2019/2 — #Gesture

Browsing 2019/2 — #Gesture by Issue Date

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  • Review
  • Article
    Touchscreens, tactility, and material traces: From avant-garde artists to Instagram ASMRtists
    O’Meara, Jennifer (2019)
    This article identifies and historicises gestural trends in ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos on the social media site Instagram, where media objects foregrounding touch and texture are shared via specialist accounts and hashtags such as #satisfyingvideos and #slimeasmr. While much of the initial scholarship on ASMR culture has focused on understanding the psychological and physiological aspects of ASMR (a tingly bodily sensation triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli), I instead explore the visual aesthetics of hand-focused ASMR videos in relation to theories of haptic visuality and the touchscreen. In particular, the article historicises the filming of dexterous hands that interact with subjects like soap, slime, and paint in relation to practices of avant-garde film and women’s decorative arts, examining how these diverse media forms can all represent traces of the creator’s hand in the work itself. In considering, for example, Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films and Mary Ellen Bute’s use of the oscilloscope as a proto-touchscreen device, I aim to reveal how both avant-garde artists and so-called ‘ASMRtists’ can channel the mediums and platforms of their times towards distinctly tactile kinds of audiovisual experiences. I argue that since Instagram’s ASMR videos are typically activated using a finger on a touchscreen then the anonymous surrogate hands contained within can allow for a vicarious kind of tactile pleasure, one that can lead to distinctly digital forms of sensory stimulation.
  • Article
    At the threshold into new worlds: Virtual reality game worlds beyond narratives
    Matuszkiewicz, Kai; Weidle, Franziska (2019)
    Virtual and Augmented Reality systems are becoming increasingly popular in our everyday lives. Although these systems are extraordinary examples of the new role played by the human body in digital media ecologies much of the academic scholarship conducted in this area tends to interpret such phenomena from a narrativist standpoint. Such approaches often overlook the essential characteristics of non-narrative media. As a counter-strategy, we propose virtual fictionality – a concept emphasising central aspects of worldliness in VR-based works that lie beyond the narrative paradigm. The aim of the paper is to outline virtual fictionality as a particular world-making strategy of digital games that turns players into configurators.
  • Review
  • Article
    (Un)Frozen expressions: Melodramatic moment, affective interval, and the transformative powers of experimental cinema
    Anger, Jiří (2019)
    The study examines the double temporality of melodrama and the ways in which it can be further developed or transformed. Typical melodramatic moments draw attention to the tension between static, seemingly frozen tableaus and utopian, supposedly endless expression. Certain experimental films (e.g. Werner Schroeter’s DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN) radicalise this tension, making way for all the affective operations that emerge when the two temporalities are played out against each other. At the same time, while these affective operations make the melodramatic moments appear in a different light, they still leave them recognisable as melodramatic. This paper aims to show how this two-way movement between melodrama and experimental cinema, or melodramatic moment and affective interval respectively, works and the new insights it can bring for affect studies and their application in film theory.
  • Article
    ‘The refugee is … FOOD FOR BIOPOLITICS’: Critical knowledgescapes in Ursula Biemann’s CONTAINED MOBILITY and X-MISSION
    Bilkić, Ljudmila (2019)
    There is an aggressive dichotomy between what migration is to modern humans and how migration continues to be (re)presented throughout history. While an essential characteristic of human existence, migration also carries highly problematic associations of danger, threat, and weakness within official designations of the ‘refugee’, the ‘asylum seeker’, and the ‘illegal’. This article focuses on the continuously unfolding narrative of the refugee experience through two essay films by Ursula Biemann, CONTAINED MOBILITY (2004) and X-MISSION (2008). By employing the interdisciplinary approach of ‘critical knowledgescapes’, it offers a contextualised glimpse into the deliberate historical and sociopolitical circumstances that shape the popular global perception of ‘modern rapid migration’. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how new media works challenge problematic narratives of human existence. Works such as CONTAINED MOBILITY and X-MISSION offer new forms of visuo-narrative evidence in which individuals caught in rapid migration successfully and productively negotiate their space, compelling us to move past viewing rapid migration as an exceptional reality and to begin accepting it as one of the constant ways of life.
  • Article
  • Article
    Selfie-screen-sphere: Examining the selfie as a complex, embodying gesture
    Berkland, Darren (2019)
    This article posits that the selfie is a screenic gesture which allows individuals to embody themselves within what Vivian Sobchack calls the ‘screen-sphere’: a reformulation of our definition of the screen which accounts for the ubiquity and mobility of contemporary screens that can no longer be regarded as an ‘“array” of discrete artefacts’ but instead regarded ‘as a structural and functional collectivity’. While Sobchack claims that our ‘lived-bodies cannot physically dwell in this new spatiality without special technologies’ such as VR equipment, I believe that the set of complex gestures which result in the selfie allow, in fact, for a type of embodied existence within the screen-sphere. In particular, it is grasping the device and viewing oneself in its ‘digital mirror’ that results in this complex gestural moment. I am following Flusser in my definition of gesture; that is, a production of meaning that is contained in some practised performance: a symbolic movement that at once both expresses and articulates meaning. I will draw upon Bo Burnham’s film EIGHTH GRADE (2017) to provide an example of how this gestural relationship develops within the screen-sphere, in which a young protagonist engages with a variety of ‘screenic’ surfaces. Closely examining the main character’s selfie process, I will, first, reformulate Sobchack’s screen-sphere as a screenic topology that accounts for how screens arrange space; second, I will examine how gestural movements emerge within this topology; and finally, I will examine the role of the digital mirror, and how looking into the device consolidates this gesture.
