“CRAZY ZOOM MAKES EVERYONE TO FIND HIMSELF IN A DOUBLE ROLE OF A SPECTATOR AND AN ACTOR”

Abstract

Oksana Bulgakowa is a researcher of visual culture, a film critic, a screenwriter, a director, and a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She has taught at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the Leipzig Graduate School of Music and Theater, the Free University of Berlin, Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley. Author of the books “FEKS: Die Fabrik des exzentrischen Schauspielers” (1996), “Sergei Eisenstein – drei Utopien. Architekturentwürfe zur Filmtheorie” (1996), “Sergej Eisenstein. Eine Biographie” (1998), “The Gesture Factory” (2005, a renewed edition to be published by NLO publishing house in 2021), “The Soviet hearing eye: cinema and its sensory organs” (2010), “The Voice as a cultural phenomenon”(2015), “SINNFABRIK/FABRIK DER SINNE” (2015), “The Fate of the Battleship: The Biography of Sergei Eisenstein” (2017). Author of the network projects “The Visual Universe of Sergei Eisenstein” (2005), “Sergei Eisenstein: My Art in Life. Google Arts and Culture” (in collaboration with Dietmar Hochmuth, 2017–2018), and the films “Stalin – eine Mosfilmproduktion” (in collaboration with Enno Patalas, 1993), “Different Faces of Sergei Eisenstein” (in collaboration with Dietmar Hochmuth, 1997). In this issue of P&I, Oksana Bulgakowa talks about medial giants and midgets, obscene gestures of Elvis Presley, “voice-over discourse” of TV presenters, and the birth of Eisenstein’s “Method” from psychosis and neurosis. Interview by Ekaterina Maksimova. Photo by Dietmar Hochmuth.