Commonly, gesture has an expressive and semantic meaning. As considered in theories of communication, gestures such as body, hand gesture, facial expression, glance and body posture are main means of not verbal, but non-verbal communication. Yet talking about cinematographic gesture, it has to be understood in a different context. It is because cinema is a sort of architecture composed of an image-mouvement of audio-visual images, and also because gesture possesses a particular structure, different from dance and theatre that are crucial expressive means of artistic media. However, this study does not approach cinematographic gesture as specific studies will do, by analyzing its changes through the history of cinema, its esthetical composition or way of expression. It will rather question the meaning of gesture enabling an effet of existence without being signified, and discuss what ethical and political potentialities this absence of signification can suggest. In cinema, gesture appeals to the audience with a certain effet of existence. This study tries to explain the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben's quote about the meaning of cinematographic gesture which is the following: 'gesture is the communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself, it has nothing to say, because what is shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure potential for mediation.” He develops this problem of cinematographic gesture's signification by briefly evoking the importance of Gilles Deleuze's image-movement. This is why this study, trying to explain Agamben's thought about the reflective meaning of cinematographic gesture, will reinvest Roland Barthes' 'sense obtuse' and Deleuze's definition of gesture as image-affection. Finally, it will discuss Agamben's reflection on cinematographic gesture. Agamben had once emphasised that cinema, not image but gesture, does not simply belong to the esthetical, but also to the ethical and political order. This study's aim is to suggest that gesture shown in cinema is more than a simple mean of expression in a symbolic perspective: it is closely related to an ontological problem.

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