![]() |
B. Ruby Rich | |
---|---|
![]() B. Ruby Rich in April 2017 | |
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Yale University |
Occupations | |
Known for | Coining the term "New Queer Cinema" |
B. Ruby Rich is an American scholar; critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films; and a professor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz. [1] Among her many contributions, she is known for coining the term "New Queer Cinema". [2] She is currently the editor of Film Quarterly , a scholarly film journal published by University of California Press.
Rich began her career in film exhibition as co-founder of the Woods Hole Film Society. In 1973, she became associate director of what is now the Gene Siskel Film Center at the Art Institute of Chicago. [3] After working as film critic for the Chicago Reader , she moved to New York City [3] to become the director of the film program for the New York State Council on the Arts, where she worked for a decade. While living in New York City, she began writing for the Village Voice. She then moved to San Francisco, where she began teaching, first at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at UC Santa Cruz. As Professor of Film and Digital Media there, she helped to build the Social Documentation graduate program.
In 2013, Rich accepted the position of Editor in Chief at Film Quarterly. She re-organized its editorial board and re-launched its website with several new features, including the "Quorum" column and video recordings of FQ webinars. [4]
In 2017, the Barbican hosted a season of films and talks to commemorate her career as a film critic, academic and curator. [5]
Rich is now Professor Emerita, UC Santa Cruz, and lives in San Francisco and Paris. She continues to appear in documentaries for independent filmmakers and television, as well as on selected Criterion releases.
In 1999, Rich appeared as a guest critic on several episodes of Roger Ebert at the Movies.
B. Ruby Rich appears in the 2009 documentary film For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism where she discusses the appeal of the film Amélie , and expresses her desire for a new kind of criticism to emerge from young critics who can go beyond auteur theory.
She appears in the film !Women Art Revolution . [6]
Rich coined the term "New Queer Cinema" in a 1992 article for the Village Voice , which was reprinted in Sight and Sound . [2] In the article, Rich identified a wave of films that "collided" at film festivals such as Sundance and TIFF. Rich asserted that these independent films, made by and for queer-identified people, used radical aesthetics to combat homophobia, grapple with the trauma of the AIDS epidemic, and address complicated queer subjectivities while importing much needed discussions of race. Rich argued that, although films dealing with these issues can be found in the previous decade, New Queer Cinema broke with the gay liberation ethos that self-representation should remain positive and desirable. [2]
Rich's presence at film festivals (such as Sundance, where she was an early member of the selection committee; TIFF, where she served as an international programmer in 2002; Telluride, where she was Guest Director in 1996; and Provincetown, where she appears every spring) has been significant. Her film reviews in major national publications, and her commentary on public broadcasting programs such as The World, Independent View, and All Things Considered , have led to her being characterized as a "central figure" in cinema studies and culture. [7]
The back cover of her 1998 book, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement , reads: "If there was a moment during the sixties, seventies, or eighties that changed the history of the women's film movement, B. Ruby Rich was there. Part journalistic chronicle, part memoir, and 100 percent pure cultural historical odyssey, Chick Flicks– with its definitive, the way-it-was collective essays – captures the birth and growth of feminist film as no other book has done." Her book includes critical analyses of Sally Potter's Thriller, the films of Yvonne Rainer, and Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform.
Mostly an assemblage of Rich's published writing on queer films of the preceding decades, New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut moves from the moment of New Queer Cinema's inception in the early 1990s festival circuit to its Hollywood co-option in the late 1990s to its more recent international impact and European and U.S. mainstreaming. The book includes studies of the films The Watermelon Woman , Go Fish, Milk , as well as the films of Lucrecia Martel and Gregg Araki.
Rich was a regular contributor to The Village Voice , the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound . She has also contributed to The Guardian , The Nation , Elle , Mirabella , The Advocate and Out . She was the founding editor of film/video reviews for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. [8] From 2013 through June 2023, she served as Editor in Chief of the journal, Film Quarterly , and now serves as Editor at Large.
