Oksana Bulgakowa - Sergei Eisenstein. A Biography

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:44:28 +0200

304 pages | If you prefer to buy this book at amazon.com, go here…

Sergei Eisenstein (1898 – 1948), the great Soviet film director, was born in Riga. His father was a Jew of German origin who had converted to Russian Orthodoxy and who passed himself off as a Baltic baron. His mother was the daughter of wealthy Russian (and traditionally anti-Semitic) merchants from St Petersburg.

Eisenstein’s life was full of unforeseen diversions and turns of events:
Would he become an architect like his father and go into German exile in 1918? Would he be banished as a Freemason in 1925, or stay in the USA in 1932? Would he be sentenced by a special court in 1939 to be executed, like his friends Isaak Babel and Vsevolod Meyerhold?

Or would he ultimately die as a Stalin Prize winner (for Ivan the Terrible, Part I) of a heart attack caused by the ban on Part II?

[ ISBN 9783980498913 for German Softcover ]

If you want to take a look into the book or even read, please go here… – more about the German edition you can find here…

The Factory of Gestures. Body Language in Film

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:39:07 +0200

The moment when the new technologies of photography, film, and the mass distribution of images upset the social and cultural practices of the 20th century is especially striking in Russia, where artistic experiments coincided with great social cataclysms and the search for a new expressivity of the body produced sometimes unparalleled results. As the Revolution disrupted social norms and traditions, Soviet society experienced a radical change in the gestural code. The abolition of gestural restraints was interpreted as the liberation of natural man: bad manners were re-evaluated as socially acceptable behavior, some body techniques that had been contained within the private space – like washing or calisthenics – were now accepted in the public sphere, and some gestures from the public sphere were transplanted to very private settings. The Soviet cinema, which had to reflect and invent a new social model, used very eclectic sources: the rhetorical gestures of political leaders, the symbolic gestures of the imperial code, the eloquent gestures of theatrical melodrama, the new gestures of decadent flamboyant hysterical bodies, the body language of American film stars, sports culture, and Taylorism.

Film proposed utopian, sometimes contradictory models of the new body behavior that should be imitated in reality. A new society striving to free itself from old rituals was developing a new design of clothing and living spaces, new standards of perception, and a new body language for a new anthropological type: homo soveticus, a specific version of a man of modernity.

IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN

for more information, go please go to www.factoryofgestures.com • order here or from amazon.com

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Oksana Bulgakowa - Sergei Eisenstein. A Biography

The Factory of Gestures. Body Language in Film