| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines gesture in French post-New Wave cinema. This
overlooked period in French film history emerged in the wake of the decline
of the New Wave from the second half of the 1960s onwards. Made by
Francophone filmmakers, writers, and artists such as Georges Perec,
Bernard Queysanne, Chantal Akerman, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre
Klossowski, Pierre Zucca, Fernand Deligny, Renaud Victor, and Jacques
Rivette, the films of my corpus reaffirm the primacy of gestures in talking
cinema and explore new manners of filming, performing, and/or editing them.
The post-New Wave develops a profusion of cinematic approaches and
styles to represent the body as well as the ritualisation of attitudes, postures,
and gestures. Drawing on the origins of cinema and, to a certain extent, on
other arts such as painting and sculpture, the filmmakers under discussion
reveal the pivotal position of gesture in the aesthetics of cinema. Through an
interdisciplinary approach, the thesis aims to understand the role of gesture
in post-New Wave cinema, by analysing its interplay with film technology, its
relationship with the visual and performing arts, as well as its reception by
the spectator. Gesture is a non-verbal form of expression and communication
which enables us to consider, on the one hand, the ontology and the medium
specificity of cinema, and, on the other hand, the concept of intermediality,
that is, the relations between the moving image and other arts and media. | en |
