing”—Fawaz characterizes Civil War as a “decidedly anti-war war movie” that promotes the necessity of this affective stance in the present political landscape.FQ editor-at-large B. Ruby Rich reports from the seventy-seventh edition of the Cannes Film Festival. Skipping the new offerings from the “grand old men” (Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, David Cronenberg’s Shrouds, and Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada) competing in the main competition, Rich concentrates instead on the festival’s other sections and its renegade outlier, the Quinzaine (Directors’ Fortnight). Her festival highlights include Jacques Audiard’s faux-Mexican, trans-phantasmagoric, all-singing, all-dancing confection Emilia Pérez along with a number of documentaries.Page Views returns with a conversation between editor Bruno Guaraná and Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece about her new book, Movies Under the Influence: Szczepaniak-Gillece’s innovative methodology fuses material, archival history and ideological critique, the result being a fascinating cultural history of film exhibition’s relationship with spectators and their vices.The books section—as always, curated and edited with acumen by Nilo Couret— begins with Sibley Labandeira’s review of Esfir Shub: Pioneer of Documentary Filmmaking, by Ilana Shub Sharp. The first book-length study of the Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub, who not only is credited with the first compilation documentary but also wrote critically about cinema and applied her theories to her practice, the book aims to reposition this fascinating director in film history. Andy Kelleher Stuhl assesses Eric Dienstfrey’s Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology, a history of multidimensional sound in American cinema. Illustrating how technical and aesthetic changes need to resonate with their surrounding industrial context before they can become part of the apparatus, the book’s model should prove generative to media historians. Dana Alston reviews Justin Wyatt’s Creating the Viewer: Market Research and the Evolving Media Ecosystem, a “complex and informative volume of industry studies research” that emerged from Wyatt’s self-described “double-life” as a media studies professor and a market researcher. Courtney Brannon Donoghue’s new book, The Value Gap: Female-Driven Films from Pitch to Premiere, unpacks the patterns and practices that contribute to the gendering of value in Hollywood, the marginalization of female creatives, and the depreciation of female-driven stories. The book’s “engaging, comprehensive view of Hollywood’s institutionalized gender disparity” makes it “essential reading” per reviewer Devin Glenn. Closing out the section are Swapna Gopinath’s review of Swapnil Rai’s Networked Bollywood: How Star Power Globalized Hindi Cinema and Tannon Reckling’s take on We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, by Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr. A fresh addition to star studies that foregrounds the Global South, Networked at the role of in the of Hindi cinema into a global industry. around conversations between Juhasz and We Are Having This Conversation a on media and in light of the of the AIDS

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