Awards seasons come and go, and more important things rightly took precedence this year, but the overall circumstances made the snubbing of Steve McQueen’s Blitz feel even more egregious to me. In part, my reaction to this film was personal; the loving multiracial family depicted in it resembled in some ways a 1940s English version of the Midwestern American home in which I grew up. At the same time, I recognized why McQueen’s anti-epic wartime drama failed to be rewarded for its thorough-going subversion of WWII mythologies, and for its anti-heroic portrayals of the hellish carnage of aerial bombing.
This drift proved unpopular for all the wrong reasons, and this memorable film, which shifts its attention away from battlefield heroics, was unjustly swept under the rug. This despite McQueen’s powerful direction and extraordinary performances from its leads, debut child actor Elliott Heffernan (George Hanway) and Academy nominee Saoirse Ronan (Rita, George’s mother). Revaluating McQueen’s cinematic vision of historical fiction in light of Blitz isn’t possible in this small space, but, for what’s it worth, I do wish to register my objection to this film’s reception: a 45% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes can be a positive sign.
I view Blitz as a film that asks pertinent and uncomfortable questions about the nature, functions, and limitations of WWII analogies themselves during a moment in which the world is on fire. The film also engages in speculative approaches to wartime histories that add to rather than detract from the film. In this regard, Blitz joins with other recent releases that significantly challenge the conventional parameters of what a WWII story is supposed to be. These include two visually astonishing small-scale productions set in snowy wartime mountain towns far away from the front: Maura Delpero’s poignant civilian-focused alpine drama, Vermiglio (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Venice), and my VCUarts colleague Rob Tregenza’s rigorous metafiction about WWII in rural Norway, The Fishing Place (screened in February at MoMA, which recently acquired the Canadian filmmaker’s archive).
The characters in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, meanwhile, avoid the topic of the war, yet the traumas of its aftermath seep into nearly every scene. The film follows a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), as its protagonist in order to condense its reflections on the ghosts of displaced people who fled Europe but found the USA less than a safe haven from its nightmares. The film’s Epilogue reveals that the building Tóth has been constructing throughout, for his American Robber Baron patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), is deliberately modeled on structures from the Camps.
One thing these films share in common with Blitz is a commitment to exploring fiction—and storytelling itself—in an era when the public is constantly told that only facts can save them, or that producing more facts is the only answer to the avalanche of lies and disinformation constantly spewing from social media. While nobody knows how bad things will get, it’s clear that better and more interesting historical fiction is urgently necessary, not just more history and better fact-checked facts. This isn’t to suggest that art based on true events should disappear into relativist postmodern slush. Instead, these films offer complex stories worth inhabiting that investigate history’s What Ifs? Taken together, they offer an insistent faith in love and in cinematic artfulness that I find relevant and resonant. Here is a heavyweight counterpunch to amnesiac WWII mythologies such as those promoted by the Spielberg-produced bomber-drama Masters of the Air, and by the biopic Bonhoeffer, with its unhinged tag-line, “Pastor. Spy. Assassin.”
Blitz challenges the wartime mythology of the “Blitz Spirit” that supposedly joined all Britons together automatically across class, gender, and ethnic divisions in the face of the Nazi onslaught. In doing this important work, the film touches a third rail of English self-mythologizing that sits uncomfortably with present-day race-riots and xenophobic demagoguery. Yet the film portrays that togetherness not as an illusion but as a fragile modern project worth defending despite its obvious flaws and shortcomings. The accusations of revisionism leveled at the film fail to grasp the purpose of historical fiction, which is always about the present and the future as much as the past. This acknowledgment allows historical fiction to be what it is: fiction that is intimate with histories told and untold. McQueen’s deliberative approach doesn’t twist history so much as raise uncomfortable truths. The filmmaker’s recent nonfiction films—Grenfell, a twenty-four-minute short on the 2017 tower-block fire that took seventy-two lives in London, and Occupied City, a four-hour epic on the Shoah in Amsterdam (both released in 2023)—as well as Resistance, his curated exhibition of documentary photographs of social protest, at Margate’s Turner Contemporary gallery in February, 2025, present archives whose images refuse to remain in the past.
The speculative aspects of historical fiction allow for Blitz to delve into less well-trodden areas, where missing stories, suppressed stories, underrepresented stories, and stories adjacent (or even sidereal) to the historical record can be told. In the process, these narratives imaginatively expand the field of possible stories. In one important sequence, George is forced to join a criminal gang, looting the dead bodies of well-heeled diners at a bombed-out jazz club. As the gang ghoulishly toasts with champagne next to a jewelry-laden corpse, George hears that the club revelers died instantly when their lungs burst during the overnight air raid. This scene, like those that precede and follow it, poetically condenses a number of intersections as only historical fiction can accomplish. These shocking images, absent from any documentary archive of which I am aware, do the talking, cutting across any simplistic messaging about solidarity, then or now. Stories like these are necessary not because of an absence of facts, and not because the facts are unimportant, but rather because facts cannot solve anything on their own.
In This Issue
It is remarkable to me how often the topics of alternative archives and speculative takes on history, film history, and film scholarship came up this quarter during the editing process with authors. Editorial Board member Jean Ma’s Special Focus on Hong Kong Cinephilia Reimagined rewrites the familiar story of that city’s postwar growth into a cinematic center, revealing a wealth of linked local artists, cine clubs, and networked organizations that fostered a film scene parallel to the mainstream. Denise Khor’s interview with Yiman Wang about the latter’s recent book on Anna May Wong begins with the famous actor’s lesser-known filmmaking adventures in China, and also discusses the book’s use of speculative scholarship to reimagine Wong’s potential relationships with other key figures of her time.
