The Power Institutes presents Lesley Stern

The Power Institute Foundation For Art & Visual Culture in association with
The School of Media Film and Theatre, University of NSW

Present A Free Public Lecture

Lesley Stern

Ghosting: The Performance and Migration of Cinematic Gesture,
focusing on Hou Hsiao-hsien's Good Men, Good Women (Taiwan, 1995)

6.00pm Wednesday, 16th March, 2005
RC MILLS LECTURE THEATRE, ROOM 209
RC Mills Building, Fisher Road, Main Campus, University of Sydney

Can the camera gesture? A film is not like a body, and it does not behave like a human body. Yet the camera has the capacity to perform in such a way as to move and to mark (to move and mark bodies within the diegesis, and to move and mark-kinetically, aesthetically, emotionally-viewing bodies). A film can do this not merely through representation and depiction, but through movement itself, the movement of memory. Good Men, Good Women enacts, in a metadiscursive way, the notion of gesture as a ghosting. The film is simultaneously about history (the modern history of Taiwan) and about performance, about betrayal and loss, about the writing of history on and through bodily memory. And as this story of a bar hostess-turned-actress-playing-a-revolutionary-heroine moves between past and present, so it moves between histrionic and quotidian registers. The paper will focus on two scenes which are each ghosted not so much by earlier scenes, as by earlier gestures. Through memory these gestures are inscribed in/on (or between?) bodies.

Lesley Stern is Professor of Visual Arts and MFA Advisor at the University of California, San Diego. She has written widely on film and performance, and also writes at the generic intersection of fiction and criticism. She is the author of The Scorsese Connection and The Smoking Book and co-editor of Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance. Currently she is working on a book called Foreign and Domestic: Gardening in a Strange Land.

If you would like to be on our email list for public lectures & seminars, please send us your details.
Further Information: power.institute@arts.usyd.edu.au tel: 9351 4211

The Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture, RC Mills Bldg, Fisher Rd, University of Sydney NSW 2006

[Recent essays include: 'From the Other side of Time', in Christie, I and Moore, A (eds), The Cinema of Michael Powell: International perspectives on an English filmmaker (in press), 'Paths that Wind Through the Thicket of Things', in Brown, B (ed), Things, 'Remaking: Patterns of Repetition and Difference in Blow-Up, The Conversation and Blow Out. Or: It Is Possible that One Machine May Know More About Another Machine Than I, You, She', in Antonini, A (ed), il film e I suoi multipli/film and its multiples, 'The Tales of Hoffmann: An Instance of Operality', in Joe, J and Theresa, R (eds), Between Opera and Cinema, 'Cinematic Performance: Between the Histrionic and the Quotidian.' Cinema & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, (Italy), No. 2, Fall 2002, 'Putting on a Show, or The Ghostliness of Gesture.' Senses of Cinema, Issue 21, July-August 2002]