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Historical Video Gesture Dictionary

 Gesture Classification System by time period
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Did you ever notice that you can date a movie by the facial expressions/gestures of the actors? I just watched an Andy Warhol film that made this clear. It was a series of 3 minute clips of celebrities mostly staring at the camera and trying not to blink. As I was watching I was thinking that the celebs could have been from 2005 because all they were doing was blinking and that is an undatable gesture. But some of the celebs were mugging and it became obvious right away when they did, that they were from the 1960's. You could see that they had copied their facial expressions from people around them and that those kind of gestures -- that language is one that changes quickly over time. and i also decided that I want my own gesture vocabulary to be totally composed of timeless gestures. Or is the timelessness just about a lack of self-consciousness?

anyway it would be good to have a video dictionary, now that there is so much available web video, of gestures and facial expressions by chronological date, with examples from the movies of the era.

—JesusHChrist, Dec 31 2005

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       Hmm. Interesting idea. Sure. +   

       I'm unsure of my ability to accurately date facial expressions. Maybe some added "date expression was popular" metadata?
—bristolz, Dec 31 2005
   

       Theater people and historians would kill for this if you could gat any sort of accuracy at all. Bread.
—humanbean, Dec 31 2005
   

       I seem to remember Wittgenstein saying something like 'The entirety of an individuals personality can be determined by observing small movements of the head and neck'. Doesn't sound like his usual stuff but still. You might say in the 50s people were austere and in the 80s aspirational (generalisation), so you may be right. I've been in front of the mirror and can't seem to summon anything up though. Fantastic idea.
—weedy, Dec 31 2005
   

       I don't think movies are going to be the best example of this... however, I like the concept.
—zigness, Dec 31 2005
   


 

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