Dialogic Cinephilia - February 1, 2019

Abrams, Stacey. "'We Have to Work Harder' Than Those Who Would Suppress the Vote." Democracy Now (January 31, 2019) ["Democrats have selected former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to deliver the response to President Trump’s State of the Union address. The address will take place on Tuesday, after being delayed due to the government shutdown. Abrams will become the first person not in public office to respond to the president, as well as the first African-American woman to deliver the response. She recently launched Fair Fight Action, a voting rights advocacy group, after she narrowly lost Georgia’s governor’s race to Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who was widely accused of suppressing the vote. In mid-November, Abrams refused to concede the race, and Fair Fight Action is now suing Georgia election officials for mismanagement of the midterm elections. We recently spoke to Abrams in Los Angeles, where she was attending the National Day of Racial Healing. “Our responsibility doesn’t end on Election Day,” she said. “The minute the elections are over, the people who won—who did not share our values—are going to be working hard. We have to be working even harder.”"]

Allen, Esther, Dennis Lim and Violet Lucca. "Lucrecia Martel's Zama." Film Comment Podcast (April 10, 2018) ["Premiered in Venice and screened in last year’s New York Film Festival, Zama marks not only the long-awaited return of Lucrecia Martel, but also her first literary adaptation. Martel expanded on the first-person fever dream of the original 1956 novel by Antonio di Benedetto, whose fans included Roberto Bolaño and Julio Cortázar. This week’s episode of The Film Comment Podcast ruminates on Zama’s novelistic origins with the help of literary translator and CUNY professor Esther Allen, who produced the first English translation of Zama in 2016, for which she won the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose. Allen is joined by Dennis Lim, Director of Programming at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Violet Lucca, FC Digital Producer and podcast host, to discuss the subconscious presences Martel might imply beyond the edges of her frames."]

Dargis, Manohla. "What the Movies Taught Me About Being a Woman." The New York Times (November 30, 2018)




Haslett, Tobi and Violet Lucca. "Personal Problems (The Movie)." Film Comment (March 6, 2018) ["Featuring the talents of Bill Gunn (Ganja & Hess), Vertamae Grosvenor (Daughters of the Dust), Ishmael Reed, and many others, Personal Problems was originally intended as “an experimental soap opera” for WNET, the public broadcast station in New York. It never aired and was thought lost for many years, but the film has been newly restored by Kino Lorber and will be traveling theatrically soon, beginning with a run at Metrograph. Written by Ishmael Reed and shot in 1979, Personal Problems stars Vertamae Grosvenor as Johnnie Mae, a nurse’s aide at Harlem Hospital who’s having an affair behind the back of her uptight transit worker husband Charles (Walter Cotton). In the March/April 2018 issue, Howard Hampton writes about this incredible work, a “motion picture [that] is inventing its language as it goes along—a series of building blocks of different shapes, tones, and materials creating a homemade Cubist mosaic. Personal Problems balances hands-on and hands-off approaches.”"]

Lourdes (Austria/France/Germany: Jessica Hausner, 2009) Dialogic Cinephilia (Ongoing Archive)

"World Poll 2018." Senses of Cinema (January 2019)