Rich received the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the 2007 Brudner Memorial Prize at Yale University. In 2012, she was awarded the Frameline Award – the first critic to receive this honor since Vito Russo was given the first. In 2014, the Guadalajara Film Festival presented her with its "Queer Icon" Maguey Award. In 2017, she was honored in London with an event titled "Being Ruby Rich: Film Curation as Advocacy and Activism" that included a study day at Birkbeck College of the University of London and several days of screenings at the Barbican Cinema. http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/birmac/21-june-2017-being-ruby-rich-film-curation-as-advocacy-and-activism/
Gregg Araki is an American filmmaker. He is noted for his heavy involvement with the New Queer Cinema movement. His film Kaboom (2010) was the first winner of the Cannes Film Festival Queer Palm.
"New queer cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.
Mädchen in Uniform is a 1931 German romantic drama film based on the play Gestern und heute by Christa Winsloe and directed by Leontine Sagan with artistic direction from Carl Froelich, who also funded the film. Winsloe also wrote the screenplay and was on the set during filming. Due to the film's overt and openly lesbian themes, the film remains an international cult classic.
Sir Isaac Julien is a British installation artist, filmmaker, and Distinguished Professor of the Arts at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bettina Fay Aptheker is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author. Aptheker was active in civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since worked in developing feminist studies.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is an experimental filmmaker, artist and author. She is Willa Cather Professor Emerita in Film Studies. Her work has focused on gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and took early retirement in 2020.
Michelle Citron is a film, video and multimedia artist, scholar and author.
Film Quarterly, a journal devoted to the study of film, television, and visual media, is published by University of California Press. It publishes scholarly analyses of international and Hollywood cinema as well as independent film, including documentary and animation. The journal also revisits film classics; examines television and digital and online media; reports from international film festivals; reviews recent academic publications; and on occasion addresses installations, video games and emergent technologies. It welcomes established scholars as well as emergent voices that bring new perspectives to bear on visual representation as rooted in issues of diversity, race, lived experience, gender, sexuality, and transnational histories. Film Quarterly brings timely critical and intersectional approaches to criticism and analyses of visual culture.
Jennie Livingston is an American director best known for the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning.
Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality is a book by Dwight A. McBride on ethno-relational mores in contemporary gay African America with a nod to black, feminist and queer cultural contexts "dedicated to integrating sexuality and race into black and queer studies."
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a filmmaker and film scholar. She is well known for her work on race, sexuality and representations. She is currently Dean of the Arts Division at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
!Women Art Revolution is a 2010 documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson and distributed by Zeitgeist Films. It tracks the feminist art movement over 40 years through interviews with artists, curators, critics, and historians.
Latin American nations have been producing national LGBT+ cinema since at least the 1980s, though homosexual characters have been appearing in their films since at least 1923.:75 The collection of LGBT-themed films from 2000 onwards has been dubbed New Maricón Cinema by Vinodh Venkatesh; the term both includes Latine culture and identity and does not exclude non-queer LGBT+ films like Azul y no tan rosa.:6-7 Latin American cinema is largely non-systemic, which is established as a reason for its wide variety of LGBT-themed films.:142
Cecilia Barriga is a Chilean-Spanish film director. Her 1991 film Meeting Two Queens was shown at Montreal Women's Film and Video Festival and New York International Festival of Gay and Lesbian Film. She directed her first feature film Time's Up! in New York City. It premiered at the Donostia-San Sebastián Film Festival in 2000 as part of Zabaltegi.
RSVP is a Canadian short film, directed by Laurie Lynd and released in 1991. It was one of the films singled out by film critic B. Ruby Rich in her influential 1992 essay on the emergence of New Queer Cinema.
Marcia Ochoa is a United States-based professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the co-founder of El/La Para TransLatinas and is credited with popularizing the term "translatina."
The Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz constitutes one of the oldest departments of gender and sexuality studies in the world. It was founded as a women's studies department in 1974. It is considered among the most influential departments in feminist studies, post-structuralism, and feminist political theory. In addition to its age and reputation, the department is significant for its numerous notable faculty, graduates, and students.
Kay Armatage is a Canadian filmmaker, former programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival and Professor emerita at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute and Women & Gender Studies Institute. Though she attained a B.A. in English Literature from Queen's University, her name is generally linked with the University of Toronto.
Margo Hendricks is an American professor emerita of literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on race and culture in literature.
The International Festival of Women's Films was an international film festival held in New York City in 1972 and 1976. The 1972 edition of the festival is significant for being the first major women's film festival.