B. Ruby Rich
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B. Ruby Rich (born 1948) is an American scholar, critic of gay films, and an assistant professor of community studies at UC Santa Cruz. She has also taught documentary film and queer studies during spring semesters at UC Berkeley. She is credited with coining the term New Queer Cinema.
Rich began her career in film exhibition, in 1972, as founder of the Woods Hole Film Society. She then became associate director of the 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 for a decade.
A working cultural theorist and critic since the mid-1970s, Rich has been closely identified with a number of important film movements, such as independent film in the U.S. and Europe, Latin American cinema and, more notably, as one of the most important voices in feminist film criticism.
Her presence at film festivals (such as Sundance, where she is a member of the selection committee), her film reviews in major national publications, and her commentaries on the public radio program The World, have secured her place as a central figure in the history of what she terms "cinefeminism."
Rich has been a regular contributor to the Village Voice, as well as the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound. She has also contributed to ELLE, Mirabella, The Advocate and Out. She also edits film/video reviews for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
The cover of her 1998 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 cultura 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."
Rich's observations cover such things as travel, softball, sex, and voodoo, as well as the anti-porn movement, the films of Yvonne Rainer, a Julie Christie visit to Washington, and the historically evocative film Maedchen in Uniform.
She introduces each of her essays with an autobiographical prologue that describes the intellectual, political, and personal moments from which the work arose, in the hope that a new generation of feminist film culture might be revitalized by reclaiming its own history.
B. Ruby Rich lives in San Francisco.
