The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training

Abstract

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.