Learning to See With Ozu, Or an Inquiry Into the Non-Modern Conditions of a Media-Anthropology of Gestures
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Abstract
Recent occidental research, following above all the work of Agamben (2000) has opened an inquiry into gesturality in general, and the gesture in and through cinema in particular. Much of this research has been done in media studies and linked, via Mauss, to anthropologies of technology and the image (Schüttpelz, 2010). Here, I aim to experiment with cosmotechnics (Hui, 2017) and will propose a way to rethink the concept of gesture in techno-modernity from within a Buddhist cosmology. This thought process will happen through the very concrete work of Ozu Yasujirō, who developed an idiosyncratic style that enables the appearance of gestures (Hasumi, 1997). In demonstrating how certain cinematic techniques tie in with Buddhist ways of thought and how they can engender a different attunement to the impermanence of not only the gestural, I will point towards the force of the technology of cinema in constructing different possible worlds within and without academia.
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