#  History of Art & Arch: film Screening of "Reasonable Doubt" followed by Lecture BY Mieke Bal 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 17, 2016** 

 05:30PM - 08:30PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Sackler Building, Lecture Hall 029, 485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA**  



 

 



 

The Graduate Student Lecture Series of the Department of History of Art and Architecture presents

**Mieke Bal**

Cultural Theorist, Critic, Video Artist

Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam

**"Reasonable Doubt"** & **"Thinking in Film"**

A FILM SCREENING AND LECTURE WITH MIEKE BAL

**Thursday, November 17**

**5:30-7:15pm** Screening of "Reasonable Doubt"

**7:30-8:30pm** Lecture "Thinking in Film"

Sackler Building (485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA 02138), Lecture Hall 029

About the film:

**Reasonable Doubt**

**Scenes from the lives and works of René Descartes and Kristina, Queen of Sweden**

**Theoretical fiction, docu-drama, 98 min.**

After a relationship by correspondence, philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) met and briefly interacted with Queen Kristina (1626-1689) in Stockholm, where he died six week after arriving, due to the cold. Once Descartes had reached Sweden, the two didn’t see each other much. Kristina’s philosophical interest was genuine enough. But he was there in a more or less decorative function, to adorn Kristina’s ambitious project of creating an Academy that would put Sweden’s intellectual elite on the European map.

Descartes left Western thought with a burden and a treasure. The burden: a misconstrued dualistic tradition. In Mieke Bal’s view, he accepted the dualism of the Catholic Church, but fought against it all his life because it is not reasonable. The treasure: a decisive advance in rational thought that, precisely, did not excise the body; nor religion for that matter. According to Bal, the (in)famous *cogito* can be interpreted in the opposite direction, an attempt to embody thought. In *Reasonable Doubt*, her most recent film project, Bal looks back from his last book, *The Passions of the Soul*, and sees the ongoing struggle against dualism in different episodes of his life.

**Watch the trailer** [here](https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__vimeo.com_155689259&d=CwMFaQ&c=WO-RGvefibhHBZq3fL85hQ&r=8PGtAuTGav0Hb3DIZ-R4nCIAe9545xhJ7A8HpkNhw1A&m=RfFfSXXGIPYuvUfZp4sNA5LI0PRYWdgIAYszIys4XpY&s=6if_yJR18bF-WgsVofbNb8zxJOptcN7xu30HEYU9ETA&e=)

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University



 

 



 

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