[csaa-forum] Professor Lesley Stern: Public Lecture

[Kirsten Stevens]

*Apologies for cross-posting*

Professor Lesley Stern - Public Lecture

*Date:* Thursday, 12th November 2015

*Time: *5:45pm

*Place:* Monash Conference Centre, Level 7, 30 Collins St Melbourne

*RSVP:* kirsten.stevens at monash.edu

You are warmly invited to attend a public lecture by internationally
renowned film scholar, Professor Lesley Stern, titled:

*"How does (the) Cinema Feel About (the) Animal?"*

*Abstract*: In the cinema all things are potentially equal: objects,
people, animals. All things come into being—come alive, acquire
performative powers—through cinematic magic. But even though the cinema is
not exclusively human it has surely been permeated by the spirit of human
exceptionalism. Bad blood enshrouds the inception of cinema, and its legacy
is a haunting. When we watch movies today we cannot avoid the presence of
ghosts: slaughtered elephants, galloping horses, sacrificial dogs,
carnivorous bears—all hover and materialize and enter our dreams. Much
recent work in cinema studies has turned attention to the place of the
animal in the cinema and this paper is enabled by such work. However,
rather than thinking through generalities my attention is caught, today, by
moments of sensuous intensity, by fragments and scenes from various films
in which animals and people and places are brought into strangely affective
alliance. Reaching from Buster Keaton’s *Go West *to Apichatpong
Weerasethakul’s *Tropical Malady*, the paper will speculate on how films
(via modes of mimeticism, empathetic projection, animistic gestures) might
affect and change the way we feel and identify across differences.

*Professor Lesley Stern* is the author of *Dead and Alive: The Body as
Cinematic Thing, The Smoking Book* and *The Scorsese Connection,* and
co-editor of *Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance*. Her work
moves between a number of disciplinary locations and spans both theory and
production: although her reputation was established in the fields of film
theory and history, she is also known for her fictocritical writing. Her
work has been highly influential in the areas of film, performance,
photography, cultural history, postcolonialism, feminism and
gardening/ecocriticism.


Regards,

Belinda Smaill & Therese Davis



Sponsored by the Film and Screen Studies Program, the School of Media, Film
and Journalism and the Faculty of Arts, Monash University

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners, and Elders past and present,
of all the lands on which Monash University operates.


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