ABSTRACT
Thinking through the relation of the invention and practices of early cinema to technology, one sees that the lack of a defined purpose for this new invention actually corresponds to new understandings of technology as an open field. This leads to an attempt to place cinema and technology in a broader context, in relation to language and human evolution. While the analogy of cinema and language has been an aspect of previous film theory, it has primarily tried to relate film techniques to linguistic systems and has encountered dead-ends. If one returns to the relation that film bears to writing, through the transcription of events onto film, a relation to a different sense of language appears, founded in André Leroi-Gourhan’s understanding of gesture and writing.
