Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 8 No. 22, July 2004
Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film
Gilles Deleuze's
two-volume theory of film, _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_
and _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_, have slowly been making an
impact on Anglo-American film studies. The special issue of
_Film-Philosophy_ on his work (vol.
5, 2001) and David
Rodowick's excellent introduction, _Gilles Deleuze's Time
Machine_ (1997), are just two signs, among many, of the
growing interest in Deleuze's writings on cinema. His work
has also inspired the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to
propose a new theory of film that significantly departs from
Deleuze. Agamben has developed a new theory of 'gestural
cinema', arguing that '*the element of cinema is gesture and
not image*'. [1] He has also argued that this new
theory of gestural cinema means that cinema belongs,
essentially, to the realm of ethics and politics, and not
aesthetics. It is this new theory that I want to
introduce. Giorgio Agamben is
professor of aesthetics at the University of Verona, Italy,
and he works on the margins of literature, philosophy, and
politics. His philosophy is indebted, primarily, to Martin
Heidegger and Walter Benjamin (he directed the Italian
edition of Benjamin's works), creating a critical dialogue
between these two thinkers. Most of his major writings have
been translated into English, including _The Coming
Community_ (1993) and _Homo Sacer_ (1998), two important
works of political philosophy. [2] However, he has
also written two brief but fascinating essays on cinema,
which have attracted little discussion. The first is 'Notes
on Gesture' (1992), in which he sketches a new theory of
film, and the second is 'Difference and Repetition: On Guy
Debord's Films' (1995), in which he draws on the filmmaking
practice of Guy Debord as an example of a new ethical and
political cinema. It is these two essays that I want to
discuss to introduce Giorgio Agamben as a philosopher of
film. The essay 'Notes on
Gesture' does not begin with the cinema but rather with what
Agamben claims is the disappearance of gestures amongst the
Western bourgeoisie at the end of the 19th century. Drawing
on scanty historical evidence he argues that the scientific
analysis of gesture begun by Gilles de la Tourette indicates
the breaking up of gesture into segments. This not only
presages film itself (Agamben also mentions the work of
Muybridge) but also the loss of any sense of the gesture.
Tourette is, of course, best known for naming Tourette's
syndrome, which Agamben describes as 'an amazing
proliferation of tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerisms -- a
proliferation that cannot be defined in any way other than
as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures'.
[3] What is strange about this syndrome is that,
after many cases being found initially, the syndrome seemed
to disappear. The neurologist Oliver Sacks only rediscovered
it in the 1970s, and Agamben argues that this
'disappearance' may be due to the fact that 'at some point
everybody had lost control of their gestures and was walking
and gesticulating frantically'. [4] What has this got to do
with cinema? The loss of gestures leads to a desperate
attempt to recover or record what has been lost. Cinema,
especially silent cinema, is the primary and exemplary
medium for trying to evoke gestures in the process of their
loss. Deleuze defines the images of cinema as, initially,
movement-images, and Agamben extends this analysis. If
Deleuze breaks down the image into movement-images, Agamben
will further break down the image into gestures. If the
unity of the image has been broken, then we are left with
only gestures and not images. What is this fragmentation of
the image? The image is a kind of force field that holds
together two opposing forces. The first is that the image
reifies and obliterates the gesture, fixing it into the
static image. The second is that the image also preserves
the dynamic force of the gesture, linking the gesture to a
whole. What we need to do is to liberate this dynamic force
from the static spell of the image. The importance of cinema
is that it restores images to this dynamic movement. In a
sense the film still is the image that obliterates the
gesture -- but as, precisely, a *still*, it relates the
image back to the whole and to gesture. The power of cinema
is that, in Agamben's words, it 'leads images back to the
homeland of gestures'. [5] If cinema leads us back
to gestures then it also leads us back to ethics and
politics, but not to aesthetics. According to Agamben, the
gesture is a particular type of action -- it is neither
about acting or making, producing or action, but instead
about enduring and supporting. It is neither a means in view
of an end, nor an end without a means, it is means as such.
