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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 Americanscholar;critic ofindependent,Latin American,documentary, feminist, and queer films; and aprofessor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation atUC Santa Cruz.[1] Among her many contributions, she is known for coining the term "New Queer Cinema".[2] She is currently the editor ofFilm Quarterly, a scholarly film journal published byUniversity of California Press.
Rich began her career in film exhibition as co-founder of theWoods Hole Film Society. In 1973, she became associate director of what is now theGene Siskel Film Center at theArt Institute of Chicago.[3] After working as film critic for theChicago Reader, she moved toNew York City[3] to become the director of the film program for theNew York State Council on the Arts, where she worked for a decade. While living in New York City, she began writing for theVillage Voice. She then moved to San Francisco, where she began teaching, first at theUniversity 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 atFilm 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, theBarbican 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 selectedCriterion releases.
In 1999, Rich appeared as a guest critic on several episodes ofRoger Ebert at the Movies.
B. Ruby Rich appears in the 2009 documentary filmFor the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism where she discusses the appeal of the filmAmélie, and expresses her desire for a new kind of criticism to emerge from young critics who can go beyondauteur theory.
She appears in the film!Women Art Revolution.[6]
Rich coined the term "New Queer Cinema" in a 1992 article for theVillage Voice, which was reprinted inSight and Sound.[2] In the article, Rich identified a wave of films that "collided" atfilm festivals such asSundance andTIFF. Rich asserted that these independent films, made by and for queer-identified people, used radical aesthetics to combathomophobia, grapple with the trauma of theAIDS 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 thegay 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; andProvincetown, where she appears every spring) has been significant. Herfilm reviews in major national publications, and her commentary on public broadcasting programs such asThe World,Independent View, andAll Things Considered, have led to her being characterized as a "central figure" in cinema studies and culture.[7]
The back cover of her1998 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 ofSally Potter'sThriller, the films ofYvonne Rainer, andLeontine Sagan'sMädchen 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 filmsThe Watermelon Woman,Go Fish,Milk, as well as the films ofLucrecia Martel andGregg Araki.
Rich was a regular contributor toThe Village Voice, theSan Francisco Bay Guardian and theBritish Film Institute'sSight & Sound. She has also contributed toThe Guardian,The Nation,Elle,Mirabella,The Advocate andOut. She was the founding editor of film/video reviews forGLQ: 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 theSociety for Cinema and Media Studies and the 2007Brudner Memorial Prize atYale University. In 2012, she was awarded theFrameline Award – the first critic to receive this honor sinceVito Russo was given the first. In 2014, theGuadalajara 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/
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