Gestures of Hands and Cinema Archaeology

Focus on the gesture of watching the palm of the hand: is it a sort of archaeological prefiguration of the cinematic dispositif? How can we interpret the modern re-birth of palmistry, with its anxiety of reproducing the surface of the hand as a landscape, as a sort of canvas on which stories and lives run, ore better as a screen? Can we think of it as a way of imagining cinema into the human body, producing a gesture that contains the special affectivity connected with the medium, and therefore deserves to be linked to other manual practices which anticipate, more evidently, cinema, such as Shadowgraphy?