Daejeon, July 27–31
In the Soviet Union, perestroika was a period of political reforms launched in the mid-1980s with Mikhail Gorbachev’s call for public openness, glasnost. This had a seismic impact on Soviet media contents (McNair 2006). Previous studies have applied visual similarity analyses based on convolutional features of sampled frames to expose how the appearance of Soviet newsreels changed radically in the mid-1980s. A hypothesis is that one of the reasons for the radical shift in visual representation was due to changing portrayals of people, as the newsreels ceased to represent heroes of socialist work and began to portray people in ways that highlighted ecological, economic, and political difficulties that were beginning to be covered in the media (Oiva et al. 2024). This hypothesis has so far not been verified.
The aim of this paper is to explore whether there was a distinguishable change in the postures and gestures of individuals depicted in the Novosti dnya newsreel series in the 1980s.
Poses and gestures are subjects of study in many disciplines, including art history, historical anthropology, semiotics, psychology, and cultural heritage studies (Impett 2020, Alliata et al. 2024). In the context of poses in Soviet media and film, Oksana Bulgakowa has noted that the ways human bodies are displayed in film reveals not only the age and societal position of the individual, but speaks also more generally about the norms of the given era. She also emphasizes that as publicly shown film media reflected upon the societal and political changes, it also created or at least amplified them by “educating” the audiences by showcasing acceptable or desirable behavior (Bulgakowa 2008). Bulgakowa’s visual analysis of the gestures, poses and movement of individuals in Soviet film throughout the 20th century emphasizes, for example, changes in the 1960s when the physical appearance became more relaxed. Her analysis, however, does not reach to the 1980s, leaving an interesting gap to be covered.
Figure 1. Detected standing poses, visualized as inferred body meshes and keypoint-based armatures, from Novosti dnya newsreels from 1982 (left) and 1988 (right).
This study examines 418 issues of the Novosti dnya (“News of the Day”) newsreel released from 1980 to 1990 by the Central Documentary Film Studios in Moscow. These approximately 8-10 minute news films were shown in cinemas and on TV and focused on contemporary events. Novosti dnya was the main newsreel series produced in the Soviet Union, comparable to Pravda in newspapers. Because its contents followed strictly the policies of the Communist Party, the changes in policies were reflected there as well. From 1980 to 1986 the series published 48 issues, and starting from 1987 the annual production nearly halved, to 27 issues per year. The films are available in digital form as MP4 video files encoded in 320x240 resolution at 25 frames per second, running to 19 hours and 19 minutes of footage in total. We use the data with the permission of the copyright holder.
We use a pipeline for human pose estimation in standard single-camera videos that is built upon a set of transformer-based models that perform end-to-end human detection and tracking in an inferred three-dimensional space, an approach that is more robust to occlusion than prior methods (Rajasegaran et al. 2021, 2023). Each video is upscaled to the models’ preferred 1920x1080 resolution, after which estimated poses are derived from volumetric body meshes (see Figure 1). This produced a dataset of 13.8 million poses, depicted as 45 keypoints in 3D space, which are also represented as simplified armatures composed of 13 standard keypoints (head, shoulders, arms, hips, legs), 15 joint angles for normalized in-place motion analysis, and 16-element view-invariant embedding vectors to facilitate clustering (Sun et al. 2020). These representations are stored in a Postgres database and indexed for similarity querying via the pgvector extension. We then apply both exploratory and directed data analyses with the objective of observing potential differences between prevalent poses from newsreels from the early 1980s to those from the second half of the decade.
A first exploratory analysis uses similar techniques to those productively applied to visual art history (Marsocci / Lastilla 2021), employing cosine similarity-based approximate nearest neighbor indexing to examine whether poses (and their embeddings) from earlier and later in the decade are more likely to cluster with each other and to identify prevalent and representative poses from before and after the advent of perestroika. We also apply directed analyses that quantify the average degree of “slouch” in standing poses, determined by applying thresholds to each pose’s average foot-ankle-hip, knee-hip-shoulder, and hip-shoulder-head angles. We further analyze simultaneous joint rotations to evaluate whether newsreels from earlier in the 1980s featured a greater or lesser degree of synchronized gestures than those in the decade's latter portion.
Figure 2. Graphs of the averaged percentage of hunched poses (left) and the average of correlated simultaneous joint motion (right) across 418 Soviet newsreels, 1980-1990. Each point is a newsreel; lines indicate a linear regression fit with 95% confidence intervals.
Initial experiments indicate a noticeable increase in the averaged percentage of hunched or ‘slouching’ postures in newsreels from 1980 to 1990, and a small but possibly significant increase in the average degree of synchronized movements, with the latter calculated via cosine similarity between simultaneous joint motion vectors (see Figure 2). The increase in hunched poses over time may support the hypotheses outlined above regarding shifts in the economic conditions and social characteristics that were available for depiction in newsreels during perestroika. The increase in synchronized motion, if indeed significant, is more difficult to explain, but may reflect greater representation of group folk performances and other mass activities.