ABSTRACT
Apart from the handful of analyses that acknowledged the improvisational facet of the actor's performance, cinema played little part in the multitude of twentieth century studies devoted to improvisational practices, most of which focused on other artistic disciplines, especially performing arts. The use of improvisation in cinema in those early days was, therefore, a way of adapting the imagination of the film crew to the capacities of the cameras but also of testing the limits of the machines on order to meet the creative aspirations of the cameramen. The emergence of unprecedented manifestations of this montage depends on the importance accorded to gestures, movements and the desire to convey certain expressivities of the body that the cinema had not yet succeeded in depicting with such spontaneity. Cameramen, sound recordists and boom operators now needed to interact differently not only with their equipment but with each other, in collective montages of gestures and machines, for the most part improvised.
