The thinking machine 26: only free gestures

Overview

In 1984, Raymond Bellour reflected on a method and style of film analysis that grasped – as modern cinema itself also did – for decisive moments of absolute stillness, freezing, arrest. The emblem of this revelatory stasis was (as Serge Daney attested) the face of young Jean-Pierre Léaud on the beach at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Yet Bellour also anticipated a time when analysis would reinvent itself audiovisually as “only free gestures” – once time has passed and the freeze-frame has burned itself up. Let us look into Léaud’s face for a response…