12 Jan

Eugenie Brinkema | Drabness and Ethics

The Critical Studies Department presents a talk by Eugenie Brinkema titled Drabness and Ethics on Friday 12 January 2024 between 14:00–16:00 at the Critical Studies Department space.

Eugenie Brinkema is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently a fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her research in film and media studies focuses on violence, affect, sexuality, aesthetics, and ethics. This talk takes as a starting point an aesthetic evaluation that greets the arrival of brutal death squads in Wes Anderson's 2014 film, The Grand Budapest Hotel: "I find these black uniforms very drab." Using the problem of drabness, and a reciprocal term that is yoked to it in the film—that of glimmer—Brinkema considers how problems of cinematic form (light, saturation, and quality) formally articulate an impersonal account of general historical violence and loss. The problem of color—and the aesthetic question of values—thus poses the broader question of the value of formalism as both a reading method and a speculative grappling with ethics and politics.