Pacts of Embodiment: A Comparative Ethnography of Filmmakers’ Gestures

Abstract

All films obliterate the production process as they take shape and generate a “black box” that is sometimes difficult to open. A simple look at the credits at the end of a film shows how many people have been involved and gives the historian clues to investigate the collective nature of filmmaking. For the ethnographer, focusing on the working gestures of filmmakers when they are devising a shot is a good way of opening the black box of the filmmaking process. They move beyond speech and seem to communicate with a sort of sign language when they want to visualize their images or explain them to others. To realize the shots they have in mind and ensure that their instructions are understood by their actors, most of them have their own way of taking production in hand, using gesticulations or manual demonstrations. On a film set, the action to be performed must be made visible to the actor, explained several times, corrected, and modified. And most of the time, this is achieved by means of relays (assistants, stand-ins) who rarely appear in the finished film. These moments of rehearsal and demonstration are always very intense but relatively difficult to describe in a simple notebook. Filming filmmakers at work seems particularly appropriate here because we can replay movements in slow motion, describe their gestures more precisely, and understand that transpose or concretize a mental image (translating a story, narrating a scenario with the help of one’s hands), those that project a shared object or whose purpose is to objectify it for others (positioning the frame, the camera movement before the take or in between takes), those that coordinate and so help to set up the take (positioning the actors, lights, accessories), and mimetic ones that reproduce an action or are supposed to be imitated that are executed by the director or his assistant in front of the actor.³

As for the fact that I work on the scenario with my collaborators and avoid letting the actors read it, that’s the result of experience. I’ve noticed that when actors can read the scenario at home in the evening, in front of a mirror, helped by family members, they adopt certain facial expressions that are absolutely not right. So, if possible, I prefer for the actors to arrive completely blank, without their own fixed idea of the character, which absolutely could not be the same as mine, or at the best of times quite different.

Federico Fellini ¹