KCL’s Elena Gorfinkel will be giving the following lecture at UW-Milwaukee on November 14th.
Sleeping in the Movie Theater (After Wanda Goronski)
Navigating recent interest in nocturnal imaginaries and the valence of sleep for understanding cinematic spectatorship, this talk takes up the sleeping spectator as it figures in Barbara Loden’s landmark independent film Wanda (1970) to examine the function of night, weariness, precarity and itinerancy in the film, exploring some tensions that inhere in analyses of sleep as a domain of repose or abandon. Following an essayistic and meandering logic that mimes the perambulations of the titular Wanda Goronski herself, this talk enacts a series of experiments with forms of description, the unraveling of archival aporias drawn from the film’s shooting script and other historical anecdotes, and larger theorisations of cinema as medium of exhaustion. The talk emerges as one product of several years of archival research on Barbara Loden, sketching out a path from one research project (a monograph on Loden’s film Wanda) to another about Barbara Loden as a feminist film historical subject and site of thorny questions about authorship, biography, the unfinished, and feminist film writing.
November 14 @ 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm // https://uwm.edu/c21/event/gorfinkel-lecture-sleeping-in-the-movie-theater/