UCSC film prof to receive Frameline Award at SF LGBT Film Festival

UC Santa Cruz professor of Film and Digital Media B. Ruby Rich, will be awarded the 2012 Frameline Award at the 36th annual San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, running June 14 to 24.

Since 1986, the Frameline Award has been given every year to a person that has made a major contribution to LGBT representation in film, television, or the media arts.

Past honorees have included film historian and author Vito Russo, Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan, avant-garde lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, producer Christine Vachon, and producer/distributor Marcus Hu.

Co-director of the Social Documentation program at UC Santa Cruz, Rich is also a film critic and the author of Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement.

Two decades ago, she coined the term term “New Queer Cinema” to describe a new type of film making its debut at independent film festivals featuring lesbian and gay protagonists.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently observed that Rich’s appearance on a panel at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992 to discuss groundbreaking LGBT cinema, plus an influential article she wrote for the Village Voice, “are considered watershed moments” in the LGBT film world.

The 2012 award citation by the Frameline board and staff notes:

“That we are still talking about "New Queer Cinema" in its twentieth year, in a culture so (ironically) fixated on the "new," is a testament to Rich's insight.”

For years an essential contributor to American and international film discourse, Rich has fashioned a unique role within film culture. Currently a professor in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is also a fixture within the worlds that she documents...

Her body of work combines the rapt enthusiasm of the most ardent fan with the discerning eye of the critic, and the long view of the historian….

Her attentiveness to the way films play out within culture is best symbolized by her presence at film festivals; moderating panel discussions, posting reports about emerging talents and trends, and helping to foster an experience of film as something shared...

Illuminating film history, the American independent scene, world cinema trends, and situating queer film within these contexts, Rich has made a salutary and indispensable contribution to a community’s sense of its own achievements and challenges; holding our feet to the fire while directing our eyes to the screen. We are the richer for it.”

Rich was additionally honored this spring by the UCLA Film & Television Archives, appearing as a part of its Legacy Project Film Series.