Agamben takes the example of dance -- what dance exhibits is
not a movement that has an end in itself, but movement for
its own sake; dance as aesthetic. Dance exhibits the gesture
as such, the medium of the gesture itself, or pure means
without end. What the gesture opens is our own
being-in-a-medium, our own ethical and political dimension.
The gesture, as such, leaves us in the realm of
mediality. It also leaves us in close
proximity to both philosophy and cinema, and it can allow us
to think about what links them together. What both
philosophy and cinema exhibit, according to Agamben, is this
pure mediality or pure gesturality. This is of course a
philosophy that comes after Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and
Benjamin. A philosophy of language that exhibits our
being-in-language as the medium of our expression -- not the
philosophy of particular forms of communication but
philosophy of communicability. In a similar way what Agamben
calls cinema's essential silence, which for him has nothing
to do with the presence or absence of a soundtrack, can also
expose our being-in-language or 'pure gesturality'.
[6] Therefore philosophy and cinema converge on the
gesture, on the loss of the gesture, and on recovering the
gesture as the realm of both the ethical and the political.
What, then, would be a purely gestural cinema? Perhaps one place to begin
is Agamben's example of the cinematic practice of Guy
Debord. Debord was not only the theorist and critic of the
spectacle, he was also a filmmaker, directing six
black-and-white sound films between 1952 and 1978.
[7] Agamben attempts to explain Debord's cinematic
strategy in relation to the image, and how this practice
brings ethics and politics into play. Again, like Deleuze,
Debord reveals that images are not static but images in
movement, or gestural in the terms Agamben had previously
used. How does he do this? Debord reveals the image in
movement by revealing the conditions of cinematic montage.
Again, this is a matter of exhibiting the medium as such, as
pure means. In doing so Debord reveals that cinematic
montage works through two conditions: repetition and
stoppage. Once this is revealed cinema starts to work on
itself, dissolving the boundary between genres and working
on its own images. The power of cinema, and
the power of cinematic montage, is to free the image from
its frozen state and transform it back into gesture. It can
reveal the potential of the image, and release what has been
frozen in the image. Montage is not simply a repetition of
the identical, because in repetition this dynamic potential
of the image is returned to us. On the other hand 'stoppage'
in montage interrupts the stream of images. It brings the
image to a stop and exhibits it as such, again as gesture.
In this way these two opposing conditions, repetition and
stoppage, both work to free the potential of the image and
to return it to the movement of the gesture. This is what
Debord does in his films, working on images he both repeats
images to free the gestures fixed within them and stops
images to allow us to think the image as such. As Rene
Vienet notes, the power of cinema for the Situationists was
that it could lend itself 'to dismantling processes of
reification'. [8] In Agamben's terms, Debord's
cinematic practice dismantles the image to reveal the
gesture. The task of cinema is to create but also to
decreate, to decreate what exists to create something
new. What then happens to the
image? The spontaneous ideology of communication is that the
medium is secondary to expression. When something is
'properly' expressed we no longer notice the medium. The
repetition and stoppage of montage reveal the medium, the
'pure means', and allow it to be shown as such. Not so much
particular images but the image as medium: 'The image gives
itself to be seen instead of disappearing into what makes it
visible'. [9] Agamben gives two very different
examples of this showing of the image as such, which reveal
that the image is, in fact, imageless, because it is no
longer an image of anything. One is pornography or
advertising, in which the image is revealed as deficient,
exposed as such, *but only to lead us on to more images*.
There are always more images promised that will fulfill our
desire but this image as such is not it. The other way,
Debord's way, is to exhibit the image and so to allow the
appearance of 'imagelessness'. In this case there is no
longer some other image but the end of the image. It is in
the difference between these two strategies that the ethics
and politics of cinema exist. Of course all this fits
with an avant-garde and modernist cinema, with which I
personally have a great deal of sympathy. However, many film
theorists may well experience a sense of deja vu, seeing in
Agamben's theory a restatement of the kind of criticism and
film practice associated with the journal _Screen_ in the
1970s. Certainly Agamben is hostile to narrative cinema and
applauds an avant-garde cinema that can reveal the cinematic
medium as such. Although, of course, he does not see this
strategy of the image as confined to avant-garde cinema. In
fact, his theory may help explain why advertising is
attracted to avant-garde film and art, where advertising
draws on this revelation of the image to lead us back into
further images instead of decreating the image as such.
