«Обними меня»: три эпохи русского жеста «объятие» (по данным корпуса МУРКО)

Abstract

The article examines the formal characteristics of the Russian gesture of embrace (Russian: ob”yatie, объятие) as depicted in feature films. The study material consists of video episodes from Soviet and post-Soviet films of the 20th century, represented in the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO) of the Russian National Corpus. The focus is on the duration of the gesture with the emphasis on its beginning and ending phases. The determination of gesture duration necessitates a scientific justification of its elementary structure, delineating crucial phases (preparation—stroke—retraction), and exploring its potential as a social tactile gesture. The research also aims to analyze the cinema aesthetics of three epochs exemplified by films from the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s. Different approaches to film montage, sociocultural and political contexts, meaning genesis in the film, as well as the perspectives of the director, actor, and viewer significantly influence what we see in feature films. Consequently, the question arises of whether a valid study of gestures can be conducted using film material, and it is resolved affirmatively. The results indicate that the realization of the gesture ob”yatie varies. The preparation phase is often a manual movement, while the retraction phase is characterized by the departure of one participant from the situation, ending physical contact at a certain point of the stroke. The proposed method of defining the beginning and ending of the gesture helped to reveal the shortest embrace in the 1936 film Circus (Russian: Цирк) and the longest gesture in the 1961 film My Friend, Kolka! (Russian: Друг мой, Колька!). On average, the duration of the embrace ranges from 6 to 13 seconds.