Screening: Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mechanics of the Brain, with Michael Hagner in conversation with D. Graham Burnett

Date: Sunday, April 11, 2010, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn
FREE. No RSVP necessary.

Listen to an audio recording of this program, or download the file by right-clicking here and selecting "Save link as..."
Please note: at the twenty-third minute, the introduction ends; there are five seconds of silence, followed by the post-screening discussion.

Vsevolod Pudovkin is primarily known as a realist filmmaker whose feature films Mother, Storm over Asia, and The End of St. Petersburg are brilliant examples of 1920s Soviet cinema. It is less known that he started his career in 1926 with The Mechanics of the Brain, a popular film on Pavlov's reflexology. Pudovkin’s film practice drew on the technical possibilities of his apparatus, the artistic methods of the originally literary concept of factography, and the psycho-physiological knowledge he was supposed to document. This experimental setup generated sequences that were new and provocative to the broader public: Pavlov’s dog tortured with electrical impulses to train its conditioned reflex; a frog hanging on a tab, as on a cross; the face of a woman in the throes of giving birth. These and other passages continue to be both fascinating and shocking to this day, and the film remains an invaluable document at the crossroads of art and science in the "Age of Extremes." The screening will be followed by a discussion with Michael Hagner, historian of science at the ETH Zürich.

This program is made possible with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Still from Mechanics of the Brain

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS
Michael Hagner is professor of science studies at the ETH Zürich (Federal Institute of Technology). He studied medicine and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and was senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin between 1995 and 2003. He has published extensively on the history of the neurosciences, the history of cybernetics, and the function of visualization in the sciences. In 2008, he was awarded the Sigmund-Freud-Preis für wissenschaftliche Prosa by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.

D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet and teaches history of science at Princeton University.