Editor’s Notebook

I began to cry in my comfy seat during a 70mm screening of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. Fastvold’s underseen film heartened me for the sheer power of its spellbinding cinematography and for its poignant depiction of Shaker nonviolence and bodily joy, particularly at a moment when the country was hurtling ever deeper into death spirals of state violence at home and abroad. I cried from joy because weird films like this are still being created, despite everything. They refute the distraction economy and provide a place to imagine joining little pockets of resistance. In some ways it’s astonishing that films are still being exhibited in public at all. But I also cried from anger about everything that has been taken away by glowing small screens: first books, then music, then movie theaters. I don’t want these forms of gathering to go away, because they make me feel less alone and more in solidarity with others who, like me, sit still in a darkened room in order to travel. In other words, I’m getting older, which means I’m simultaneously more cranky and more sentimental.A few weeks later, Fastvold’s film remained with me, asking insistent questions, its images mixing in with what I saw on the insides of my eyelids when they were closed. How I feel about films is related to how long they stay with me, not what I think when I see them at first. The Testament of Ann Lee grew in my mind in surprising directions, like a strange plant. Around that time, I resolved to begin an experiment. What would happen if I canceled my streaming subscriptions and deleted or disabled certain apps on my phone? Would my life really be so diminished without “free” shipping (I didn’t want to add my coins to the coffers of the company whose founder destroyed The Washington Post), EFL Championship League video highlights (I was tired of seeing ads for the US Border Patrol), instant access to comfort movies and series (I felt turned off by the whole Netflix–Paramount–Warner Bros. debacle), and constant updates promoting fear or FOMO via social media (I wanted to avoid the toxic and addictive loops of these apps)?Confident that this resolution wouldn’t last, and hoping to stay aware of the contradictions and complicity that imbricated me in these systems that I wanted to leave behind, I decided to give it a try for a while. I harbor no illusions about the ability of individuals to halt the gears of these vertically integrated quasi-monopolies (never mind the larger war machine), but the personal benefits that accrued to me from this temporary detachment were wide-ranging. For starters, I got a lot of my time back, and some of my money, both of which were promptly spent on the tangible joys of physical media. There were also some small but noticeable costs, from minor annoyances (missing out on the instant gratification of watching Deadloch season 2 on its release day, for example) to more general difficulties. My first major obstacle was the brutal algorithmic calculus of a certain app on which artists, distributors, critics, audiences, and cultural institutions alike now heavily rely for information, updates, and coverage of current events. YouTube is the elephant in the room. Searching for alternatives for audiobooks, news, and movies via my local library card was satisfying but not comprehensive.It’s my pleasure to seek out cinematic alternatives, and I am lucky to live in an area in which they are plentiful: at nonprofit or smaller-scale community-supported cinemas; university screenings with a scholarly speaker or a filmmaker talk-back; and live events that mix film with musical performances. The 70mm screening of Fastvold’s film at AFI Silver gave me pause by reminding me that cinema, writ large, continues to outlive its own death. This impression was reinforced by a subsequent visit to the same venue during the African Film Festival to see the British Nigerian filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow (shot on 16mm). The film has already won a BAFTA, although it continued its American theatrical release in Spring 2026. A poetic account of two brothers’ (Remi Chibuike Marvellous Egbo and Akin Godwin Chiemerie Egbo) day out in Lagos with their father (Folarin S.o.pé. Dìrísù), My Father’s Shadow also contains a personal history of the military government’s annulment of the Nigerian elections of 1993 on the day depicted in the film, and, also, potentially, a deeply affecting ghost story.Two other events impacted me powerfully in providing antidotes to mainstream filmmaking itself. In February, I felt lucky to catch a screening at the University of Richmond of Christopher Harris’s still/here (2000) on a larger screen and with the artist present. Just over twenty-five years have passed since Harris created this extraordinary filmic meditation on the destruction of the neighborhoods of the north side of St. Louis, but I felt it could have been made yesterday. (Harris was interviewed a decade ago by Terri Francis in FQ 69, no. 4, in “Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afrosurrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris.”) Harris perhaps remains better known for his influential 2004 short film Reckless Eyeballing, but still/here poses an equally powerful challenge to what attention itself means, and how cinema might operate differently in order to command regard for people, places, and things that commercial filmmaking passes over.Harris’s lingering long takes stretch on until his images of the abandoned Criterion Theater, for example, transform the wrecked marquee and ruined interior amphitheater-style cinema seating into an otherworldly Tarkovsky-like zona, using duration to provoke reflections not on “ruin porn” that aestheticizes urban infrastructural decay but rather on how to process the nightmares of history by halting the process of looking away. Especially when presented on a larger screen, Harris’s long takes—often filmed from the position of a still, fixed camera angle, or presented in what appears to be slow motion from a moving car in an ad hoc relentless tracking shot—overlaid with intriguing sound designs like a repeated motif that recalls ghostly footsteps on wooden floors or stairs, test his viewers to see a defamiliarized world anew. As Francis notes, Harris’s work “theorizes film,” and Harris