Re: Annette Michelson presents rare screening of V.I. Pudovkin's Mechanics of the Brain at Light Industry (8/11)

From: Esperanza Collado (email suppressed)
Date: Sat Aug 08 2009 - 08:08:50 PDT


Thomas,
do you recommend to get tickets in advance?
Merci infiniment,

Esperanza.

2009/8/7 Thomas Beard <email suppressed>

> Light Industry
> 220 36th Street, 5th Floor
> Brooklyn, New York
> http://www.lightindustry.org
>
> Mechanics of the Brain
> V.I. Pudovkin, 16mm, 1926, 64 mins
> Presented by Annette Michelson
> Tuesday, August 11, 2009 at 7:30pm
>
> The year 1926 represents a privileged moment of the young Soviet film
> industry, with Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Vertov, Barnet, Room,
> Kozintsev and Trauberg all represented by important workãand some,
> including
> Pudovkin, with more than one.
>
> But Mechanics of the Brain, Pudovkinπs first film, was like no other.
> Interrupted on this project by work on The Mother, his extremely successful
> first major film narrative, Pudovkin returned later that year to complete
> his documentary on the theory and practice of Pavlovian reflexology. This
> film is of especial interest in a number of ways: first, as a clear
> indication of the importance of this filmmakerπs primarily scientific
> training and work experience, something we see in his texts on filmmaking
> and film acting which were to serve as a bible for successive generations
> of
> filmmakers, well beyond the borders of the USSR. Of more general importance
> is Mechanicsπ role in the establishment of reflexology as the official base
> of psychology and psychiatry in the USSR, and its anti-psychoanalytic
> character. And of particular interest is the show-and-tell form of the
> demonstrationsãcompelling, and, in fact, disturbing. For the subjection of
> patients to Pavolvian technology and method generates images that recall,
> in
> their strangeness, certain aspects of Surrealist imageryãthe work of Max
> Ernst in particular. This film that begins as a demonstration of scientific
> method develops in its appropriation of technology the aspect of a horror
> feature. ã AM
>
> Annette Michelson is Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at New York
> University. Her research addresses issues of practice and theory within the
> various forms and periods of the cinematic avant-garde. She is a founder of
> the journal October as well as of October Books and editor of October: The
> First Decade. Professor Michelson has introduced and edited Kino-eye: The
> Writings of Dziga Vertov and Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The
> Writings
> of Nagisa Oshima. Among her other publications are studies of Marcel
> Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, S.M. Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, and
> Jean Renoir. She is a co-author of The Art of Moving Shadows for the
> National Gallery of Art.
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>

-- 
-----------------Esperanza Collado
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.