Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects 9789048544769

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Images
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Themes – The Framed Hand and Being
2. Symbolism – The Semiotic Hand
3. Aesthetics – The Stylised Hand: Beauty, Ugliness, Genre
4. Narration – Hands Doing and Being
5. Characterisation – Hands and Identity
Concluding Case Study – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975)
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

Hands on Film

To Ciara, Clara and Eliot

Hands on Film Actants, Aesthetics, Affects

Barry Monahan

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Image from Au hasard Balthazar by Robert Bresson © 1966 Argos Films – Parc Films – Argos Films – Svensk Filmindustri Cover design: Kok Korpershoek Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 771 6 e-isbn 978 90 4854 476 9 doi 10.5117/9789463727716 nur 670 © B. Monahan / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.



Table of Contents

List of Images

9

Acknowledgements 11 Introduction 13 1. Themes – The Framed Hand and Being 21 Natural and Supernatural Phenomena: Matter Becoming Consciousness 21 The Nature and Origin of Creativity 36 Determinism and Free Will: Possession, Self-possession, Dispossession 50 Modernism: Industrialisation and Technology 63 Gendered Hands 76 2. Symbolism – The Semiotic Hand The Meaningful Hand and Metonymy The Manual as Metaphorical Between Metaphor and Metonym: The Hand and Memory

91 91 111 127

3. Aesthetics – The Stylised Hand: Beauty, Ugliness, Genre Behind the Scenes: Unseen Creative Hands The Stylised Hand on Screen The Camp Hand and the Hand in Camp The Haptic Experience: Screened Sensations

135 135 138 163 172

4. Narration – Hands Doing and Being Hands as Narrative Actants Slow Hands and Slow Cinema Acting Hands and Set Pieces

189 189 196 202

5. Characterisation – Hands and Identity Cultural Contexts for Creative and Destructive Personalities The Psychopathic Hand Vocational Hands Characters and Labour

211 211 223 228 232

Manual Details: Emotions and Eccentricities Concealing and Revealing Characters

235 242

Concluding Case Study – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) 249 Filmography 253 Index 261



List of Images

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 1.3 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2

Divinely created contorted female hands in The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963) Film – The House is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad 49 © 1963 – Studio Golestan The protagonist enjoys her secret manual pleasure in Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) Film – Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulin de JeanPierre Juenet © 2001 – UGC Images – Tapioca Films 83 – France 3 Cinéma – MMC Independent GMBH The hand of fate in Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) Film – Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulin de JeanPierre Juenet © 2001 – UGC Images – Tapioca Films 84 – France 3 Cinéma – MMC Independent GMBH Bruno takes hold of Caroline’s hands in Le lit (Marion Hänsel, 1982) Film – Le lit de Marion Hänsel © 2001 – Pyramide Films 105 Hands trap the cricket, symbolising repressed emotion in Cecil Tang’s The Arch (1968) Film – The Arch by Cecil Tang © 1968 – Photo courtesy of www.lesblank.com107 Workman’s gloves inhibit the emotional connection between father and son in Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) Film – Five Easy Pieces © 1970, renewed 1998 – Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. – All Rights Reserved 125 – Courtesy of Columbia Pictures Manual touch invokes memory in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) Film – Hiroshima mon amour by Alain Resnais © 1959 – Argos Films – Como Films – Pathé 129 Hands and the style of German Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) Film – Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari / The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene © 1920 – Courtesy of FILMS SANS FRONTIERES 139 Hands as stylistic elements in The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)

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Film – The House is Black by Forugh Farrokhzad © 1963 – Studio Golestan 147 Figure 3.3 Stylised destruction of the evil limb in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) Film – Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors by Freddie Francis © 1965 – Tigon Film Distributors Ltd. 152 Figure 3.4 Stylised mise en scène in Harold P. Warren’s Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) Film – Manos: The Hands of Fate by Harold P. Warren, 155 1966 – Public Domain Figure 3.5 Camp hands as functioning objets d’art in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1947) Film – La Belle et la bête by Jean Cocteau © 1947 – 169 Lopert Films – Publicity Image Figure 4.1 The skilled hand in action in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) Film – Pickpocket by Robert Bresson © 1959 – AGNES 195 DELAHAIE PRODUCTIONS Figure 4.2 The pervasive threatening hand in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) Film – Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors by Freddie Francis 203 © 1965 – Tigon Film Distributors Ltd. Figure 5.1 Lacenaire presents his criminal and creative hands in Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945) Film – Les enfants du paradis by Marcel Carné © 1945 213 – Courtesy of Pathé Figure 5.2 Identification intensified with the silent characters in Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together (1956) Film – Together by Lorenza Mazzetti © 1956 – Harlequin Productions Ltd. – Courtesy of the BFI National Archive230 Figure 5.3 Characterisation through manual communication in Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together (1956) Film – Together by Lorenza Mazzetti © 1956 – Harlequin Productions Ltd. – Courtesy of the BFI National Archive230 Figure 5.4 The lovers’ manual interactions in L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) Film – L’Eclisse by Michelangelo Antonioni © 1962 – 235 Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL

