Kinesthetic Empathy in Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Theory

Chapter 4 explores Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of the audience’s corporeal empathy, evoked by actors’ movements and graphical, nonhuman “gestures”—that is, “movements” implied by the structure of the shot composition, editing, and other formal devices. In scrutinizing Eisenstein’s theory that spectatorship is, fundamentally, an enactive experience, this chapter traces the roots of his ideas and evaluates the aesthetic and political implications of his position. First, I analyze the filmmaker’s engagement with psychological theories of William James, William Carpenter, Vladimir Bekhterev, Alexander Luria, and Lev Vygotsky, as well as the 19th-century German theorists of empathy (Einfühlung). Special attention is devoted to one of Eisenstein’s major sources: Vladimir Bekhterev’s Collective Reflexology (1921), a seminal work of early Soviet psychology, which discussed nonverbal communication in crowds and argued that the processing of visual sensations by the brain instantaneously impacts motor networks. I argue that although Eisenstein’s model of spectatorship appears manipulative, it is also potentially emancipatory. Embracing the utopian spirit of the avant-garde, he was willing to subject himself and his audience to radical experimentation aimed at testing the sensory properties of cinema and demystifying the mass production of emotions.

Epilogue

Over the past twenty years, evolving technologies have allowed us to map the activity of the brain with unprecedented precision. Initially driven by medical goals, neuroscience has advanced to the level where it is rapidly transforming our understanding of emotions, empathy, reasoning, love, morality, and free will. What is at stake today is our sense of the self: who we are, how we act, how we experience the world, and how we interact with it. By now nearly all of our subjective mental states have been tied to some particular patterns of cortical activity. Beyond the radical philosophical implications, these studies have far-reaching social consequences. Neuroscientists are authoritatively establishing norms and deviations; they make predictions about our behavior based on processes that lie outside our conscious knowledge and control. The insights of neuroscience are being imported into the social sphere, informing debates in jurisprudence, forensics, healthcare, education, business, and politics. A recent collection of essays, compiled by Semir Zeki, a leading European proponent of applied neuroscience, in collaboration with the American lawyer Oliver Goodenough, calls for further integration of lab findings into discussions of public policy and personnel training....

The Pulse of Film

Chapter 5 considers psychophysiological efforts to assess the emotional responses of filmgoers by photographing their facial reactions and registering changes in their vital signs. These studies were done in the USSR for the purpose of raising the effectiveness of film propaganda among proletarian, rural, and juvenile audiences, and in the United States, for identifying crowd-pleasing narrative formulae. The chapter juxtaposes spectator tests conducted by the inventor of the polygraph lie detector, William Moulton Marston, for Universal Studios in Hollywood with analogous initiatives launched by various agencies under the jurisdiction of the Narkompros (a Soviet ministry for education and propaganda). I further trace the roots of these empirical methods to late 19th-century trends in physiological psychology, when chronophotography served alongside the kymograph for obtaining indexical records of corporeal processes that were thought to reflect the workings of the psyche. Offering a critical reading of this legacy, the chapter shows how these spectator studies replicated the universalist fallacies of biologically oriented psychology, in addition to strengthening a patronizing attitude toward the subjects of research: women, children, and illiterate peasants.

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.

Motor Impulses of Verse

Chapter 2 explores scholarly theories that accounted for the role of kinesthetic sensations of pronunciation in the aesthetic experience of the poetic form. The Russian Formalists described the articulatory properties of various poetic styles as an objective, impersonal formal structure. They aimed to establish whether this structure takes shape during the process of verse composition and whether it impacts the subsequent oral renditions of the poem by the author and other readers. In historicizing the Formalists’ conceptions of the performative, embodied aspect of poetry, my analysis centers on the Petrograd Institute of the Living Word (Institut Zhivogo Slova) and the Laboratory for the Study of Artistic Speech under the auspices of the Institute of Art History (Kabinet Izucheniiа Khudizhestvennoi Rechi pri Institute Istorii Iskusstv) between 1919 and 1930. Their endeavor to register poetic rhythms and intonations closely resembled the methods of experimental phonetics used by the European and American phoneticians. My analysis points to numerous common sources shared by the Russian and Western authors—notably, the publications coming out from Jean-Pierre Rousselot’s laboratory of experimental phonetics. The final section of the chapter unravels the concept of “formal emotions,” proposed by the Russian Formalists, as they attempted to distance themselves from the simplistic biographic interpretations of affects encoded in literature and considered the psychomotor properties of verse from the standpoint of genre and style.

Sound-Gesture

Chapter 1 analyzes Viktor Shklovskii’s reflections on Futurist poets, who presented their experiments as an inquiry into the biodynamics of verbal expressivity. Shklovskii suggested that Aleksei Kruchenykh’s trans-rational poetry (zaum’) uncovered deeply ingrained motor programs, which shape the verbalization of various ideas and states of consciousness. Shklovskii contended that identifying these motor programs, or “sound gestures,” and putting them to play was the Futurists’ method of palpating the “inner form” of words in the Russian language. In contextualizing Shklovskii’s conception, the chapter maps the spread of psychophysiological terms in Russian literary theory and linguistic scholarship in the 1910s, with a particular emphasis on the echoes of William James’s theory of the corporeal experience of emotion and Wilhelm Wundt’s ideas on the gestural origin of language.