Habitual Gestures

Abstract

This chapter examines “habitual gestures”—everyday bodily movements, such as walking or sitting, that are ingrained as muscle memory—as a form of motion associated with postwar realist cinema. Closely reading scenes of ordinary household activities in Umberto D (De Sica, 1952), Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946), and Mouchette (Bresson, 1967), this chapter shows how an aesthetics of habitual gestures compels one to attend to the invisible bodily movements between and within willed actions. In doing so, this motion form foregrounds the body’s nonconscious and automatic ways of moving. Reading such gestures alongside the notion of “bodily habit” in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this chapter ultimately troubles Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the time-image as the dominant lens through which the postwar aesthetics of laboring bodies is understood.