Teresa de Lauretis presents:
Val Lewton’s Cat People: Otherness in the Everyday
Friday, September 19, 2014
Public Lecture: 5:00 – 6:30 pm
Screening of Cat People (1942): 3:00 – 4:15 pm
EV Building, Room 1.605 Concordia University 1515 St. Catherine W. Montreal (Qc)
In what is sure to be a can’t miss event, Teresa de Lauretis (UC Santa Cruz) will be in Montreal to give a special lecture on Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942), a landmark film within the horror genre.
Details Below: ______________________________________________________________________
“Val Lewton’s Cat People, like the other eight films with which he redesigned the horror genre in the 1940s, is about the presence in human life of an otherness that is not an emanation of Evil or preternatural powers but comes from a place of darkness, an alterity, within the human. Irena fears that her body, under the sway of sexual emotions, will transform into a panther. While refusing to visualize the transformation, the film materializes her fear for the spectator by the innovative use of sound, creating the figure of a “pantherness,” an internal force that compels and transforms Irena.
Teresa de Lauretis is Distinguished Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has written on cinema since The Cinematic Apparatus (co-edited with Stephen Heath, 1980) and Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984). Her recent essays in Freud’s Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (2008) and others are working toward a theory of reading and spectatorship based on the figurality of language and the psychoanalytic concepts of transference, seduction, and the drive.”
For more information: feministmediastudio.ca info@feministmediastudio.ca
Co-sponsored by:
FEMINIST MEDIA STUDIO / Department of Communication Studies Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema ARTHEMIS Canada Research Chair in Feminist Media Studies Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts & Culture Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture
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