Wes Fest presents Kristi McKim, author of Rushmore (BFI Film Classics) & Reception

Following the 6:30PM screening of Rushmore, Kristi McKim will discuss her new book, Rushmore (BFI Film Classics, 2023). Program begins at 8:15PM in the Ron Robinson Theater.

Rushmore (BFI Film Classics, 2023)
Kristi McKim’s compelling study of the film argues that despite the film’s titular call for haste and excess (rush/more), it challenges a drive toward perfectionism and celebrates the quiet connections that defy such passion and speed. After establishing Rushmore‘s history and reception, McKim closely reads Rushmore‘s energetic musical montages relative to slower moments that introduce tenderness and ambiguity, in a form subtler than Max’s desire-built drive or genre-based plays.

About the Author:
Kristi McKim is Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Hendrix, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Studying global ecocinema through a phenomenological approach, she explores the ways that cinema can enrich our perception by correlating our experience of time (through clocks, calendars, bodies, histories, maternity, mortality) with environmental changes (as weather, seasons, climate change) and human emotion (as hope, desire, love, mourning, nostalgia). She has published the books  Love in the Time of Cinema  (2011) and  Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change  (2013). Her essays range from the scholarly to the personal, in journals such as  Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Bennington Review, New England Review, Bright Lights Film Review, Film International,  and  Film-Philosophy.  A member of  Film Matters  Advisory Board and co-editor of  The Cine-Files  special edition on “Teaching Film,” she writes about how film experience and film teaching, over time, graft new meaning onto an art itself defined by change. Emerging from a fascination with trees, her current research explores film’s potential as a site of and inspiration for natural history.

A reception will immediately follow the session.

Full Wes Fest Details