The time of gesture in cinema and its ethics

Abstract

This essay explores the ethical and gesture in film, developing from Giorgio Agamben’s two ideas of gesture – of the movement that gesture constitutes, transforming the photographic into the cinematic; and what is pointed to as the feeling, or ethical stance that the gesture instantiates. In representation – whether literary or audio-visual, live or recorded, the time and timeliness of gesture as both the action of a moment, and the movement it constitutes, demands a reading, a recognition, that spurs understanding but also opens a gap in meaning. Gesture involves movement, an action in time, but it also appears as a moment of action, and not as a continuing movement, thus the moment of the gesture becomes stilled in its time of action as a communication. A gesture is a kind of event, crystallising meaning at a moment, while opening up to something next. Time here is therefore the time of the action itself, seconds or minutes, the stilling of that natural time in the moment of recognition by the observer or spectator of the action and its (potential) meaning, and the opening of implication of a time-to-be, a becoming inaugurated but not caused by the gesture. Agamben’s gesture is anti-realist, in his philosophy of ethics as the gestural as undertaking and supporting and hence of responsibility. It is the enigmatic, undecidable quality of gesture in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica that will be the focus of this essay. Gesture here is an action that carries the burden of responsibility in which the subject neither makes something nor enacts something.