Abstract

This chapter investigates the two levels at which gestures appear in cinema: gestures depicted within the diegesis, and those enacted by the film as a medium. First, it discusses the analytical distinction and interrelation of these levels through Steffen Hven’s ecological model of diegesis. Secondly, it examines case studies from both representational and medial perspectives, engaging with the work of Barbara Creed and Bernhard Siegert. These analyses are brought into dialogue with the gestural framework developed in the previous chapters, and it reveals how films can articulate nonhuman agency, mediate multispecies encounters, and unsettle anthropocentric modes of spectatorship. The chapter concludes with a close reading of Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Those that, at a Distance, Resemble Another, where filmic gestures are grasped as enactments that reach beyond form to touch the lived, affective core of relational life.