Acknowledgements In the first instance I would like to thank Maryse Elliott, Senior Commissioning Editor at Amsterdam University Press, for her guidance, encouragement, and patience throughout the process of bringing this project to completion. Maryse was supported by Julie Benschop-Plokker along the way, and both were indispensable supporters of my work when I most needed it. From its early incarnations, my erratic and ambitious thinking was focused and challenged by conversations with friends, colleagues, and students. Their generous suggestions and intellectual challenges helped me to mould the idealistic dreamwork into a feasible venture. I am grateful to those in the Department of Film & Screen Media at University College Cork, and to others beyond that unit who had wonderful ideas that steered my thinking: these include Graham Allen, Alan Gibbs, Maureen O’Connor, and Edel Semple. I had interesting conversations with my graduate researchers about process and product, during its evolution, and I would like to thank Sandra Costello, Rachel Gough, Tadhg Dennehy, and Nicholas O’Riordan, as well as other inspiring cinema enthusiasts from the same research community: James Mulvey, Marija Laugalyte, and Loretta Goff come to mind immediately. I would like to acknowledge especially Aidan Power, Máire Messenger-Davies, John Davies, Conn Holohan and Seán Crosson for valuable recommendations offered early in the mission. I am indebted to a large number of people in film archives, holders of private collections and – I add with encouragement but not surprise – from independent, less market-dominant distribution companies, who facilitated my use of the images in this book. Among this cohort of cinephiles are: Alexandre de la Porte (UGC), Jean-Pierre Jeunet and his assistant Marjorie Orth (Tapioca Films), Raphaëlle Quinet (Pyramide Films), Emily and Harrod Blank from Les Blank Films, Margarita Diaz (Sony Pictures), Loli Geneste and Ellen Schafer (Argos Films), Cécile Meyer-Cases (Cité Films), Anne-Sophie Mignot (Films Sans Frontières), John Henderson (Tigon Film Distributors), Jonathan Rechenstein (Pathé), Espen Bale (British Film Institute), Alexane Durand (Studiocanal), Anne-Laure Barbarit (mk2), and Mylène Bresson. Without crucial guidance from Dan O’Connell and incredible generosity of spirit and time by Barry Reilly (both from my home department), there would have been no visual component to this book: I cannot thank them enough for turning it into the final version that it now is. Friends and family have been at hand for support and encouragement throughout. I want to mention specifically Brian, Sarina, Thomas, Liz,

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Christophe, Oisín, Liz, Kevin, Dolores, Stephen, Suzy, Evelyn, Kealan, Peter, Cathy, and my parents, Christy and Etta. The younger generation of family members weren’t of much academic help, but they provided a background of hilarity, naughtiness, and fun, without which I (and this endeavour) would have definitely suffered. A big thanks to John, Claire, Joey, and Jessica for abundant provision of this essential energy! During completion of the book, our son Eliot was born. His arrival awoke in me the memory that no creativity is as wonderful, and that I am profoundly lucky to have Ciara and Clara to share the new learning curve with me. They help me through and listen to moaning, but persist in their kindness… Thank you C Major and Minor!

Introduction It is a truism that the number of hands on the cinematic screen is approximately twice the number of characters represented in films. This vast quantity of limbs became a challenge early in the present project despite help by friends, colleagues, and students who offered lists of important examples that ultimately became an aggregate filmography of several hundred cases. Having been initially overwhelmed by this unwieldy collection, I eventually found some assurance that the research task might not be so daunting. I began to discern categorical variations on the role played by hands in the cinematic art. Hands were abundantly available for scrutiny, but the list became more manageable by concentrating on appearances that were disposed to analytical attention because of their meaningful value. As the methodology shifted from enumeration to categorisation it invited a two-sided process: by considering what cinema had to say about human hands, it was necessary to reflect upon what that limb could reveal about the art form itself. The book in front of you uses a familiar modus operandi; one in which film is considered in relation to another concept – literature, philosophy, adaptation, history – or objects – cars, guns, costumes, architecture – used to chart the historical and aesthetic development of both medium and mediated. If I have achieved my objective even partially, the proposal that the hand has something of indispensable importance to add to these studies should become explicit. To offer a visual analogy: this book might be conceived as an hourglass. In the top bulb, theoretical ruminations on the cinema lie in layers with wider philosophical questions – ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic – stratified as theses and antitheses. These levels blend as they percolate through the narrow neck of the sandglass, which represents the catalyst of this study: hands. Following that theoretical amalgamation, new ideas and conceptualisations emerge synthetically to shed light on how humankind has used the cinema as a mode of artistic expression to explore what it means to be a sentient, socially participating, and creative individual. Fundamentally this study comprises a series of attempts at justifying why the hand has such a crucial role to play in this process of revelation.