emphasizes in their interview that Christian Metz’s work linking photography and death influenced his filmmaking.Not a moment is wasted in the precise one-hour run time of still/here, which left me breathless and shaken as it closed, but also eager to read what I thought was an unspoken story or essay that unfolded analytically beyond or in parallel with my feelings. As a shot extends further and further in length, Harris’s technique encourages each viewer to add in their own voice-over, creating, in this process, a different film for every viewer, and on each viewing. Watching Harris’s film in 2026, it occurred to me to recast it as a message not only from the past but also, somehow, from the future: among other things, it might be reread as a warning of what’s to come—for cities across the globe, and for the fate of the cinema as a public space.I also had the good fortune of attending the film event of the season in DC: a screening, discussion, and musical celebration of Haile Gerima’s Black Lions – Roman Wolves at the Lincoln Theatre. This gala program, which followed Gerima’s return from screening the film at the Berlinale, featured “Chapter 2: Invasion,” a two-hour segment on the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia from the five-chapter, nearly nine-hour film that Gerima has been creating for years, often in the teeth of severe obstacles to obtaining the footage essential to the production. “Invasion” unfolds with an editing style that is difficult to describe but utterly hypnotic in its music-like leitmotifs and deliberative modern symphonic repetitions that allow the audience to see the same images several times in different ways, including images of bodies scorched and blistered with poison gas, battle scenes that intercut Italian tanks with Ethiopian cavalry, and Fascist newsreels whose images and words are subverted by their presentation within the film. At key moments, the historical narrative is paused to reveal the filmmakers in the present at their work of creating the story, together with interviews with historians and those who were there. Archival photographs interspersed throughout reveal an “eyewitness” perspective on different segments of the film.Gerima directed, edited, and wrote the film, but, before his postscreening interview, he emphasized the collaborative filmmaking process with his producer and spouse, Shirikiana Aina; with his associate producer and sister, Salome Gerima; and with the creators of the film’s powerful music and sound design, Aschalew Fetene and Merawi Gerima, respectively. During the Q&A, Gerima described his personal journey to this epic work as one of “repentance” involving a critique of filmmaking itself. I took Gerima’s remarks to mean, among other things, that film, viewed as conventional entertainment, had not only colonized the imagination of what might be possible for the medium but also worked to control who is seen and how on-screen, while simultaneously suppressing other images, histories, peoples, and places. Gerima also expressed a related concern for the present and the future in the era of digital culture, and his film provides a clear antidote to the distraction economy’s manipulations of public attention (and inattention) by offering depth, complexity, and anger artfully focused and sharpened by important subversions of narrative filmmaking conventions. Now that regime loyalists own the rights to One Battle After Another and to Casablanca, Gerima’s perspective seems especially timely.Alternative ways of encountering film culture are considered by several authors in FQ 79, no. 4. Broderick Fox discusses the unique distribution strategy of Alexandra Juhasz’s Please Hold, in which groups of viewers watch the artwork together and often discuss it with the filmmaker. As Fox notes, “Juhasz invites us to explore and together mobilize what she terms ‘technologies of memory’: the media (videos, photographs), things (letters, clothing, books, magazines), spaces (neighborhoods, bars, websites, archives), and conversations (always central to Juhasz’s works and their dissemination) that both archive and transmit queer history, kinship, care, and activism.” In different veins, Duncan Wheeler includes his travels to Asbury Park, New Jersey, in order to trace the roots and impact of Nebraska (1982) as the album, the city, and the artist are depicted in Scott Cooper’s Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, while Bill Nichols reflects on changes to his thinking in his career as a key documentary film theorist, Dan O’Brien reconsiders Carson Lund’s Eephus from the perspective of a playwright living in Los Angeles after the devastating fires and the decay of Hollywood, and Rob King interviews film critic J. Hoberman about beginning his career in New York City.FQ also continues to consider cinema’s present evolutions and disruptions through the lens of its features and columns, including recent developments in streaming movies and series. Considering the former, FQ editorial-board member Dawn Keetley analyzes the movie series Horror in the High Desert (Dutch Marich, 2021–), invoking in the process one of FQ’s most well-known articles, “What Is Hauntology?,” by Mark Fisher, and Fisher’s theory of the eerie. Studying the latter, FQ contributing editor Anthony Michael D’Agostino thinks through The Boys (2019–2026) and Gen V (2023–2025) as horror-inflected antidotes to the superhero cycle. Surrounded as we are by real-life horror, it’s not surprising that this durable genre remains central to cultural conversations.Regarding cinema history, Killian Quigley revisits the depiction of the Coral Sea through cinematic portraits of its pearl hunting industry, using “blue humanities” and “critical ocean studies” to criticize “the tendencies of settler Australian pearl films” toward the “emptying” of richly historied oceans and the replacement thereof by “ahistorical voids.” Equally fascinating for its rewiring of conventional concepts is Anya Ekaterina’s article reconsidering the work of Marie Epstein as a filmmaking “collaboratrice” whose resistance to sole authorship presents a significant challenge to auteurist ideas of cinema. “Retheorizing filmmaking as a collaborative endeavor,” as Ekaterina suggests, also returns vital critical considerations to many other filmmakers who offer another path. –JMT