On Friday, January 15th, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m., Ken Calhoon will be presenting a lecture as part of the School of Languages and Global Studies seminar series. The lecture is titled “A Pause in the Action: Reflections on a Cinematic Gesture.” It is taken from Prof. Calhoon's recently completed book project, The Long Century’s Long Shadow: Weimar Cinema and the Romantic Modern. The focus of this study is German cinema of the 1920s and specifically the horizon, within that body of filmmaking, that opens onto Romanticism. This project attempts to link the cinema of Robert Wiene (Caligari), F. W Murnau (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh), Fritz Lang (Siegfried, Metropolis) and others to aesthetic practices, in literature and painting, that emerged around 1800, which in turn gave rise to the modernism of which “Expressionist” cinema was a part. This lecture will concentrate on a gestural motíf characteristic of Romantic painting and its afterlife in the cinema generally. Literary works under discussion include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as well as Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a novel by the German Romantic Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg).