Performing vulnerability: hand in hand with Les Enfants d’Isadora

ABSTRACT Damien Manivel’s Les Enfants d’Isadora (2019) is inspired by Isadora Duncan’s solo dance ‘Mother’, which she choreographed after the tragic loss of her two young children. Manivel’s film shows a series of women who engage with the dance in contemporary times, juxtaposing their interpretations of the solo with scenes from everyday life. These women’s performances point to a shared vulnerability, stemming from, but not limited to, Isadora Duncan’s grief. In contrast to studies of vulnerability in film that concentrate on vulnerable individuals, this reading of Manivel’s film explores how vulnerability subtends the formation of relational identity. Drawing first upon Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of vulnerability, before centring on the ethico-political work of Judith Butler on vulnerability, performativity and gesture, the article shows how Manivel scrutinises actions and gestures both in and beyond dance, frequently singling out people’s hands. The film’s performance of vulnerability through its attention to hands is bound less to the proximity of tactility and contact or identification and empathy than it is to distance. By valorising distance and difference between the disparate women who are otherwise united by the same dance, the film enables us to re-view the ties that bind both them and us to each other.

the dance. If we read what glints in Elsa's tears as pain, in keeping with the terms of the epigraph of this article from Emmanuel Levinas's work, it is to be understood as 'pending' [en attendant] and therefore as temporally oriented towards the future. 2 It is also a poignant sign of a more widespread vulnerability that is evident throughout this film. For, Elsa's tears may be hers alone, but they point to a relational and shared vulnerability that extends far beyond her. This is not a film about vulnerable individuals per se, and my reading of it in terms of vulnerability will differ from studies of film in recent years that have focused on vulnerable characters. 3 Rather, I seek to show how vulnerability subtends the formation of relational identity in this film, and this has both ethical and political implications.
Since the late twentieth century, the topic of vulnerability has inspired a wealth of work within the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences. With recent scholarship keen to side-line negative connotations of vulnerability to harm, emphasis has been placed on how vulnerability can be an ethical resource (Ganteau 2015;Gilson 2014). It lies indeed at the heart of the Levinasian ethical relation as outlined in his two major books on ethics: from the face-to-face encounter of Totality and Infinity ([1961] 2007), in which the self is exposed to the Other whom they can never accommodate, through to descriptions of sensibility in Otherwise than Being as 'vulnerability itself' ([1974] 2004, 75). The face, along with the caress, are the central concepts in Levinas's articulation of the non-reductive ethical relation to the Other in which neither sight nor touch can grasp that Other. Taking us from the face to the hand, the pain that glistens in the tear and that Levinas figures in terms of an opening to the future, is associated with the tactile yet non-possessive caress. But the fruits of this caress are born of heterosexual lovers in Levinas's account, and in this respect the time of Elsa's tears does not entirely correspond with that of Levinasian futurity.
Elsa becomes the last in a sequence of women who perform the dance solo in this film, which begins with a student (played by Agathe Bonitzer) who teaches herself the dance by means of books and which continues with the young performer, Manon, who learns the dance with the help of a teacher (played by Marika Rizzi). Aside from Manon and Marika's student-teacher relationship, the women do not know one another and are distant from each other in time and space. Moreover, the editing ensures that the only connection between them is the sequential juxtaposition of their relation to the dance. And yet their lineage in this film creates a form of kinship between them nonetheless, not in the terms of Levinasian futural temporal progression from one familial generation to another, but closer to the way in which Judith Butler reconfigures Levinas's ethical relation. Butler's work on vulnerability is influenced by but different from Levinas's account, allowing lateral relations between people to emerge along with other forms of kinship beyond a genealogical progression into the future. Arguing that vulnerability is a feature of our shared and interdependent lives rather than a subjective state, Butler maintains that it is what links us ethico-politically to one another and to larger structures and institutions that we depend upon (2004,2016,2021). In its relational aspect, her understanding of vulnerability connects with her earlier theory of gender performativity and citationality (1990,1993), as well as her more recent work on gesture (2017). For Butler, the gesture is an interrupted action that both taps into and breaks with the performances and citations central to the performative constitution of (gendered) identity. In Les Enfants d'Isadora, non-normative gestural performance is valorised rather than repressed, and it is the hands that lead the way. Hands in Manivel's film are not only gestural focal points in the dance solo but also functional organs seen in everyday situations in which their actions would normally go unnoticed. The organ that for Martin Heidegger makes us human is the conduit to our undoing here which connects us on a deeper level through vulnerability rather than asserting an exceptional status that would separate us from other beings ([1954] 1968). 4 It is by focalising attention on the hands and on tactility, as well as on how they gesture beyond tactile contact, that the film performs a shared vulnerability that reaches out to viewers in contemporary times too.
Autumn was the season Manivel felt best suited Les Enfants d'Isadora (2019b), and when I first watched the film in autumn 2020, with the trees in full colour transformation as they are in several sequences, never had I been so conscious of my hands, which were the locus of some of the most vital hygiene measures during the coronavirus pandemic that swept across the world. To say that this film became meaningful to me initially through my hands invites comparison with Vivian Sobchack's approach to film, which grounds her readings in her flesh. Discussing Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), Sobchack tells of how she watched the opening shots that show Ada (Holly Hunter) looking through her fingers from her perspective before an objective reverse shot confirms this. Although the initial image is blurred, this is not an unrecognisable image to Sobchack. She observes that her fingers knew what she was looking at sensually and sensuously before she refigured her carnal comprehension into conscious thought (2004,(62)(63)(64). While Les Enfants d'Isadora certainly prompts sensual and sensuous recognition of some actions of the hand, albeit in a clear-sighted rather than blurred way, it is for different reasons that hands lead the way in my reading of this film. The fact that this film becomes meaningful to me through my hands at this particular historical moment is due in part to the inverse of tactile contact, in which any bridging of distance, separation and isolation by means of touch could lead to death at the end of a sinister viral chain that links us morbidly to unknown others. The filmed hands of the dance solo, rather than centring attention on touch, among the other things hands facilitate ordinarily, set up a contrast within the film's attention to gesture that enables us to think connectivity at a distance as well as in the face of devastating loss. Advancing hand in hand with this film's performance of vulnerability, it is what my hands and fingers do not know and cannot grasp that brings us together.

Between dance and everyday gestures of the hand
In 'dancefilm', dance and film scholar Erin Brannigan's term for films characterised by performances dominated by choreographic strategies or effects (2011, vii), hands are occasionally the only subjects. One brief dancefilm, Hands (Adam Roberts, 1995), shows Jonathan Burrows's hands dancing on his lap -a performance that Brannigan, following dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright, suggests is prefigured by a dance that Loïe Fuller performed in 1914, La Danse des mains ('The Hand Dance'), in darkness with only her hands illuminated (Brannigan 2011, 39, note 2). Beyond this, there are countless examples of the centrality of hands in the history of cinema that do not have an explicit basis in dance. David Bordwell argues that choices about staging and performance mean that hands can do a number of things: convey story information and express character; add nuance to a particular moment; surprise spectators by slipping into and out of visibility; and inflect facial expressions or line reading (2012). In a more expansive study that ranges across experimental and mainstream film history, Emmanuelle André explores the relationship between the hand and the eye in cinema, arguing that hands in the history of film reconfigure ways of looking (2020). In keeping with this, Les Enfants d'Isadora leads us by the hands to look again at ways of seeing actions, gesture and relational identity. It shines a light on hands as part of Manivel's broader interest in gesture, his surname itself audibly in tune with manual focalisation, being a homophone for manivelle, a hand crank.
Les Enfants d'Isadora won the Prix de la Mise en Scène at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019, an award that stands as just the most recent reflection of the early promise that the Prix Jean Vigo recognised in Manivel for his short film La Dame au chien/The Lady with the Dog (2010). 5 The latter film was his third short after he arrived on the filmmaking scene in 2007, having been a contemporary dancer prior to this. Manivel explains in interview that he had wanted to talk about dance as soon as he started working in cinema (2019a). This desire manifests itself in his inaugural short film, Viril/Virile (2007), in which men perform, and it is also apparent in his work as assistant director to André S. Labarthe for Blue Lady (2008), on the choreographer Carolyn Carlson. The feature-length relation to filming dance in Les Enfants d'Isadora, instigated through Manivel's encounter with Duncan's solo and aided by the cinematography of Noé Bach, blends stillness and fluidity in its shots that explore continuities between the subject of dance and everyday movement. As Manivel notes in interview: 'I think in all of my films there is dance, but in a very invisible way, like everyday gestures' (2019b). Les Enfants d'Isadora builds on the emphasis on the power of non-verbal embodied performance evident in Manivel's preceding feature films and shorts, most notably in his fourth short, Un dimanche matin/One Sunday Morning (2012), and his third feature, Takara -La Nuit où j'ai nagé/The Night I Swam (2017, codirected with Kohei Igarashi), but also in a section of Le Parc/The Park (2016). Beginning with inter-titles, which continue thereafter, punctuating the film with dates throughout from late October to late November, Les Enfants d'Isadora employs voice-over and diegetic dialogue, while making use of silence and embodied movement in everyday settings as well as in the private and public spaces of dance rehearsal and performance. Manivel explains that he chose to film with the aspect ratio of 1.33:1, as he had done in other recent films, because it was good for the filming of gestures, as well as faces and vertical lines (2019b). The primacy of the hands is evident not only in the sequences that feature the solo, but in those that surround it too, and it is these latter that I consider first.
Before the film shows the initial movements of the solo as learned by the dance student played by Agathe Bonitzer, we follow her over several days and see her conduct research into Duncan's life, at home and at a dance library. In the library, she sits down with a large hardback book, and we see her face and shoulders in close-up as she looks at the symbols of Labanotation -the system of dance notation invented by Austro-Hungarian dancer, choreographer and theoretician Rudolf Laban. We then see a closeup of her left hand on the book as she runs it up one of the tracks of symbols with the camera following its lead to reveal the title 'Mother' at the top of the page (Figure 1). 6 She moves her hand gently from bottom to top, with the index finger and second finger delicately brushing the page, lingering at the top before bringing her hand down the page slowly, caressing it. She closes the book, and the cover reveals the two hands of a woman placed over each other in the middle of her chest. She touches this image of these hands (Figure 2), moving her own hand aside and off the book to the left, as the camera pans up to show a woman's face -it is Isadora Duncan -and the title of the book she has been consulting, Isadora Duncan: The Dances. In this intimate sequence of first acquaintance with the precisely documented movements of the solo, which is bookended by close-ups of Agathe Bonitzer's and Isadora Duncan's faces, the hands are central in establishing the connection to the dance before we get to its formal choreography.
Watching this scene with its images of contact between fingers and page, and thinking back to Sobchack's approach to film through her fingers, I know exactly what it feels like to run my fingers up and down a page of a book. The sensuous experience comes clearly to me as I look at this image without having to make sense of it because I am also seeing precisely what Agathe is doing as I feel this. Yet on another level I cannot make sense of what I am seeing: I read 'Mother', but I cannot decipher the underlying notation. Agathe's passing of her own fingers up the page as if reading a form of vertical braille begins to illuminate dance movements for her in a way that my sensuous recall of the feeling of  passing fingers up a page does not. My fingers both do and do not know this image. Moreover, the delicacy of Agathe's caressing touch suggests sensitivity not just to the book, the surface of the page and the movements of the dance, but also to Isadora Duncan's tragic back story, encoded through these notations of her art form that sublimate her loss. Yet the contact of Agathe's fingers with the book brings her no closer to Duncan's experience even as Agathe begins to see and feel how she transposed her suffering into something beautiful, as was Duncan's aim. Rather than identify spectator or character empathetically with her experience, the closer either of us gets -by technological means of close-ups in the spectator's case, or fingers in the case of Agathe as well as a seen and felt experience of touch for the spectator -the more distant we become. It is, however, through this distance that a profound connection is seeded that grows as the film progresses.
The title 'Mother' at the top of the page is already imbued with the narrative of the accident, which is told from the outset of the film through a mixture of inter-titles and voice-over as Agathe reads from Duncan's autobiography, My Life ([1927] 2013). The mother who has lost her child is an archetypal figure of suffering, incarnated in Christian art through the Pietà. Duncan's secular incarnation in dance of the loss of her children that we will see performed in piecemeal fashion first by Agathe as she teaches herself the solo in subsequent sequences, shows a mother at the height of vulnerability. For Levinas, there are many interchangeable terms for the vulnerable subjectivity at the heart of his ethics, but the most prominent and provocative of these in his second major ethical work is maternity, defined as how 'I am bound to others before being tied to my body' (Levinas [1974(Levinas [ ] 2004. Maternity serves to signify this bind to alterity, which invokes the literal mother while speaking for subjectivity as such. Related to the futurity of the caress and conjuring literally or figuratively the fruits of the carnal encounter between a man and a woman, the maternal-feminine is central to Levinas's ethics of vulnerability. When Agathe caresses Duncan's image, her face and hands, and the page of notation that encodes her dance 'Mother', she is obviously not caressing the woman herself, but this encounter that brings neither her nor us as spectators closer to Duncan, bears something of a Levinasian ethics that maintains distance through proximity and contact. Moving from Duncan's face on the cover of the book to her hands via Agathe's hands, our gaze is redirected by these hands that touch without grasping everything there is to see and know here and which remains forever out of reach. It is however kinship of a different kind from the Levinasian relation to the maternal that emerges from this encounter with 'Mother'. The dance that incarnates the loss of Duncan's biological children is performed by women of the future, begetting 'children' beyond those born of the futurity that Levinas figures through the caress. In this, the film, following Duncan's influence, joins with Butler's deviation from the Levinasian vulnerable subject and its maternal capacity. Butler engages explicitly with Levinas in her work on precariousness and vulnerability (2004,, but her early work on gender performativity and the materiality of sex is also pertinent here. In this earlier work, Butler writes about Jennie Livingston's documentary Paris is Burning (1990) and the 'mothers' and 'children' of the drag houses in this film that rethink the biological and genealogical understanding of these terms through their different kinship patterns (1993,(121)(122)(123)(124)(125)(126)(127)(128)(129)(130)(131)(132)(133)(134)(135)(136)(137)(138)(139)(140). The black and Latino gay drag performers of Harlem, New York City rework conventional familial structures, exposing the repetition of norms that found families in the first place and showing how the terms 'mother' and 'children' can be inhabited differently. The 'children' of Manivel's film title are, of course, Isadora Duncan's own who were killed, but the term also includes others. Duncan speaks in 'The Dance of the Future', delivered originally as a lecture in Berlin in 1903, of her intention to form a school in which she will not teach students to imitate her movements but to find their own ([1903] 2018, 302), and her autobiography details her schooling endeavours in her lifetime, referring to her students frequently as her children. Isadora's 'children' therefore also include all those she taught in her lifetime, as well as those we see onscreen -from Agathe, through Manon and Marika, to Elsa -all of whom dance their versions of the solo in the wake of the two little ones who died. Writing about vulnerability, Butler suggests that loss makes a 'tenuous "we" of us all', wherein the 'I' that suffers is linked invisibly to all those who have been through or will ever experience the loss of loved ones: what undoes us, in Butler's sense, also ties us to each other through that very undoing (2004,20). While Elsa is the only woman in this film who has apparently undergone a loss similar to that of Duncan, a more fundamental connection underlies this. In a relay from body to body, these women reach out, just as Duncan's hands once did, 'marked with sorrow', as she writes in her autobiography (Duncan [1927] 2013, xxxvi). These hands give on to something we all share, which undoes us, as Butler puts it, but which links us anew, albeit distantly, through this very undoing.
Butler's initial work on relational vulnerability emerges from a context of loss in response to violent events with global repercussions radically different from the accident that took Isadora Duncan's children. Yet her broader sense of vulnerability is not bound solely to this underpinning violence. Butler was writing in the aftermath of 9/11 and the conditions of increased vulnerability and aggression that followed from these events. Objecting to the way in which the US responded to this violent terror attack with a war on terror, she suggests that the US misses an opportunity to connect with others around the globe through a shared acknowledgement of human vulnerability, choosing instead to shore up national defences (2004, xi). While acknowledging a hierarchy of grieving, of human physical vulnerability being distributed unevenly across the globe, of some lives being highly protected and others not even qualifying as grievable (32), she speaks of grief as a way of establishing a connection with others.
In contrast to those who think that grief is privatising and that it returns the griefstricken to a solitary situation, and is thus depoliticising, Butler argues that it furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order 'by bringing to the fore the relational ties that have implications for theorising fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility' (2004,22). For Butler, it is clear how grief undoes us, but she says that this is only so because it was already the case for desire -we are constituted as well as dispossessed by relations of all kinds (24). 7 This dual relational force of constitution and dispossession runs through to the politicising of vulnerability as resistance in her more recent work. Rather than only ever making us subject to our relations with others, Butler argues that 'vulnerability can be a way of being exposed and agentic at the same time ' (2016, 24). Expanding upon this in her exploration of non-violence, she specifies what we can be vulnerable to -'a situation, a person, a social structure, something upon which we rely and in relation to which we are exposed' (2021, 45) -none of which situations have any automatic relation to violence at their origin. These ties that bind people to one another through and beyond grief and loss are evident in the subtle gestures of Manivel's film. The performances of everyday actions serve as a counterpoint to the gestures of the solo, playing a signal role in bringing the relational vulnerability of Les Enfants d'Isadora to light.