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The hand can be understood as an entity that mediates between the material (body) and the immaterial (mind). Consequently, it carries both literal and metaphorical potential. As an illustration of the former, explaining the evolution of our species in his detailed study The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture, Frank R. Wilson has described the relationship between the limb and the mind and how, over millennia, the refinement in the functioning of each one contributed to the development of the intellect and capability of the other. Geoffrey Beattie has elucidated the diverse possibilities for the hand’s capacity for denotative and connotative communication in his work Rethinking Body Language: How Hand Movements Reveal Hidden Thoughts. Both of these studies, as well as a host of other noteworthy expositions referenced in this work, testify to the critical importance of the position of the hand in human socialisation, acculturation, and intellectual development. Two detailed interventions into the field integrate the hand specifically as performing entity within the cultural practices of theatre and film. In her study The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment, Farah Karim-Cooper considers the Bard’s manual representations within the historical contexts of its cultural applications both on stage and in textual and artistic imagery. Closer to home, in his monograph Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory Volker Pantenburg offers innovative reflection and astute analysis of the canons of those filmmakers and dedicates a detailed chapter to how hands have played an instrumental thematic (theoretical) and artistic (pragmatic) role in their work. Both studies centralise that part of the human anatomy by justifying the importance of its role in the artists’ productions and for wider questions into the nature of homo sapiens. These conceptual enquiries are addressed in three further works that consider the position of the hand philosophically, without addressing cultural texts specifically. John Napier’s Hands, Darian Leader’s Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why, and The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being by Raymond Tallis, present comprehensive narratives that triangulate the relationship between intelligence, existence, and the hand, with a view to stressing the predominant position occupied by the limb in the evolution of humankind. These studies reaffirm and demonstrate that the corporeal entity bears considerable ontological significance in its unique connection to the social, intellectual, and cultural development of the species. Karim-Cooper and Pantenburg’s research further testifies to its gestural and communicative flexibilities; qualities that make the hand an ideal subject for aesthetic representation in the plastic arts, literature, theatre, and cinema. To bring the discourses full circle, we need only propose

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that the framed, filmed hand might itself have something to contribute to our understanding of how the cinematic medium works. If such a dialectic is possible then it is best sought at the representational point where unique qualities of film and the hand overlap. As distinct from other representational cultural forms, cinema is endowed with the possibility of presenting the hands both in motion and in close-up; characteristics that elevate them to a position of importance exclusively available to the filmmaker. In writing on film’s potential to rediscover any common object anew Fernand Léger mentions the hand in passing: Before the invention of the moving picture no one knew the possibilities latent in a foot – a hand – a hat. These objects were, of course, known to be useful – they were seen, but never looked at. On the screen they can be looked at – they can be discovered – and they are found to possess plastic and dramatic beauty when properly presented. (1974, 97)

In a different context, Antonin Artaud has used the hand as one of a set of things that become meaningfully captured by virtue of isolation within the film frame. The medium charges diurnal objects with a renewed potency and aesthetic value by creating a contextual separation from which they obtain a life of their own which becomes increasingly independent and detaches them from their usual meaning. A leaf, a bottle, a hand, etc., live with an almost animal life which is crying out to be used. (1972, 65)

This aesthetic magnification of the commonplace article reflects the way we give prominence to the hand on a regular basis. Thus, as we explore the motivations behind our observation of the limb in routine, quotidian circumstances, and as we appreciate its capacity to hold our attention, we might discover why aspects of its cinematic mediation have drawn that subject and this medium together. A possibility emerges from the hand’s ‘doing and thingness’ marked by its location at the point of intersection between the active consciousness and the world in which action occurs; two characteristics that are fundamentally embedded in the process of filmmaking. Elements of these cinematic qualities resonate through the film theory writing of Gilles Deleuze and find expression in a discussion of the framed hand at the transitional point between his studies Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. At the beginning of the second work Deleuze emphasises the aesthetic capacities of the hand and grants it even more potency than the framed face. Setting out the evolution

