MPSI and STILLPOINT Magazine Host:

HYSTERICAL GIRL: A CONVERSATION WITH FILMMAKER KATE NOVACK

WHEN:  Saturday, May 1, 2021
TIME:  11:00 am (CST) - 12:00 pm (CST)
WHERE:  ZOOM

REGISTRATION LINK AND MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE EVENT HERE

On Saturday, May 1, 2021, director Kate Novack will be in conversation with Professor Madelon Sprengnether, free of charge and open to the public. This conversation will orient around the making of Novack’s Hysterical Girl, shortlisted for the Academy Award in the Documentary Film Short Subject category. Hysterical Girl takes a critical look at Sigmund Freud’s famous Dora case, his only extensive case study focused on a woman. The film and conversation will touch on issues of craft in filmmaking, research and artistic process, as well as urgent contemporary topics including feminism, the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society and institutions, the complex history of psychoanalysis, and more. 

The film (13:27min) is available to watch in full here.
It is recommended that you watch this before attending the conversation. 

This event has been made possible through a collaboration with MPSI and Stillpoint Magazine. 

REGISTRATION LINK AND MORE DETAILS ABOUT THE EVENT HERE

ABOUT HYSTERICAL GIRL AND KATE NOVACK

Kate Novack is an Emmy-nominated director and producer of documentary films.

Her most recent film, Hysterical Girl, was shortlisted for an Academy Award and nominated for best short by the International Documentary Association. It revisits the only major case history that Sigmund Freud produced of a female patient. Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, critic Richard Brody called it “Extraordinary... a feature’s worth of ideas, emotions, allusions, references, and associations condensed into a mere thirteen minutes.” Following its selection as a world premiere by SXSW in 2020, the film was acquired by The New York Times’ Op-Docs, the short film arm of the paper’s opinion page, and Grasshopper Film. Hysterical Girl was nominated for Best International Film at the Norwich Film Festival in the UK and won the audience award at the Anchorage Film Festival. 

Kate’s solo feature directorial debut, The Gospel According to Andre (Magnolia Pictures, 2018), was named one of the top ten Queer films of the year by Indiewire and nominated for best LGBTQ documentary of the year by the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. An intimate portrait of the legendary fashion editor Andre Leon Talley, Gospel traces Andre’s formative years growing up in the Black Church in the American South in the era of Jim Crow and his experience over four decades working in the predominantly white fashion industry. 

A former print journalist, Kate produced and wrote with director Andrew Rossi his film Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011). Over the past 15 years, Kate has worked in a producing or story role on several films, including the Emmy-nominated Ivory Tower (CNN Films/Participant Media/Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2014), The First Monday in May (Magnolia Pictures, 2016) and A Table In Heaven (HBO, 2008).

ABOUT MADELON SPRENGNETHER

Madelon Sprengnether is a poet, memoirist, and literary scholar. She is Regents Professor Emerita of the University of Minnesota. Her publications include The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation (Cornell UP,1985), Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (Indiana UP, 1996), and The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Cornell UP, 1990). In addition, she has published three memoirs and three collections of poetry. Her most recent books are Great River Road: Memoir and Memory (New Rivers Press, 2015), Near Solstice: Prose Poems (Holy Cow! Press, 2015), and Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

She is also a regular blogger for Psychology Today.

ABOUT MPSI

The Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society and Institute (MPSI) is a vibrant and growing community for psychoanalysis in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. MPSI is a not-for-profit educational organization, providing a variety of training and educational opportunities in the field of psychoanalysis for members, varied professionals as well as the interested general public.

ABOUT STILLPOINT MAGAZINE


 

Stillpoint Magazine: a magazine in the eye of the storm, an international, psychoanalytically-rooted, digital publication of contemporary visual art, literature, social critique, and fashion. What is behind the I?