Anat Pick (Queen Mary, London): "Showing Up: Kelly Reichardt's Multispecies Comedy of Care" Film Studies Speaker Series: Professor Anat Pick (Queen Mary, University of London)

Kelly Reichardt's Showing Up (2022) is portrait of a female artist by a female artist that explores the connections between artmaking and acts of care towards human and nonhuman others. Continuing her longstanding interest in animals, the film is also a kind of departure for Reichardt. The most intimate of her films to date, Showing Up turns its attentions from domesticated animals (the dogs, horses, and cows of her earlier work) to the much-maligned feral pigeon. The film begins by positing artistic dedication and caring responsibilities as irreconcilable, competing demands. Read as a “process film,” however, I argue that Showing Up gradually reveals art and care as interlocking creative, relational practices. With reference to feminist ethics of care, I discuss Showing Up as a multispecies comedy about artmaking and caregiving in a shared world.

Bio: Anat Pick is Professor of Film and Head of the Department of Film at Queen Mary University of London, UK. She is author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011), and co-editor of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn, 2013) and Religion in Contemporary Thought and Cinema (Edinburgh, 2019). Anat has published widely on animals in film. Her coedited volume Permacinema: Rootedness, Regeneration, Resistance is forthcoming in 2025, and she is completing a book on the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil and film.