Gesture and Film

Nicholas Chare is Associate Professor in Art History in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, Canada. His most recent books are Sportswomen in Cinema (2015), After Francis Bacon (2012), and Matters of Testimony (with Dominic Williams, 2016).   Liz Watkins is a Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research interests include the significance of colour for film theories of subjectivity, perception, and sexual difference. She has published on feminism, film/philosophy, the materiality of film, and archive in parallax, Paragraph, British Journal of Cinema and Television, and NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies. She is co-editor, with Simon Brown and Sarah Street, of Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive (2013) and British Colour Cinema: Practices and Theories (2013).

Introduction: Gesture in Film 1. Cinematic Gesture: The Ghost in the Machine 2. Speech-Gesture Mimicry in Performance: An Actor → Audience, Author → Actor, Audience → Actor Triangle 3. Films, Gestures, Species 4. Gesture in Shoah 5. Martial Gestures 6. The Disquiet of the Everyday: Gesture and Bad Timing 7. Image as Gesture: Notes on Aemout Mik’s Communitas and the Modern Political Film 8. Between Trauma and Ecstasy: Reading the Cinematic Gesture of Marilyn Monroe with Aby Warburg 9. The Time of Gesture in Cinema and its Ethics 10. The exchange of two fantasies and the contact of two epidermises: Gestures of touch in Gattaca (1997), The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and The Piano (1993) 11. A Mark on the Canvas