Performative doing and undoing
Over a fortnight after we first meet Agathe reading Duncan's autobiography in a café, we see her again in a café, initially in a long shot that shows the city outside its large windows, and we hear simultaneously the Alexander Scriabin Étude in C-sharp minor, op. 2, no. 1, which Duncan used for 'Mother'. There are many people around Agathe in the café, eating and drinking, reading, or using a laptop. The image cuts to her with her earphones in, and, as the music continues to play, the ensuing shots show close-ups of hands doing different things. An older person's left hand wearing a wedding ring holds open a book as the other hand moves down the page, the hands more important than anything else, keeping the place and guiding the eye once again, as they did in the library sequence ( Figure 3). The film then cuts to a profile view of a young woman who is offered food by the person she is with -the extension of the hand a utensil here used to share and connect (Figure 4). Then a man is visible from behind only, rubbing his head with his left hand ( Figure 5), before the film cuts back to Agathe. All these hands make contact with something, all move and perform actions, and all these actions are not just a precursor to or an aftermath of the dance proper: they are part of a usually unnoticed array of hand movements which replicates itself in the sections featuring the other women of the film, even when filmed at more of a distance.
When Marika and Manon work together in the middle section of the film, as well as in their breaks from their rehearsal sessions, and when Elsa leaves the theatre and returns home in the final section, we see the actions of hands in relation to objects. They serve the women in the most obvious ways as they eat and drink, play an electronic game, strike a match to light incense, get undressed or draw a curtain. As we watch Elsa leave Manon's performance, she moves slowly and with some difficulty, using a cane, her body weight supported through her hand's grip on this prosthetic device that supplements her limbs to aid her ( Figure 6). In addition to touching, holding or gripping objects there is occasional human contact, as when Marika stretches out a hand to help Manon climb down sand dunes on a break to the coast (Figure 7). Not all of these uses of hands have the same degree of attention drawn to them that the close-ups facilitate when Agathe is in the library and café, but they are all part of the day-to-day performances of the hands that the film makes apparent in relation to objects and people.
To view this in terms of Butler's theory of performativity, the repetition of these everyday performances of actions constitutes the acts themselves while also binding the performers of those actions to social convention, as they comply with the norms of using their hands in particular ways to achieve certain ends. It is the conventions that lend efficacy to the act rather than this resulting from the will of an individual subject. As with the performative speech acts of J. L. Austin to which Butler's theory of gender  performativity is indebted, social conventions act upon us as well as enabling us to act, establishing a citational chain through the repetition of speech and embodied acts. These performances are therefore relational from the outset. The body in this mesh is less an entity than a relation and cannot be separated from the environment -people and things -on which it depends. In this, the repetition of norms requires corporeal vulnerability, and this very susceptibility, for Butler, is where something queer can happen. Norms may be undermined through reiteration as well as being reasserted. I have already observed the questioning of the categories of the 'mother' and 'children' that Butler speaks of in relation to Paris is Burning and have suggested how Les Enfants d'Isadora challenges this dynamic too in its different context by shifting the mother-child relationship from genealogical to lateral relations with disparate women. In a further parallel with this earlier film, Les Enfants d'Isadora places the everyday performances of the women and the people in the café alongside performances of the dance solo by the women. For  Butler, the juxtaposition of street scenes of straight white economically privileged America in Paris is Burning with the drag performances in the ball room exposes the repetition of norms at the heart of gender constitution as such. Less stridently yet still evocatively, the juxtaposition of everyday gesture in Les Enfants d'Isadora, especially of the hands, with the performances of 'Mother', exposes gesture as citation and event, to coin the terms of Butler's more recent work, as the film engages in its own questioning of normativity.

