B. Ruby Rich
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. Among her many contributions, she is known for coining the term "New Queer Cinema". She is currently the editor of Film Quarterly, a scholarly film journal published by University of California Press.
Career
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. After working as film critic for the Chicago Reader, she moved to New York City 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.
In 2017, the Barbican hosted a season of films and talks to commemorate her career as a film critic, academic and curator.
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.
Media appearances
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.
New Queer Cinema and other influences
Rich coined the term "New Queer Cinema" in a 1992 article for the Village Voice, which was reprinted in Sight and Sound. 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.Rich's presence at film festivals 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.