The filmic gesture as a collective expression of the art of cinema

Abstract

This article explores filmmaking through a collective perspective of its creators. To trace this path, we introduce the conception of what we call filmic gesture as a way of outlining some relevant attributes of the nature of cinema. This route helps us develop the relations between the agents present in a film, where the conjugation of human and technical forces constitutes the cinematographic act. Our theoretical basis on the filmic gesture is constructed from Vilém Flusser’s reflections on the term gesture along with other writers who have dedicated their thoughts to the specificities of cinema – like Ricciotto Canudo, Béla Balázs and, more recently, Laura Mulvey. These authors, throughout their works, bet on the semantic richness of the word as an instrument of investigation into the complexities of the art of cinema. In order to examine the pertinence of our proposition, we lean on some important names in the history of cinema such as Jean Renoir, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovski and Sven Nykvist, who devoted part of their careers to think over the particularities of their work with their partners. In doing so, we explore the collective character of creation, not as a mode of sharing authorship, but as a founding element of the cinematographic expression, in which the modulations between human and technical moves, between bodies and machines are the cornerstones of the filmic gesture.