The Soviet Union of the 1920s produces and supports multiple connections between the policy of work in factories and the research in medical, neurological, and collective physiology. The theatrical and cinematic work of S. M. Eisenstein forms a specific prism where these interconnections appear in a spectrum of concrete attempts to engage the factory as an aesthetic and political model. The factory as a concrete topos which Eisenstein exploits in Gas Masks and Strike questions the interrelations between the human body and machine in a new iconology of a striking factory. For the duration of the Strike, the factory is represented beyond any functionality: the workers’ body movements and gestures are all the more expressive the less they have to do with their everyday work. This modulated status of production appears in Capital, Eisenstein’s unfulfilled project to realize Marx’s political economy with methods of inner monologue invented by Joyce. This last project transfigures the factory strike into the structure of cinematographic thinking where the neuro-sensorial stimuli constantly strike the logic of the everyday consciousness in the non-personal, polyphonic, and intimate monologue.
