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To illustrate his point, Hartley mentioned a moment in Surviving Desire (figure 1), where Jude reaches out to touch Sophie’s hand. Rather than shoot the scene in two matching close-ups, as a traditional shot-reverse-shot pattern, Hartley recognised the “Bressonian” quality of the action, “that the gesture itself was expressive”.55 Therefore, Hartley films the action in close-up, isolating the gesture. The approach towards the body here is elliptical, abstracting movement to emphasise the expressive nature of the gesture, its ability to convey the interior of the character using body movement in conjunction with the isolating distance and angle of the camera. There is a similar moment in Flirt, where Hartley films Bill’s hand touching that of a woman at a phone booth (figure 2). Again, the gesture is filmed in close-up, fragmenting the body, and
FIGURE 1. A close-up abstracts and makes a gesture expressive, “isolating an image” by fragmenting the body to focus on performance signs.
