Dear Colleagues,
The Centre for Film Studies in St Andrews is proud to announce two upcoming talks, by Prof. Laura Mulvey and Prof. Janet Harbord. We would like to invite you to attend these lectures, taking place in the Arts Lecture Theatre at the University of St Andrews. We look forward to seeing you there.
CFS Talk: Laura Mulvey – Hitchcock’s blondes and feminist film theory: a cinema of voyeurism or a cinema of self-reflexivity?
October 15 @ 5:15 pm - 7:00 pm
The ‘Hitchcock blonde’ has become an established cliché image within popular culture today, recognised, recounted and discussed beyond film theory circles. In this lecture Laura Mulvey returns to the significance of Hitchcock’s blonde heroines and his voyeuristic cinema for the development her feminist and psychoanalytic approach to film in the 1970s. Recently, after a gap of 40 years, she has returned to the ‘Hitchcock blonde’ to reflect on his cinema as, perhaps, revealing and self-reflexive rather than simply misogynistic.
Laura Mulvey is Professor in Screen media at Birkbeck University of London.
CFS Talk: Janet Harbord – Giorgio Agamben and Cinema: an unlikely coupling?
November 12 @ 5:15 pm - 7:00 pm
Giorgio Agamben is perhaps best known for his directly political writings on bare life and the state of exception, providing a framework for thinking through ‘events’ such as the detainment camp at Guantánamo Bay. Yet his essays frequently give mention to photographic and film images, and in ‘The Six Most Beautiful Moments in the History of Cinema’, to the apparatus of cinema itself. This talk explores the ‘and’ between Agamben and cinema: or, what it is that Agamben’s thought might bring to, and how might it transform, an understanding of film?
Janet Harbord is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London.