The Factory of Gestures: Body Language in Film (review)

Oksana Bulgakowa's fascinating DVD The Factory of Gestures is the audiovisual companion to her book of the same title, published in Russian.¹ Together, book and DVD are an interactive multimedia project on movement in cinema. The DVD, which is written, edited, and directed in collaboration with Dietmar Hochmuth and Gregor Hochmuth, provides the visual documents to support the larger historical and theoretical claims of the book: namely, that the language of the body—posture, manner of walking or sitting, how one holds one's head—is a series of signifying codes that shift and change as societies undergo changes in social structure, mobility, and modernization. As Bulgakowa points out in the introduction to the book and the voice-over on the DVD, the language of gestures for a seventeenth-century nobleman were radically different from that of a man of the Renaissance or an eighteenth-century peasant. While children learn their manner of walking or sitting or eating from parents and teachers, adults continue to learn it by imitating bodily norms taken from portraits, sculpture, photographs, and, in the twentieth century, from the cinema. Tourists on vacation take pictures not only of famous monuments but also of themselves posing in front of these sites, their bodily language readily imitating the postures they have seen in paintings, reproducing at the level of the body a kind of visual memory. And while bodily language and gesture have always been rigidly codified along class, race, social, and gender lines, those same rigid codes have also been subject to rapid change, brought on by revolution, industrialization, modernization, and other forms of social upheaval. The problem of bodily language is posed in this study in two ways. First, what happens to the body during a period of radical societal transformation, such as the Russian Revolution? And second, in what way does the new art of cinema come to play a role in both registering and creating the new body?

While the book is more focused on history and theory, the DVD provides an archive of bodily gestures (taken mostly from Russian and Soviet cinema, but frequently placed in the broader context of American and European visual culture) and shows the ways in which their meanings shift with social and economic transformations. The study as a whole looks at the history of Russian and Soviet cinema, moving from highly theatrical bodily gestures (the bent back and lowered head of the peasant as a symbol of oppression) and the marked differences between classes (the restricted gestures of the workers, the corpulence of the capitalist, the straight back of the military officer) to the liberated "natural" body (the "physiological" hero of 1920s cinema who smacks his lips, scratches himself, burps, or spits) or its transgendered performance (the feminized male body of the dandy versus the masculinized female body of the suffragette). "Locomotion," for example, describes the posture of the body as it appears in movement: straight and bent, standing, walking, running. Personal carriage speaks to social rather than age difference. Thus, a bent or straight back demonstrates relations of power and subordination: peasants, workers, and traders do not stand up straight; peasants, whether they are men, women, or children, all stand hunched over, both in joy and in sorrow, at work or at home; czars, noblemen, and beautiful women hold their heads up high, their backs straight. This discipline of the body has to do with a sense of grace and balance, but also one of mastery, both over the body and over society at large. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, in Soviet cinema the workers' backs straightened out, whereas the previous ruling class (now perceived as the losers) are hunched over.

At the same time, certain postures speak to issues of gender rather than class. The slightly inclined head is a sign of youthful femininity and is shared equally by the in-genue, the peasant, and the worker. But for men, the same gesture can also be used as a...