Audio-visual program 'The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film'

“The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film” is an extensive audiovisual research project that investigates the metamorphoses of body language in Soviet society, as evidenced by documentary and feature films, private and professional photography, visual arts and theatre (http://www.factoryofgestures.com/).

As the Revolution disrupted social norms and traditions, Soviet society experienced a radical change in its gestural code. The abolition of gestural restraints was interpreted as the liberation of natural man: bad manners were re-evaluated as socially acceptable behaviour; some body techniques that had been contained within the private space, such as bathing or gymnastics, were now accepted in the public sphere, and some gestures from the public sphere were transplanted to very private settings. Soviet cinema, which had to reflect and invent a new social model, used very eclectic sources: the rhetorical gestures of political leaders, the symbolic gestures of the imperial code, the eloquent gestures of theatrical melodrama, the new gestures of decadent flamboyant hysterical bodies, and the body language of American film stars, sports culture, and Taylorism.

Films proposed utopian, sometimes contradictory, models of a new body behaviour that should be imitated in reality. A new society striving to free itself from old rituals was developing new designs in clothing and living spaces, new standards of perception, and a new body language for a new anthropological type: homo sovieticus, a specific version of the modern man.