Black Cinematic Gesture and the Aesthetics of Contagion

Anna Rose Holmer's 2015 feature film debut, The Fits, advances the stakes of black performance, particularly in relation to the critical interrogation of the loss of gesture in the history of cinema. Thinking about migration in close association with the gestural, the continued migration of gesture is endemic to black social dance forms, and this fundamentally migratory quality is central to the film's political and aesthetic imagination.