2019/2 — #Gesture

Now showing 1 - 20 of 26

Editorial NECSUS
NECSUS Editorial Board (2019) , S. 1-3
On gesture, or of the blissful promise
De Rosa, Miriam (2019) , S. 113-128
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.
The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training
Harbord, Janet (2019) , S. 129-148
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.
‘Pure gesturality’: Exploring cinematic encounters through exotic dancing
Dalla Gassa, Marco (2019) , S. 149-168
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.
The filmed body and the cinematic gesture: Zoe Beloff’s revisions
Blümlinger, Christa (2019) , S. 169-188
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.
Drawing light: Gesture and suspense in the weave
De Brabandere, Nicole; Thain, Alanna (2019) , S. 189-211
In this essay, we remix the participatory gestures that emerged in and around Drawing Light, an experimental workshop that we developed in 2018 to explore what happens when illumination moves from a functionalist binary between the invisible and the visible, to become part of an affective charge that reorganises the relation between light and bodily presence, capture and dispersal, clarity and opacity. In other words, we explore the workshop’s propositional conditions that allowed participants to access the material supports of a cinematic experience – light and screens – in order to play with a gesturality in excess of the human, in order to develop a working concept of the ‘light gesture’. We begin by describing the workshop format. We then consider three selected movement ecologies of cinematic light and critical concepts from Suzanne Langer and Edouard Glissant that influenced the workshop design, to refine our sense of how light gestures are compositions with time, and to outline their ‘logic of feeling’. Finally, we revisit the workshop itself through a gestural catalogue, to consider how we re-choreographed these light gestures in collaboration with participants, to reopen the encounters which follow and draw out transversal weavings between ecologies, readings, and practice.
(Not) doing it for the Vine: #Boredom Vine videos and the biopolitics of gesture
Kendall, Tina (2019) , S. 213-233
This article proposes an analysis of gesture in relation to Vine videos that use boredom-related hashtags to classify bodily movements and gestures and to link them to a particular mood, situation, or state of mind. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Notes on Gesture’, the article situates Vine videos within the emergent attention economy of twenty-first century media, which aims to extract profit from even the most mundane of our daily gestures. As I argue, gesture in these videos is marked by an uncomfortable tension between digital network culture’s demand for both entertaining content and sufficiently entertained subjects, and the obdurate state of lethargy and stalled agency that these videos often express. As such, the gestural in these Vines is caught up in the neoliberal logic of means and ends, while also holding out the possibility of interrupting this logic to disclose what Agamben calls ‘pure means’, or the ‘emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings’.
Touchscreens, tactility, and material traces: From avant-garde artists to Instagram ASMRtists
O’Meara, Jennifer (2019) , S. 235-262
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.
(Un)Frozen expressions: Melodramatic moment, affective interval, and the transformative powers of experimental cinema
Anger, Jiří (2019) , S. 25-47
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.
Selfie-screen-sphere: Examining the selfie as a complex, embodying gesture
Berkland, Darren (2019) , S. 263-283
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.
Film diplomacy in action at the 23rd Boston Turkish Festival: A critical look at immigrants efforts to promote Turkish culture
Etem, Aysehan Jülide (2019) , S. 285-297
Reflections on Montreal’s Elektra festival, its twentieth edition, and the exhibition of digital media art
Zielinski, Ger (2019) , S. 299-308
Fields of Loves: Historicising and defining (French) queerness
Damiens, Antoine (2019) , S. 309-314
Blackout / IFFR
Cumming, Jesse (2019) , S. 315-320
Both inside the circle and out: Béla Tarr’s MISSING PEOPLE at the Vienna Festival
Klamer, Jonathan (2019) , S. 321-331
Media Experiences / Popularizing Japanese TV
Aitaki, Georgia (2019) , S. 333-340
Pinpointing the ‘cinematic’ in twenty-first century art: ‘Dreamlands’ / ‘On Desire’
Chinita, Fatima (2019) , S. 341-350
Female Authorship and the Documentary Image / Female Agency and Documentary Strategies
Predescu, Alina (2019) , S. 351-359
Gesture and videographic writing: Manifesting the ‘in between’
Cox-Stanton, Tracy (2019) , S. 361-364
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.
Gesture in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, a charting of relations
Cox-Stanton, Tracy (2019) , S. 365-370

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