Dans la paume de la main : L’archéologie du cinéma en un geste

There are few gestures that contemporary humans make more frequently than looking at their hand to consult a high-tech phone. This gesture is partly the outcome of new technological development, and partly inscribed in the memory of ancient gestures, in practices in which the palm of the hand was examined. From the mid-nineteenth century, a revival of interest in the study of palmistry, between magic and science, anticipated the cinema. In chiromancy, the palm of the hand enabled access to past and future, while chirognomony saw in it a mirror which reflected man’s personality and gestures (inscribed in the folds of the skin – which had been used in the learning of ancient music, but also discussed by Eisenstein). This illustrates the assumption made by anthropologist Marcel Jousse, for whom human gestures represent a kind of corporeal thinking, by which man imagined and anticipated technical development. Cinema itself acknowledged the importance of this gesture, since it used the palm of the hand as a screen onto which images were projected, from the start of the twentieth century to the twenties. Therefore this article addresses the role of gestures in media archaeology.