Friday, October 28 at 4:00, LC 319. The Theory and Media Studies Colloquium presents: Amelie Hastie, Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film and Media Studies at Amherst College. Professor Hastie’s presentation is titled “Loving Film Theory.” We have a word for an obsessive love of film – cinephilia – which seems to move in and out of relevance (or fashion) in film studies. But how do we describe a love of film theory itself? What is the relevance of love not just for the object of our study but also for a means of thinking about it? And how might this love help to order a structure of knowledge? With these questions as provocations and motivations, Amelie Hastie’s talk will consider the cinephilic drive in particular theoretical writings as a foundation for imagining both a conceptual and a historiographical ordering of film theory.
Professor Hastie is the author of Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Duke UP, 2007) and The Bigamist (“BFI Classics,” Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009); the editor of a special issue of Journal of Visual Culture on “Detritus and the Moving Image”; and the curator of a project entitled Objects of Media Studies for the on-line journal Vectors. Her work has also appeared in Cabinet, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, Film History, Framework, Screen, and anthologies on film history and television studies. She is currently at work on a book about the television series Columbo.