Solo connectedness
Intercut with Agathe's visit to the busy café as well as a return to her home, and a walk in the park on the days she spends teaching herself in a studio, are the stages of the dance, broken down roughly into the most prominent gestures that constitute its opening, middle and end. The studio is a blank white and light space, the glass opaque but still letting in the muffled sound of traffic and permitting a faint view of passers-by on the street outside, while the mirrors reflect Agathe in haunting ways. It is obvious that we are in a more abstract space, at one remove from the everyday, and the dance gestures stand out strikingly here. Agathe is absorbed in reading the Labanotation and making notes to herself along the way: on the first day, 'take the children by the hand', and on another day, 'rock the children' and 'caress one last time'. These instructions relate to the gestures of hands and arms, which are foregrounded on camera as she teaches herself. They also decode the Labanotation and translate it for viewers, making the otherwise fragmented and unintelligible movements legible in terms of the relation between mother and children, but this happens in reverse order. Agathe writes 'take the children by the hand' at the end of the sequence in which her arm and hand movements have been the focus and just before the film cuts to her leaving the studio. Likewise, it is at the conclusion of another sequence in dwindling light in which we have seen her rock her arms and perform a caressing motion that she writes the corresponding statements in her notebook, retrospectively explaining the disjointed gestures. The dance movements are not the illustration of a verbal statement but bring into being gestures that are only named subsequently: the truncated gestures, made legible belatedly and explained as they are interrupted, both expose and challenge their performative constitution.
In her exploration of gesture, Butler draws upon a range of writings, from Austin through Jacques Derrida to Franz Kafka, as well as the work of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht on epic theatre. Marked by its quotability, epic theatre, which lifts utterances into quotable form suspends and loses their everyday context, turning them into gesture that she describes as 'a truncated form of action that has lost the context for its intelligibility ' (2017, 182). A gesture that does not convert to action becomes in itself an event. For Butler, it is a pause and partial decomposition of a performative which, through its citational repetition, would usually bring actions into being. Isadora Duncan's dance is not epic theatre, and yet the quotability of the bodily actions that inform it gives rise to precisely a kind of truncation that suspends momentarily the relation to an everyday context before Agathe's translations into language from Labanotation invite us to see this relation. The camera focuses in several shots in the sequences featuring Agathe on how hands become entities in themselves rather than functional organs in the service of actions that clearly reiterate everyday gesture (Figure 8). This introduces an intermittent opacity to gesture that resists an intelligible language of the body even as it courts it. Such opacity recalls the crisis in communication that Giorgio Agamben addresses when writing about the capture of the body as a feature of cinema's emergence. Rather than read Les Enfants d'Isadora as adding to the archive of gesture in the history of cinema that recent studies have valuably explored, this exposure of something opaquer brings my reading closer to scholarship that questions the cinematic normalising of gesture. 8 Agamben speaks of the period during which Duncan came to prominence in the early twentieth century as the end of an era that had begun in the late nineteenth century that had lost its gestures and that therefore became all the more obsessed with them ([1978] 1993, 137). He deems Nietzsche, whom Duncan read, to be the point where a polarised tension rises to a peak: 'a tension towards the effacement and loss of the gesture on one hand and, on the other, its transmutation into a destiny' (137). 9 Agamben gathers together the main protagonists in the era of the loss and height of gesture: The dance of Isadora and Diaghilev, the novels of Proust, the great Jugendestil poets from Pascoli to Rilke and ultimately -in the most exemplary way -silent cinema, trace the magic circle in which humanity sought, for the last time, to evoke what was slipping through its fingers for ever. (137) Positioning Isadora Duncan at one end of this lineage with silent cinema at the other, those fingers mentioned by Agamben become active in the evocation of gesture and the saving of it from effacement. The magic circle becomes a tragic arc in Duncan's hands, though, and the children slip through the very fingers that seek to capture their passing upwards and outwards into the unfathomable realm of spirit. Yet Manivel's film neither crushes nor standardises gesture in its own iterations of Duncan's dance, giving each woman a relative freedom of their own, in keeping with the shape of relational vulnerability that both the dance and the film trace.
