Thinking Cinema Lecture: “Thinking Like a Holy Girl: A Philosophy of Grandma’s Bedroom”

On Monday, October 16, the Committee for Film Studies will host the second lecture in its seven-part, year-long Thinking Cinema series, which structures vibrant encounters between leading film scholars and the Princeton community. Karen Redrobe, University of Pennsylvania, will deliver “Thinking Like a Holy Girl: A Philosophy of Grandma’s Bedroom.”

Abstract
In recent years, debates around the question of film auteurship have been reanimated within the context of discussions of global art cinema, the festival circuit, and the “global auteur.” Auteurs may have become more geographically diverse than before, but have the always-controversial gender dynamics of auteurship also altered over time? What new criteria for inclusion in the auteur category have emerged in the 21st century, and what are the new (and old) stakes involved in the employment of this term today? This paper will consider the state of contemporary auteur debates—and it’s not always pretty—in dialogue with the second film in Lucrecia Martel’s Salta trilogy, The Holy Girl (2004).

Speaker
Karen Redrobe (formerly Beckman) is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media and Chair of the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also served as the Director of Penn’s Program in Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, and is now working on a new book, Undead: Animation and the Contemporary Art of War. She has co-edited two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, with Jean Ma, and On Writing with Photography, with Liliane Weissberg. Redrobe is also the editor of Animating Film Theory, which explores the history of film theory’s engagement with animation (and lack thereof). Between 2012 and 2015, she served as Advisor to the Arts for Penn and in that capacity ran a three-year, cross-campus arts initiative. For several years she served as a senior editor of the MIT journal Grey Room, and she is now a member of its editorial board. She is also a member of the PMLA advisory board. At Penn, she is a member of the graduate groups in English, German, and Comparative Literature; a board member for the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; and a faculty affiliate of the LGBT center.

Sponsored by the Committee for Film Studies and the Humanities Council’s David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project.