Screen1900 Member: Brigitte Schulze
Brigitte Schulze obtained her PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 1997, and in the same year completed her training as a yoga teacher certified by the German preventive health care system. In 2003 she published her doctoral thesis titled Humanist and Emotional Beginnings of a Nationalist Indian Cinema in Bombay. With Kracauer in the Footsteps of Phalke.
Her main research interests are condensed in this book: Identity constructions of belonging to nation(-state), religion, or history; how these are linked to violence against the ‘outsider’, and how these processes are coupled to ‘scientific revolutions’ and the modern ‘public sphere’; Siegfried Kracauer and his multifaceted and pluralistic œuvre is in its philosophical dimensions a major field of study, also a referee for transdisciplinary, comparative explorations into its relevance to present identity discourses highlighted by Indian academics, in particular their postcolonial approaches and the Subaltern Studies’ Group at Delhi University. Here and at Bombay’s Tata Institute of Social Sciences she conducted her main empirical data research for her post-graduation thesis in ‘Pedagogy in the Third World’ (1990), and for her doctoral thesis.
From 2001 to 2004, funded by Volkswagen Foundation, Brigitte conducted the research project Regional Cine-Experiences of 'Femininity' in Self-Reflections of Cultural Identity in Kerala, at the University of Trier: www.femcinecult-kerala.uni-trier.de
Sheis currently preparing a research project on the impact of Jewish thought and philosophy on expressionist artists in the Hessian region 1900 to 1933 at the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt.
In the Screen1900 context, Brigitte published, lectured and taught widely on the history, socio-culture and philosophy of the cinematic ventures undertaken by Indian film pioneers in British India. She researched historic cinema cultures in the metropolis Bombay City and its hinterland, the Bombay Presidency, and retrieved markedly universal characteristics of Bombay’s screens around 1900, in particular Bombay’s film pioneer D. G. Phalke’s feature films and writings.
Dhundiraj Govind Phalke (1870-1940), Bombay’s Film Pioneer
Phalke’s Major Opus Raja Harischandra, 1913 and 1917