Manivel comments in interview on the importance of the movement from ground to sky in the dance, which he notes is the main gesture of the film (2019b). Agathe's movements as she performs the solo sketch a very apparent arc from low to high, her gestures oriented upwards even as she has gone in the opposite direction. The arc of grief then moves from Agathe through contrasting bodies: from Marika, a middle-aged teacher who is also a mother of two grown-up children, working with Manon who has Down syndrome, to Elsa, an older, heavyset woman who has difficulty walking. It matters that after Agathe's performance the dance moves through these differently able bodies, since this questions normativity. It also reconnects, albeit tacitly, the relational vulnerability of the film to the category of vulnerability as it pertains to individuals, with Manon's disability making her part of the very group that Julia Kristeva advocates for in her recent work on vulnerable subjects in France. 10 Although each woman follows the original dance, miming or quoting its movements as faithfully as possible in the case of Agathe and then Marika and Manon before being more loosely interpreted in the case of Elsa, bodily agency is apparent throughout, particularly with Elsa, and this allows the dance to emerge differently through their varied performances. As Marika explains to Manon on their autumn daytrip to the coast, Duncan believed that dance does not belong to anyone, explaining that it is open to all and that everyone just has to find their own gestures. This is precisely what these diverse women do through their own bodily performances. The opacity introduced first in the filming of Agathe's hands returns in the gestural performances of the subsequent dancers as a focus on the hands occasionally truncates their relation to a legible action, returning us to Butler's sense of gesture as event. The women work separately with the gestures that transpose Isadora Duncan's undoing through the loss of her children, but in so doing they testify to what has the potential to undo them and us all.
The undoing of anyone in common parlance is akin to a downfall, with this latter term implying a vertical motion of collapse that leads us towards the sense of falling apart that characterises the experience in question here. In its attachment to grief in the work of Butler, as we have observed, to be undone is to be human and connected to others, rendered vulnerable and affected irreversibly by their loss (2004,23). It is the shape of this vulnerability that Isadora Duncan's dance articulates so powerfully, while also reorienting it. Writing of the affective force of grief on bodies, Eugenie Brinkema notes how it 'upends and weights down to dust the contour of fleshy materiality ' (2014, 109). The gravity of Agathe's initial approach to the dance -in the sense of her seriousness -matches the gravitational pull of the earth that relates the soloist's movements to grief. Yet the arced shape of the dance, as we have seen, is from low to high, and while this does not render the tragic gravitational pull any less weighty -the dancer/mother's body sinks downwards inexorably -the hand gesture that completes the dance which began with hands angled earthwards, points eventually in the opposite direction, skywards. When Agathe reads from Duncan's autobiography, she learns of Duncan imagining a dance of the descent to the tomb in which she carries a child hesitantly to a resting place, but also of the ascent of the spirit towards the light. This combined movement is not only embodied in each woman's performance; it is also echoed through the different spaces in which they dance.
During some of Marika and Manon's breaks, they emerge from the dark rehearsal space in which they work -a stark contrast to Agathe's white, mirrored walls -into a sunlit refectory. This shift also provides a subtle architectural echo of the arc of the dance. The refectory is a storey above the ground, and this middle section of the film takes place in a multi-level space called the 'Carré Magique' (magic square), which rises upwards beyond the ground-level studio in which Agathe teaches herself in the first part of the film (an ascent foreshadowed briefly by a camera movement linking Agathe walking to the library in the first section with the sign 'danse' in giant red letters on the top of the building, and by the vantage point of her flat over a children's playground in the opening sequences). The concluding section of the film takes us from Manon's performance in the 'Carré Magique' back to street level before ascending still further to a flat in a tower block, as we follow Elsa. Elsa's flat is the highest point that the film attains in vertical terms, which corresponds with the height of the film's emotion as it follows its final arc.
When she gets indoors, Elsa does various things, including changing her clothes and lighting some incense in front of a photograph of a young child in an area resembling a shrine (Figure 9). She crosses the room to water a plant, and she walks to the window, preparing to shut out the night. A view of the tower block windows from the outside in this final sequence reinforces the sense of vertical height but also emphasises how close people are to one another in their living spaces while being entirely distanced from one another. Drawing a curtain, Elsa feels her way down the length of it as her left hand comes to life differently, behaving as if she were holding something precious up to her face ( Figure 10), her gaze transfixed by the hand as she rocks gently before making a more expansive gesture outwards and upwards with her arm and hand. As she moves, continuing to rock, bent forwards and attentive to her left hand as she supports herself with the cane in her other hand, the camera draws back and we see her as if on her own stage, in the gap between her curtains, the urban lights visible in the distance below, before she is filmed in close-up, with the focus on her face, her upward gaze and outstretched hand. This final dance is inspired by the performance she saw but also draws on Elsa's intimated pain, as her hand that stretches out towards the camera is the last gesture of the film. We watch her face as her gaze drops and she leaves the frame as the Scriabin music returns and the credits roll.
