Faure and Canudo:

The body in early 20th century film formalism

Abstract

The article analyzes the critical and theoretical production of Élie Faure and Ricciotto Canudo in order to understand their respective looks on human figure in the cinema. Partisans of an essentialist discourse, based on the search for a specific expressiveness of the cinematographic medium, the authors, at least at first, disregard or minimize the representation of the body. The primacy is given to the formal qualities of the image. The purpose here is to understand the nuances involved in this
apparent antagonism between the image of the body and the body of the image.