Image as Gesture: Notes on Aernout Mik's Communitas and the Modern Political Film

Walking through Aernout Mik’s exhibition Communitas, dwelling in the encounter with the people and situations in front of and on the screens, one is struck by the cinematic and political qualities of the gestures in these powerful video installations. In this article I will develop some film-philosophical reflections on the silent performative force of the image as gesture and as politics. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s "Notes on Gesture", Robert Bresson’s "Notes on the Cinematographer" and Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the modern political film, I will contextualize Mik’s work in the tradition of the modern political film. Being in between language and image, a go-between that connects people, things and the world, the gesture belongs to ethics and politics more than to aesthetics. Characters in Mik’s work perform gestures that express the possibility of resistance and of the possibility of a shared community, a gesture which is shared by the artist, his actors and the visitors of the exhibition alike. Just like the modern political film the video works manage to change our perception of familiar situations via a simple tic, a spasm or a shared bodily posture.