Film Quarterly

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.

Since 2013, it has been edited by B. Ruby Rich, with Regina Longo as associate editor. In 2015, Film Quarterly began to receive funding from the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative to “support the journal’s work in advancing criticism, analysis, and reporting with particular attention to social justice documentary and the interrogation of cinema practices across genres and platforms.”

Film Quarterly was first published in 1945 as Hollywood Quarterly, was renamed The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television in 1951, and has operated under its current title since 1958.

According to former Film Quarterly editorial board member Brian Henderson, “Hollywood Quarterly was launched in 1945 as a joint venture of the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the University of California Press. The association began as a wartime collaboration between educators and media workers in response to social needs occasioned by the war.” Notable members of its first editorial board were playwright and screenwriter John Howard Lawson, psychologist Franklin Fearing, and writer-director Abraham Polonsky.

After allegations in a House of Un-American Activities Committee hearing that Hollywood Quarterly had communist leanings, in 1951, the journal changed its name to Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television. This name change inaugurated the journal’s clear divorce from the Hollywood industry with which it had partnered for several years. The journal’s turn towards “politically safe” work in the following years led to editorial discord and instability until August Frugé, then-director of UC Press, changed the direction of the journal. Frugé drew inspiration from the European film journals Sight and Sound and Cahiers du cinéma, noting in his book that, "there was no American review comparable to these two, intellectual but not academic and devoted to film as art and not as communication. By accident we found ourselves with the means to publish one—if we chose and if we knew how."