The hand gestures
I've never understood where or why they came up with the hand gestures for the tones. What purpose do these serve?
shareThe gestures are the Kodaly hand signs for solfege developed by the Hungarian composer and educator in the 1920s. Singers use these gestures to learn solfege, aka the do-re-mi scale.
In the film, the aliens used tones to make contact. The Truffaut character used the Kodaly gestures to explain to other scientists the tonal sequence the aliens were using to make contact. I think this was setting up the grand finale where the alien steps out of the mother ship and makes the 5 hand signs as kind of a gesture of extraterrestrial diplomacy.
That clears the matter up a lot. I never knew of these hand gestures before and thought it was something they just made up but didn't explain why.
Thanks for the insight.
Lacombe (Truffaut) does explain it when he's giving his presentation about the Indian chanting, although his lines can be hard to understand because of his accent: "To help you learn, I am using the hand sign created by Zoltán Kodály. Kodály developed these signs to teach music to deaf children." and they show a diagram of the 7 hand signs.
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