Ex-centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben's film archaeology

Whilst Giles Deleuze famously posited two forms of cinema - the movement image and the time-image, the latter created by the crisis of World War 2 - Agamben suggests that cinema came into being through a crisis of a different order: a crisis of human communication and gesture. This paper examines what is at stake in Agamben's concept of gesture and explores the tenets of a archaeological approach to cinema.