14.05.2008 | Russisches Haus der Wissenschaft und Kultur, Friedrichstraße 176-179, 10117 Berlin-Mitte

Gesture in soviet films

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 / 8 pm

Russisches Haus der Wissenschaft und Kultur, Friedrichstrasse 176-179, 10117 Berlin-Mitte, U6 Französische Strasse

In the past, the language of gestures was imparted from adults to children, from teachers to pupils, adhered to in books about proper comportment, and rehearsed in dancing lessons. But what happens to bodily memory when change is accelerated, the boundaries between social groups become permeable, and national traditions become blurred due to the fact that over the last hundred years people have become film spectators and the films, which transverse national and social borders, have embedded their everyday experience? Presenting the findings of her vast research on bodily comportment for The Factory of Gestures, a comprehensive DVD project, Oksana Bulgakowa reveals the alteration of body language in the film and daily life of twentiethcentury Russian and Soviet society. Bulgakowa curated the film section for the exhibition Berlin — Moscow/ Moscow— Berlin 1950–2000 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin and has been a professor at several universities, among them Stanford University and internationale filmschule köln, Cologne. She was born 1954 in Nikopol (UA), and lives and works in Berlin (DE). The lecture will be held in German.