Factory of Gestures
Body Language in Film
AMT (the Aesthetics & Media Track in the German Department) in conjunction with
the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and the Department of German,
present
a media-analytic demonstration and lecture by
OKSANA BULGAKOVA
Factory of Gestures:
Body Language in Film
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13th @ 4:30pm
East Pyne 205
In earlier times the language of gestures was transmitted from adults to children, taught through dancing lessons, and preserved in books on good manners. What happened with body memory when people became moviegoers and when their everyday experience embraced films crossing national and social borders? Film not only preserved the body language of previous eras, it also altered this language and developed the imitative abilities of people with regard to motion. Physiologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers studied this development, while artists and politicians tried to manipulate it.
“The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film“ is an extensive audiovisual research project that investigates the metamorphoses of body language in Russian society as evidenced by documentary and fiction films, private and professional photography, visual arts, and theatre (http://www.factoryofgestures.com/). It was developed by Oksana Bulgakowa between 2003 and 2008 at the Stanford Humanities lab in collaboration with Dietmar and Gregor Hochmuth.
An internationally known film scholar and filmmaker formerly at Stanford University and subsequently at the ZFL Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin, Prof. Oksana Bulgakova is the author of Eisenstein and Germany (1998), The Adventures of Dr Mabuse in the Country of Bolsheviks (1995), the co-author (with Katya Djogot, Boris Groys, and Hans Gunther) of Dream Factory Communism: The Visual Culture of the Stalin Period and (with Lynne Attwood and Maya Turovskaya) of Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era. Her directorial film credits include The Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein (with Dietmar Hochmuth, 1998), the five-part Evgenij Bauer and the Russian Cinema (1995) and Stalin – eine Mosfilmproduktion (with Enno Patalas, 1993). She has recently been named the successor to Thomas Koebner as the director of the Institute für Filmwissenschaft at the Universität Mainz.