Matt’s paper is available for download here.

Please email either Katerina Korola [katerinakorola@uchicago.edu] or Dave Burnham [burnham@uchicago.edu] for the password.

Refreshments will be provided.

We look forward to seeing you at the workshop!

Your coordinators,

Katerina Korola and Dave Burnham

Exemplary Gestures, Revolutionary Postures, and the Forms of Rupture: Embodying History in the Shadow of ‘68

The first chapter of my dissertation focuses on a group of films and images produced in the months surrounding the events of May 1968 in France.  In particular, I examine the ways in which these works – including a fiction film made immediately prior to the May events, a famous photograph taken during a demonstration in May, and a short documentary film made in June, as the strikes and protests are subsiding – aim to create or capture bodily gestures that have an exemplary relationship to their historical moment.  While looking at these works in relation to theories of gesture produced by Bertolt Brecht, Vilem Flusser, and Giorgio Agamben, the chapter focuses on the act of posing in order to think about the relationship of gesture and image.  In addition, I argue that the idea of gesture – recently very fashionable in media studies – should be supplemented by a concept of posture, and that this concept can help us to understand the way that these works respond to the complex political and representational challenges of their particular historical moment.

Matt Hubbell is a PhD candidate in the department of Cinema and Media Studies.  His work focuses on post-war French film, cinematic figurations of history, and the place of performance, gesture, and the body in moving images.  He is currently working on his dissertation, “Acting After the New Wave: The Political Aesthetics of Performance in France, 1968-1981.”