The outward movement of this final hand draws to a close the suite of performances of 'Mother' as it extends poignantly towards viewers. At the end of each of the other dancer's performances in the film, we see a gesture of an outstretched arm and waving hand (Figures 11 and 12). While this marks the end of the dance solo, this is also the beginning of a relation born of this hand gesture. Speaking of gesture in the context of dance performance, Rebecca Schneider notes that it can be a movement held in suspension, but that it can also be a relational movement. Rather than being proper to movements of the hand, for Schneider, the hand gesture is relational in so far as it moves off that hand to the relations it beckons (2017,114). It is in such a way that this film closes, with Elsa's final gesture moving off her hand towards viewers now, having moved off one woman's hands to the next throughout the film, beckoning recognition of relation ( Figure 13) through the performance of vulnerability.
In a review of the film, Sophie Monks Kaufman notes how she could not take her eyes off an audience member at the Locarno film festival premiere who sat motionless at the end, staring at the blank screen with sorrow, saying that it felt as though he were the unofficial fourth part of the film (2019). These women's hands offer themselves to anyone who connects with the experience of loss. The resultant spectatorial connection is not one of identification or empathy but of distanced lateral relations, symbolised by the hands that reach out without  ever making contact with an other but that the film positions in sequential succession, inviting us finally to join the chain. 11 The main gesture of the film that rises upwards repeatedly from a low to a high position in the mise en scène as well as in the individual dance performances may not be the kind of uprising of activist resistance that Butler envisages in her politics of vulnerability, but it is a show of strength rather than weakness. The vulnerability born of Isadora Duncan's original loss and performed through dance encourages the creation of a political community of a complex order by exposing the relational ethical ties and dependency of which Butler writes. As one person's hands gesture towards those of another whose experiences they will never know and who they will never touch, they commune nevertheless in the kinship that comes from recognising at a distance the attachments and losses that form and undo us all.   We know that Duncan lost her children in an accident, but the context for Elsa's loss is never specified. The Levinas epigraph refers to reparation, and while this article does not address reparation in the sense of making amends for losses due to war, violence or injustice, it does relate to a wider sense of the term. Levinas's prose broaches the potential for future consolation through a turn towards those left behind after a tragic loss. It thereby connects with broader uses of the verb 'réparer' to approach futurity and grief outside of the context of war, violence and injustice; for a notable example of such usage, see  (2015) and Ince (2021, 42-62). 4. Jacques Derrida ([2003] 2008) questions Heidegger's hierarchy that singles out the hand and the human as exceptional and superior to other beings, most notably other animals. It is fitting that Derrida's deconstructive thinking informs Butler's work even as her focus on vulnerability does not address the hand as such. 5. For further information on nominations and awards, see http://isadora-2020.com/, accessed 3 November 2020. 6. All figures are from Les Enfants d'Isadora (Shellac films). 7. Butler has been criticised for understanding vulnerability as vulnerability to violence. See Lloyd (2008). While it is the case that 9/11 prompts her early thinking on vulnerability, the relationship she posits between vulnerability and desire suggests a sense of vulnerability that does not necessarily stem from violence. 8. For recent studies of gesture in cinema and media, see Chare and Watkins (2017) and Grønstad, Gustafsson, and Vågnes (2017). For a critique of the correspondence between the rise of psychiatry and the development of cinema in terms of the normalising of gesture, see Harbord (2019). I align myself with Harbord's interest in querying the normative aspects of gestural performance in cinema. 9. Duncan refers to Thus Spake Zarathustra in her autobiography My Life, a philosophical text which Agamben terms 'the ballet of a humanity bereft of its gestures' (Agamben [1978(Agamben [ ] 1993. 10. When Kristeva (2010) writes to the French president about vulnerability as the missing term in the list of French values of liberty, equality and fraternity, promoted since the Enlightenment, she does so in the first instance as the mother of a disabled son. 11. I draw close here to Marianne Hirsch's work on vulnerability when she writes: 'Current pedagogies encourage students to respond to "the pain of others" through identification and empathy, but my work with postmemory has introduced a distancing awareness emphasizing that although "it could have been me, it was, decidedly not me"' (Hirsch 2016, 84).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).