  • Article
    Gesture and videographic writing: Manifesting the ‘in between’
    Cox-Stanton, Tracy (2019)
    The three audiovisual essays presented in this collection employ digital tools to research and explicate the significance of gesture, deliberately engaging with written scholarship. Though written text might anchor the videos’ images and sounds, it never quite contains them, reminding us that the audiovisual essay is itself ‘in between’ scholarship and filmmaking.
  • Article
    Editorial NECSUS
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2019)
  • Review
    Blackout / IFFR
    Cumming, Jesse (2019)
  • Article
    On gesture, or of the blissful promise
    De Rosa, Miriam (2019)
    In this text I situate gesture within film and media studies, introducing the centrality of this notion from modernity onwards, explaining the structural connection of its analysis and the mechanisms featuring cinema, and giving an account of the main existing resources covering this field. Employing this as a basis, I propose to read gesture as a ‘blissful promise’. To do so, I examine a set of key characteristics that build towards my definition by putting gesture in relation with temporality and continuity, theory and practice, resistance, pleasure, and reconciliation.
  • Review
    Media Experiences / Popularizing Japanese TV
    Aitaki, Georgia (2019)
  • Review
  • Review
  • Article
    Iconomy of the derivative image: Effacing the visual currency in Société Réaliste’s THE FOUNTAINHEAD
    Watt, Calum (2019)
    This article discusses the experimental film THE FOUNTAINHEAD (2010) by the Parisian artist cooperative Société Réaliste, originally exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris. The film reworks the 1949 film of the same name by King Vidor (itself based on a novel by Ayn Rand) by digitally erasing the actors and soundtrack. My reading draws on an interview I conducted with one of the artists to stress the importance of the 2008 financial crisis as the film’s inspiration. The article conceptualises the film’s form and context in relation to the notions of ‘face value’, ‘iconomy’, and the ‘derivative condition’ elaborated in recent film theory by Peter Szendy and Jonathan Beller, to argue that Société Réaliste’s film ‘de-faces’ or erases the original THE FOUNTAINHEAD as visual and ideological currency. Discussing a particular sequence from the film in relation to a recent history of the crisis, I argue that the film can be considered a ‘derivative’ film. Situating Société Réaliste’s film within a broader context of the cinema of the 2008 financial crisis and contemporary financial film theory, I suggest that both the recent theory and the films respond to the crisis through an engagement with financial motifs, notably derivatives.
  • Article
    The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training
    Harbord, Janet (2019)
    This article explores the co-constitution of autism in the twentieth century with a normative concept of gesture and body language. As an archive of bodies in movement, cinema provides a database of gestures, their changing modality, and cultural distinctiveness across the course of a century. A lesser known cinema of medical and psychiatric film testifies to a longstanding fascination with the a-typical gesture as an optic for observation, documentation, and diagnosis. An identification of idiosyncratic motor co-ordination in the early twentieth century coincided with the rise of neurology, obtaining a different focus in the postwar period in an enquiry into autistic presence. Produced as an outside, autistic gesture provides an external limit-case of what can be known about the development of the human subject.
  • Article
    Hands, Up
    Zinsel, A (2019)
  • Article
    ‘Pure gesturality’: Exploring cinematic encounters through exotic dancing
    Dalla Gassa, Marco (2019)
    Is there a proximity between the theory of gesture, as originally conceived in the early cinema era, and the cinematic representations of travel? What kind of bond connects the idea of moving images as a universal language and the globalisation processes which increasingly unfold throughout the twentieth century? How does a body that dances before the eyes of a ‘foreigner’ establish hierarchies of the gaze and simultaneously exceed them? This essay seeks to answer these questions through the analysis of three different films: Jean Renoir’s THE RIVER, Fritz Lang’s THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR, and Louis Malle’s PHANTOM INDIA, in which these European filmmakers represent exotic ‘Indian’ dances. In particular, this essay dwells on the multiple and ambiguous entailments that the dancing body establishes through its gesture within the relationship between the camera, characters, and audiences, in a context where the encounter of cultures speaking different languages occurs. Finally, through the theoretical arguments of Simmel, Focillon, and Lyotard, this preverbal relationship is defined as ‘pure gesturality’ and as a – yet unexpressed and maybe even inexpressible – promise of meaning.
  • Article
    The filmed body and the cinematic gesture: Zoe Beloff’s revisions
    Blümlinger, Christa (2019)
    Commenting on New York artist Zoe Beloff’s multimedia installation THE INFERNAL DREAM OF MUTT AND JEFF (2011), this article discusses its epistemological and aesthetic explorations, which focus on the problems of movement as a fundamental act of the cinema machine, and of the moving image as an instrument for the psychosocial control of the human body. In a twofold movement of reuse, Beloff’s studies reveal themselves as both cultural and visual, both theoretical and artistic, demonstrating to what extent the specific ‘techniques’ that bring words, things, and bodies together have been the subject not only of films whose main purpose was entertainment, but also of educational films as a genre. For Beloff, cinema is the place where this archaeology of perception transpires in the clearest fashion; where through mechanical, mimetic movement, and through the moving images of bodies and things, we regain access to what Walter Benjamin calls the forgotten ‘powers of magic’. These powers became tangible at the moment when what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘sensory-motor linkages’ were interrupted, and when synesthesia became manifest. In her installation, Beloff reveals by these kinds of interruptions the conditions of a dispositif of visibility in Foucault’s sense of the term – that is, as a system of value distribution.