The Meaning of the Moves: Gestural Mythologies and the Generic Film

Abstract

This essay investigates the role of gestures in the production of film genre. These repeated moves—generic gestures—operate in and signify mythologies that produce film genre. This paper seeks to animate theories of the gesture while theorizing film genre as a choreography that is performed across film texts and bodies. It moves the notion of the genre “corpus” towards a mobile concept that privileges the gestural exchanges occurring between bodies of actors, of viewers, and of films.