Performative Opacity

Slought and the Departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Francophone, Italian, & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce Performative Opacity, a public conversation with scholars Ian Fleishman and Iggy Cortez, introduced by Meta Mazaj, about stardom and screen performance in the work of Isabelle Huppert. The program, free and open to the public, will take place at Slought on Monday, November 13, 2023 from 6-8pm.

With a corpus of well over a hundred films, Huppert is a singular French actor who offers a unique testing ground for current approaches in film studies and affect studies. Attention to Huppert's performances can reframe recent discussions on the social and cultural dimensions of emotion through a compelling paradox. Her roles tend to express grandiose and overwhelming conditions central to debates in the humanities—negativity, dispossession, trauma—but through elusive or resistant forms of expression: what J. Hoberman once called her "genius to distinguish varieties of blankness."

In their recent volume, Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (2023), editors Ian Fleishman and Iggy Cortez, together with a variety of scholarly contributors, survey Huppert's corporeal bearing, her repertoire of gestural and emotional expressions, the affective attributes and orientations she signifies – they also take her work as an invitation for sustained reflection on the aesthetic, political and even philosophical questions it raises. Her affective disposition towards abject, aberrant, or discordant characters approaches the darker recesses of the psyche. Depravity, dispossession and trauma come to light in the microeconomy of a grimace, through subtle vocal modulations, and in the stillness of expressions that, when held in a long-take close-up, register almost imperceptible psychic movements and inflections.