Scores of Movement
Chapter 3 examines the approaches to film actor training developed by the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the early 1920s. Inspired by the radical innovations of contemporary theater, Kuleshov’s perspective on film acting relied on Ivan Pavlov’s and Vladimir Bekhterev’s reflexology, as well as psychotechnics and Taylorist labor efficiency training. Based on archival materials, this chapter establishes Kuleshov’s connection to the Central Institute of Labor (Tsentral’nyi Institut Truda) in Moscow, which promoted a utopian program of ingraining effective working skills in the nervous systems of factory workers by optimizing their trajectories of movement. Kuleshov embraced the concepts and techniques popularized by this Institute. He theorized his actors’ ideal performance in terms of energy expenditure and maximal use of the audiences’ attention span. My analysis of Kuleshov’s program for actors’ bodily discipline scrutinizes the training apparatuses he relied on in the hopes of achieving geometrically precise, rhythmical gestures, which he believed could form a legible “ornament” in rapid montage.