HYSTERICAL GIRL: WITH KATE NOVACK & MADELON SPRENGNETHER
WHEN: SATURDAY MAY 1 2021
11AM(CDT) / 12PM(EDT) / 5PM(BST) / 6PM(CEST)
WHERE: ZOOM
(link provided on sign-up)
On Saturday May 1 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 Novak’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.
Sign up for the conversation here.
This event has been made possible through a collaboration with MPSI (Minnesota Psychoanalytic Society and Institute) and Stillpoint Magazine.
ABOUT HYSTERICAL GIRL & 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.
Kate also directed The Gospel According to Andre (Magnolia Pictures, 2018), which was nominated for best LGBTQ documentary of the year by the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, and was a producer and writer on 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 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). For more information, see her author website.
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.