The research project aims to identify and relate the "automatic bodies" that populate silent cinema from its origins until the late 1920s — both on and off the screen. This concept, derived from the scientific description of involuntary bodily movements, infiltrates the new medium, which, by not merely representing it, becomes the cause of a new spectatorial symptomatology. At the two poles of the cinematic apparatus, we can position the spectator and the actor. For constructing the first pole, we will reference the seminal studies by Gunning and Gaudreault on the cinema of attractions and Berton's investigations into "nervous spectatorship." For the second pole, we will turn to specific theories on actorhood and corporeality that emerged during this period.

Influenced by contemporary studies in physiology and psychology, as well as avant-garde theatrical experiments, the first generation of filmmakers are particularly sensitive to the issue of the body as an object endowed with its own internal logic. The "bodily unconscious," both in its inert predisposition and its unpredictable resistances, proves once again to be the obsession of modernism.