As part of The Design Film Festival, a collaborative programme between HEAD-Genève, Parsons The New School and Kingston School of Art, led by Alexandra Midal, Ulrich Lehmann and Jana Scholze, Marloes ten Bhömer performed a reading for the By the Dark of the Moon event. Ten Bhömer is currently working on a research project focused on directing women’s movements on screen (which she interprets as designed actions) and intends to measure the muscle activation of the audience in response to those movements. The reading focuses on women’s movement on screen and blocking. Blocking refers to the positioning and movement of the actors and the camera. The act of blocking is a vital part of steering an audience’s reading or perception of a woman on screen, who she is, what her motives are, what she represents, how much control over her body she has, where she is allowed to go or what her place is. These representations in turn shape ideas about women. As such films are mirrors with agency and serve as methods for liberating or policing women’s physical movements and social mobility. With the potential that audiences mimic movements on screen through covert muscle activation, films become immediate controlling muscle training devises.

 

List of Readings, in order of appearance:

Film: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975, directed by Chantal Akerman.

Thesis: Temporality, spatiality and Looking at Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), 2015, by Genevieve Pocius.

Lecture: Film Factory Of Gestures. Body Images And Body Memory In The Age Of Globalization, 2020 by Oksana Bulgakova. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMdw97p9Ykk

Journal Article: Ideomotor design: Using common coding theory to derive novel video game interactions, in Pragmatics and Cognition, vol. 18 issue 2, 2010, pp.313-339 by S. Chandrasekharan, A. Mazalek, M. Nitsche, Y. Chen and A. Ranjan.

Film: Life of Oharu, Saikaku Ichidai Onna, 1952, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.

Chapter: ‘Floating Femininity: A look at Performance Art by Women’ in Women’s Images of Men, 1985, pages 164, 170, 173, by Catherine Elwes.