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of his thesis from the movement-image to the time-image he identifies a shift in the focus from the active doer to the passive seer of the representation and points to neo-realism for his main examples. There, he finds a ‘pure optical situation’ (1994, 2) that indicates a ‘crisis of the action-image’ where ‘the character has become a kind of viewer […] the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides’ (ibidem, 3). Stating that ‘it is as if the action floats in the situation, rather than bringing it to a conclusion or strengthening it’ (ibidem, 4), the author concludes his introductory section to Cinema 2 with reiterated concentration on the hand. This, he affirms, takes on a role in the image which goes infinitely beyond the sensorymotor demands of the action, which takes the place of the face itself for the purpose of affects, and which, in the area of perception, becomes the mode of construction of a space which is adequate to the decisions of the spirit. (1994, 12)

This monograph is a comprehensive study of the history of the human hand on film. By considering hundreds of case studies, it will assess the ways in which filmmakers have framed the hand: for purposes of character and narrative development; with the intention of exploring thematic and philosophical questions; and as a part of the aesthetic construction of their works. Its primary focus is on the valuable and varied ways in which that human feature has enriched the filmic representation. It also explores the ways in which the specific framing and use of the hand in cinema has facilitated thematic interventions into several philosophical, sociological, and theoretical questions about being human. Included in the former category are analyses of how the hand is used on screen for stylistic effect in genres as differently designed as the horror and the romantic comedy; how the hand has been mobilised for dramatic effect in narratives such as the action/adventure thriller and detective film; and how it has been framed in the construction of character and in determining agency in films that, among others, have something to say about working class societies and individuals, as well as race, gender, social mores and communication. In the latter group, the book will excavate the ways in which the cinematic hand can provide inroads into ontological questions about materialism and human evolution; into debates around free will and determinism; and concerning notions of good faith and individual moral and ethical responsibility. It will analyse the cinematic use of the hands by considering five roles that they perform. Each of these categories seeks to work in a dialectical way: firstly, by considering how the hand appears and performs diverse functions on

Introduc tion

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screen for different filmmakers; and secondly, by focusing on how that cinematic framing might shed light on philosophical and physiological questions about humanity and the hand. This methodological classif ication is designed with the intention of offering clarity and in the hope that it will make the book as user-friendly as possible. However, as with any taxonomy, it is beset by two main categorical complications. The f irst of these is an inevitable, pragmatic tautology: because recognisable characteristics determine the group into which given examples should be placed, these groups in turn come to be redefined by their constituents. An interminable dance of a priori and a posteriori selection thus produces a permanent state of flexible indeterminacy, one which can only be accepted as unavoidable with such an endeavour. The second difficulty arises when a given example exhibits qualities that might have it reasonably situated in more than one taxonomic group. In these cases, I have used the predominant aspect of the film to assign its category, or else I have simply included the same film in the alternative sections. This has led to some repetition in the films discussed across my thematic sections, however the analytical angle of attack is sufficiently different in revisited case studies and I have attempted to synopsise the key points of the film for readers who may only dip in and out of single segments or chapters. Each of my five fields of exploration is represented by a single chapter. In Chapter One – Themes – I consider how directors have used the hand as primary instrument to explore key ideas in their films. It offers close readings of several films that establish human decision, desire, agency, and potency as their principal concerns, and it presents a variety of ways in which metaphysical and ontotheological questions have been rendered on screen. It looks at films that have something to say directly about the labouring human hand: whether Marxist ideas about industrialisation, Lukács’ notion of reification of the working subject, or questions about the changing conditions of work in the modern age. Within the context of debates around free will and determinism, and representations of individuals who suffer manual dispossession, it evaluates films that ask ethical and moral questions about the disempowerment of suppressed, minority, or marginalised individuals and groups. In the second chapter – Symbolism – I analyse the hand as a tool of communication, first assessing how the creation of on-screen meaning relates to socially-established codes of expression, and then considering how filmed hands play a role semiotically in the creation of new hermeneutic possibilities. It also looks at a compilation of films that focus on manual movement as a part of denotative or connotative coding, or as it makes meaning through established social hand

