Abstract

The body has always been on cinema’s agenda. Film, from its beginnings, satisfies an obsession about the body, a kind of desire for exploration, research and fragmentation of the body. The purpose of this article is precisely to dive in the cradle of the seventh art embracing the body as a kind of conductor, identifying, in the early years of motion pictures, the sprout of some of the most recurrent lines of registering body in film: the monstrous and extraordinary body, its materiality, its fluids, its flesh; the burlesque body, launched into the world, at the mercy of chance; the domesticated body, wrapped in glamour and fetish.