Also, Agamben's theory might help us to think of a cinematic
ethics and politics of the gesture, released from being
frozen in the image. One example of this could
be the well-known scene from Krzysztof Kieslowski's _Three
Colours: Blue_ (1993) of the lump of sugar being dissolved
in the coffee cup. In his 1994 master class on this scene
Kieslowski states that the use of close-ups such as this one
is to convey the mental state of the film's heroine. In her
grief she can only focus on the small things, things close
to her, such as the cube of sugar slowly being dissolved by
the coffee. Her concentration on the sugar cube is what
allows her to shut out everything else, other people, and,
in particular, the man who has just expressed his love to
her. Kieslowski explains the trouble he went to so that the
cube would dissolve in precisely the right time for the
shot. His assistant spent half a day soaking sugar cubes to
find the right one so this 'detail' would last no longer,
and no shorter, than four and a half seconds. Why all this
trouble for a sugar cube? As Kieslowski explains: to convey
the mental state of the heroine within the tolerances of the
audience to watch a cube of sugar soaking up
coffee. However, could we not also
see this scene, after Agamben, as the recovery of a gesture
as simple as dropping a sugar cube into coffee. The cube
touches the surface of the coffee and in four and a half
seconds the coffee soaks into the cube which is then dropped
into the coffee. In this 'stoppage' the dynamic potential of
the image is freed as we are forced, if only for four and a
half seconds, to watch the coffee slowly soaking into the
cube. In this way, it may be, the image of dropping sugar
into coffee is decreated and our attention drawn to the
image and the gesture as such. Rather than only being an
image of the heroine's alienation, her lack of connection to
the world, this image of the lack of connection opens our
connection to the gesture and to the image as the gesture of
connection. No other image is promised, this is the ethics
and politics of this scene. Instead the image becomes
imageless and the gesture is freed as pure means. No longer
simply a beautiful aesthetic image, but also the exhibiting
of the gesture as our medium, the pure means of our
being-in-the-world. Ethics and politics in a
sugar cube? No doubt we could be dubious, but I think
Agamben's rather strange theory can help us to approach both
film and philosophy differently. He draws attention to the
silence of cinema and to the silence of philosophy as
practices that suspend our relation to communication all the
better to reveal communicability as such. Whether we have
lost our gestures or not, Agamben redeems cinema as a site
of the messianic promise contained in the image. Every image
is, as he paraphrases Walter Benjamin, 'charged with history
because it is the door through which the Messiah enters'.
[9] University
College, Chichester,
England Notes 1. Agamben, 'Notes on
Gesture', p. 55. 2. For a bibliography of
Agamben's writing, and further biographical information, see
<http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgioagamben.html>. 3. Agamben, 'Notes on
Gesture', p. 51. 4. Ibid., p.
52. 5. Ibid., p.
55. 6. Ibid., p.
60. 7. For a description of
Debord's filmmaking practice, see Thomas Y. Levin's article
'Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord'
(1989). 8. Rene Vienet, quoted in
Levin, 'Dismantling the Spectacle', p. 330. 9. Agamben, 'Difference
and Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films', p. 315. Bibliography Giorgio Agamben, 'Notes on
Gesture' (1992), in _Means Without End_, trans. V. Binetti
and C. Casarino (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000). --- 'Difference and
Repetition: On Guy Debord's Films' (1995), in T. McDonough,
ed., _Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts
and Documents_ (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The
MIT Press, 2002). Gilles Deleuze, _Cinema 1:
The Movement-Image_ (London: The Athlone Press,
1986). --- _Cinema 2: The
Time-Image_ (London: The Athlone Press, 1989). Thomas Y. Levin,
'Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord'
(1989), in T. McDonough, ed., _Guy Debord and the
Situationist International'. David Rodowick, _Gilles
Deleuze's Time Machine_ (Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1997). Copyright ©
Film-Philosophy 2004 Benjamin Noys, 'Gestural
Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 8
no. 22, July 2004
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n22noys>. Read a response to this
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