Also in this issue, contributing editor Laurie Ouellette explores one of the oddest but most popular corners of nonfiction media, the true-crime show and its legions of fans. She reports from CrimeCon, a convention where one can meet celebrity profilers, investigate a blood-spattered crime scene, and even get one’s cheek swabbed for DNA. Here, truth is stranger than fiction; and the key fiction of the omnipotent and all-good authorities is maintained. Contributing editor Ramzi Fawaz, in stark contrast, continues his consideration of children’s animation in his column on The Wild Robot. Fawaz argues for the film’s complexity in considering the climate crisis and the rise of AI through the lens of the indigenous creation story of Skywoman. He draws on the writing of Robin Kimmerer to argue that the power of this story (which is sacral rather than mythical) can be located in its adaptable fusion with modern concerns.
This issue also features a major retrospective by Sheila Liming on Edith Wharton’s relationship with film. Her analysis includes not only the now-classic Martin Scorsese adaptation of The Age of Innocence, but also the what-might-have-been of the Sofia Coppola project, The Custom of the Country, which was scrapped by Apple out of fear of its “unlikeable” woman protagonist. Speculation might extend to here from the starting-point of Wharton’s unusual status as an often-adapted literary source whose idiosyncratic brand of fiction remains crucially resistant to the commercial requirements of palatable contemporary melodrama. (According to industry reports, Apple also decided against the massive funding required to fully boost the Oscars prospects of its features, including Blitz and Mike Leigh’s collaboration with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths, an extraordinary film that was declined for funding by Netflix. Since the streamers aren’t exactly short of investor cash, these outcomes seem like after-effects of legalized vertical integration, although nothing can stop Jean-Baptiste from delivering one of the greatest performances in recent memory.)
Completing this issue are three reports of significant cinematic events that transpired close to the end of 2024. Randy Malamud, reporting from San Sebastian, provides an overview of new films (including Hard Truths), geographically and cinematically overlapping with Duncan Wheeler’s account of a recent exhibition dedicated to Almodóvar’s Madrid, in which the real-life city and the films of the Spanish auteur mix and blend. Each writer discusses different aspects of Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film, The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, whose theme of assisted dying might be connected with the progress through the U.K. Parliament of legislation intended to support those suffering from terminal illnesses. Katarina Docalovich, meanwhile, reports on Mati Diop’s visit to New York City for the New York Film Festival screening of her feature Dahomey, and the MoMA screening of her short film Naked Blue, codirected (and copresented) with Manon Lutanie. In Dahomey, the speculative and documentary components of cinema are fused, albeit in a very different way than in McQueen’s films. Diop follows the partial repatriation from France of a small fraction of the sacral statues looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin). Her film records a debate over the meaning of this partial act of postcolonial restitution, refusing to allow a triumphalist narrative to emerge. Diop focuses, instead, on clashing interpretations of what this story means to those who have a significant stake in its future—Beninese university students. Brilliantly overspilling the conventional boundaries of documentary, Diop also allows for the statue of a king to speak for himself in a voiceover monologue, reflecting on the complexities and contradictions of his long-delayed homecoming.
Updates
The on-again/off-again threatened American ban of TikTok and the spectacular implosion of Twitter both serve as cautionary tales of overreliance on social media culture, but the latter platform’s history as an important center of film culture deserves a critical backward glance. Initially this was due to the efforts of Roger Ebert, who almost single-handedly transformed the platform when cancer attacked his voicebox. Ebert used social media to inaugurate and announce what he hoped would be a “golden era of film criticism,” in which independent, knowledgeable, and decentralized online outlets could network, share ideas, and productively argue like never before. This was a nice dream. But social media, with its algorithmic herding of negative feedback loops and digital surveillance technologies, has turned out to be a vast and complicated minefield. While artists and writers continue in their futile grail quest for a utopian online platform in which to gather without harassment or capricious corporate governance (yesterday, Mastodon; today Letterboxd; tomorrow BlueSky; etc.), it’s obvious that social media itself is part of the problem.
These apps (and ones like them) shape rather than merely reflect desires, driving users into realms far beyond the pleasure principle. Nonetheless, these platforms—with their addictive ecosystems and unequal economies—provide key nodes for a novel visual culture outside of traditional distribution networks, and, what’s more, they foster the production and consumption of moving pictures. This might not be everyone’s idea of cinema (yet?), but it is arguably an expanded realm of “film” writ large, and, therefore, it seems relevant to this journal’s brief. While experimenting with alternative platforms, FQ keeps the faith in its old-school “vinyl” ethos as a quarterly print journal, remaining interested in social media primarily as a critical emergent topic in media studies. FQ’s book reviews section, under Nilo Couret’s editorship, has led FQ in exploring this area, and continues to do so in this issue with Megan Wiessner’s review of Tiziano Bonini and Emiliano Treré’s recent Algorithms of Resistance: The Everyday Fight against Platform Power. Nilo completes his term of service, for which I am grateful, this year at the end of the current volume.
With this issue, I also thank FQ’s 78.3 interim copy editor, Christina Gimlin, and I welcome FQ’s new editorial assistant, Amani Hagmagid. Amani is an MFA student at American University who, in addition to writing and directing her own short films and a debut feature, has worked in casting and as a freelance consultant on sets, helping to accurately portray Muslim life on screen. Amani will assist me and managing editor Ben Walters on aspects of journal issue production. Ben also continues his own creative series, of drop-in badge-making and button-making sessions at Rich Mix Cinema Café in Shoreditch, London, at which participants take home laminated wearable collages created from archival materials of visual cultures assembled for these fun film-adjacent events. Laughter is one of the keynotes of Ben’s Badge Café, and this much-needed joy also helps to inspire critical reflection on what images are supposed to be doing now. -JMT
University of California Press