Face/Body: European-Chinese Aberrations (Eisenstein, Brecht, Barthes, Robbe-Grillet and Ang Lee)
Date
Fri March 4th 2011, 11:00am
Location
Pigott Hall (Bldg. 260), Room
216
216
Speaker(s): Oksana Bulgakowa
Oksana Bulgakowa is an internationally known film scholar and filmmaker, who currently teaches and resides in Berlin. She has published a number of monographs on Russian and German cinema and theory. Most recently, her biography of Sergei Eisenstein was published in English in 2003 and her book Soviet Cinema and Its Senses in 2010.
Her workshop "Face/Body" will draw upon
her recent research in China and her extensive previous audiovisual
research project Factory of
Gestures (conducted at the Stanford Humanities
Lab), which analyzed the metamorphoses of body language in Russian
society on the basis of the evidence of film, photography and the
visual arts. In her workshop, she will elaborate the contrast
between the face and body from the European and Chinese points of
view, while focusing on how these portrayals interrogate the issues
of identity and
individuality.
Some of the questions addressed will be as follows: What
meaning do we assign to the face and what to the body; which part
is reserved for the expression of identity and which for
individuality; could we differentiate between the European and
Chinese understandings of these settings and can we observe changes
in their allocations over
time?
As reference texts, we will be using a European novel set
in Hong Kong, Alain Robbe-Grillet's House
of Assignation(1965), and a Chinese film with Hollywood
references, Ang Lee's Lust
Caution (2007)