ABSTRACT
Cinema has the power to expropriate the Ego and reduce it to the inert matter of things. When cinema is bounded to the sensory-motor schema of action-reaction, of meaning production and quantitative sum it means that the camera is turned to silence; that its potential passivity has been enslaved by the prerogatives of the activity of the director. Gilles Deleuze, in his analysis of Bresson, considered the portrait of hands as a metaphor of the power of montage: the active operation, par excellence, in cinematic production. The concept of the gaze reinscribes the incompatibility of visualisation and formalisation within the domain of the visual itself. The gaze as an intruder in the filmic text and the gaze as subjective experience of scopic jouissance are two different modalities through which the consistency of the visual field as geometral optics is cut.
