Title: Failed Animation, Limited Theory: Feminist Reflections in a Transnational Context

Speaker: Professor Karen Redrobe, Pennsylvania University, USA 

Moderator: Professor Daisy Yan Du, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK

Format: 40-50 minutes’ lecture, followed by around 30 minutes’ Q & A 

Time: 9:30-11am, Feb 7, 2024 (Wed, Hong Kong Time)

Location: Room 3301 (Lifts no. 2, 17, 18), Academic Building, HKUST

Zoom ID: 956 6919 0626

Password: ACASSHSS

Abstract: 

Film histories, theories, and textbooks have often focused on “peak” live-action moments, triumphant or movement-defining aesthetics, box office hits, award-winning auteurs, and dominant, enduring theories. As such narratives have largely prioritized white, male, heteronormative artists and thinkers, feminist historians and theorists have, not surprisingly, frequently demonstrated a more active interest in what might be designated unsuccessful, failed, marginalized, collaborative, modest, and even laughable filmmaking and theoretical efforts. This feminist preoccupation with the incomplete, the unresolved, and the non-triumphant, recently explored in Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon’s coedited collection, The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (2023), suggests what the British psychoanalytic feminist scholar Jacqueline Rose describes as an “ethics of failure” (“Why War?”). For Rose, being willing to fail and resisting the “conviction of absolute truth” is intimately linked to the avoidance of war and warlike violence. In this talk, I will reflect informally, at the intersection of animation and film theory and within the context of 21st century efforts to develop transnational scholarly methods that do not reproduce colonial forms of knowledge, on the possibilities for thought generated in spaces of incompletion, failure, and provisionality.

Bio: 

Karen Redrobe is Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism and Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis, and editor of Animating Film Theory. She has co-edited three volumes, Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma, On Writing With Photography, with Liliane Weissberg, and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible, which won SCMS’s Best Edited Collection Award. In addition to completing Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminism, and the Art of War, she is collaborating with Kartik Nair on a co-edited volume entitled, Required Readings: Film Scholars on Freedom and Discipline in the Classroom.