Drabness and Ethics (on the Values of Formalism)
- Date 20 February 2023 - 5.15 p.m. - 20 February 2023 - 6.45 p.m.
- Location Mark Bedingham Room, St John's College Library and Study Centre
Professor Brinkema takes as her starting point an aesthetic evaluation that greets the arrival of brutal death squads in Wes Anderson’s 2014 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—the talk considers how problems of cinematic form related to light, saturation, and quality formally articulate an impersonal account of general historical violence and loss. The problem of color—and the 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.