Article:
The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training

Author(s): Harbord, Janet

Abstract

This article explores the co-constitution of autism in the twentieth century with a normative concept of gesture and body language. As an archive of bodies in movement, cinema provides a database of gestures, their changing modality, and cultural distinctiveness across the course of a century. A lesser known cinema of medical and psychiatric film testifies to a longstanding fascination with the a-typical gesture as an optic for observation, documentation, and diagnosis. An identification of idiosyncratic motor co-ordination in the early twentieth century coincided with the rise of neurology, obtaining a different focus in the postwar period in an enquiry into autistic presence. Produced as an outside, autistic gesture provides an external limit-case of what can be known about the development of the human subject.

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Harbord, Janet: The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 8 (2019), Nr. 2, S. 129-148. DOI: 10.25969/mediarep/13142.
@ARTICLE{Harbord2019,
 author = {Harbord, Janet},
 title = {The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training},
 year = 2019,
 doi = {10.25969/mediarep/13142},
 volume = 8,
 address = {Amsterdam},
 journal = {NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies},
 number = 2,
 pages = {129--148},
}
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