Говорящие руки, фильм Эммануэля Альмборга

Talking Hands/Говорящие руки, 2016, 48 min, HD (and 16mm transferred to HD). Talking Hands/Говорящие руки, is a film about the 1960’s Zagorsk school for deaf-blind children outside Moscow and its pedagogy. It was established by Marxist philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, who, in contention with dominant Soviet ideology, began developing ideas of how human consciousness is socially constituted and emerges in relation to material culture, objects, and tools. Inspired by 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza he conceptualized the “thinking body,” that is, a body’s capacity to “mould its own action actively to the shape of any other body, to coordinate the shape of its movement in space with the shape and distribution of all other bodies” as a fundamental feature of ‘thinking’ or ‘reason.’ For Ilyenkov, communism was a pedagogical project for such a vision and subject to emerge. Or as Alexander Suvorov, one of Ilyenkov’s deaf-blind students described, “Who told you we see nothing and hear nothing? We see and