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gestures, signalling, or conventional sign language. This section works with a tripartite structure and divides representations of the hand into categories of the metonymic, the metaphorical, and specific cases in which both are combined. Chapter Three – Aesthetics – deals with pro-filmic hands as creative contributors to the filmmaking process and on-screen hands as stylistic elements. Thus, it considers the manual labour involved in certain aspects of film production as well as paying attention to the tonal qualities generated by different manual effects and designs across various genres. It interrogates some of the recurring ways that filmmakers have used the hand as a stylistic entity and analyses how framing the limb as a thing of beauty or ugliness can create an aesthetic effect that permeates the whole representation tonally. With a view to exploring theoretical writing on film studies by analysts who have considered the Camp aesthetic and the haptic effects of film spectatorship, it uses the hand as a starting point to propose new possibilities of intervention into those areas: in both cases attempting to problematise some of the existing lines of debate. Chapter Four – Narration – explores the relationship between the active human hand and plot progression. It considers how on-screen hands have played instrumental roles in the development or suspension of the cinematic story. A brief opening section explains the underlying distinction between the operations that hands perform in every cinematic narrative – merely by ‘doing’ and incidentally moving the plot forward – and those films in which the actions of the hands become a marked object of focus. It explores how, in a powerfully protracted way, the active hands of inactive protagonists are tied to examples of ‘slow cinema’ narration, and the section on that stylistic group uses it as a benchmark in assessing how manual activity – or inactivity – might determine narrative progression in films more generally. The fifth chapter – Characterisation – catalogues examples of the use of the hand in providing information for the development of character, and it considers what film personalities do with their hands and how their hands reveal psychological interiority and complexity. The section reads hands as mechanisms that expose unconscious motives, desires, and pathologies, and it scrutinises their role in character formation and revelation: as actants, or as determinants of an existential condition. In a concluding section, I use Steven Spielberg’s 1975 feature film blockbuster Jaws as a case study to consider the five categories set out in the preceding chapters. By analysing it from those different perspectives I hope to show how an application of hand-centric evaluations can shed light on cinematic elements that might otherwise remain hidden. At the same time, this closing piece should expose the problematic tautological nature

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of the taxonomy that structures the book. While discrete examples of how the hand is working in a single film justify my categorical distinctions, the overlapping of elements of theme, symbolism, style, narration, and characterisation testifies to the dialectical interconnectedness of manual imagery, framing, referencing, and use for a range of cinematic objectives. Four lines of investigation are embarked upon here which, for a few reasons, are not brought to satisfactory conclusions. While I acknowledge this – and hopefully justify it reasonably – time and space, and the nature of the debates in question have not permitted fuller closure. Complex and on-going discussions about humanity’s relationship with free will and determinism are not resolved in films dealing with that topic and, accordingly, my own findings stop short of a perfect denouement by proposing that cinematic texts play with the indecision rather than try to draw a definite line under the argument. Similarly, I hope that my analysis of aesthetics of Camp cinema does justice to that rich area of investigation – especially as I attempt to justify Susan Sontag’s early reading of the style – and that my omitting consideration of a broader range of (contemporary) cases will not leave the reader too frustrated. On the question of how the film spectator is haptically stirred by the viewing experience, I have tried to problematise certain lines of debate without rejecting the concept wholesale. In this respect, I feel that much more must be done that might borrow from writing on the ‘paradox of fiction’ in elucidating what is, fundamentally, a core ambiguity around our tactile relationship with the screened world. Finally, I mention that consideration of the hand – particularly the detached and self-conscious entity – might have something to add to conceptualisations of character. Rather than propose a definite set of theses in this regard, I suggest that analysis of how the human and animal limb (as the severed but re-animated extremity) is represented might expose important qualities that have something to say about all character construction. These might include, but are not limited to, questions about the anthropomorphic form imitating physical qualities of the living being, and how identification with psychological motivations and intentions might be aroused in the viewer. In all these examples, I hope that more expert and better minds will pursue lines of study only modestly and tentatively begun here. In considering cinematic hands and how these might inform discussions about our being-in-the-world and our (self) representation on screen, it is hoped that both researchers in film studies and those interested in ontological philosophical questions will be satisfied, theoretically challenged, and informed about a variety of topics in film themes and aesthetics. Readers will hopefully discover a variety of examples of the hand on screen with as

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many questions about the ways in which the moving hand is represented and mobilised for interrogative and stylistic effect. Ultimately, readers are invited to consider the meanings offered by this set of representations as they shed light on critical aspects of our being humans who manipulate the world we inhabit.

Works Referenced Artaud, Antonin. 1972. Collected Works: Volume Three. Translated by Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder and Boyars. Beattie, Geoffrey. 2016. Rethinking Body Language: How Hand Movements Reveal Hidden Thoughts. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. Karim-Cooper, Farah. 2016. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York, London: Bloomsbury. Leader, Darian. 2016. Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why. United Kingdom: Penguin, Random House. Léger, Fernand. 1974. ‘A New Realism – The Object’. In Introduction to the Art of the Movies, edited by Lewis Jacobs, 96–98. New York: The Noonday Press. Napier, John. 1980. Hands. New York: Pantheon Books. Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Tallis, Raymond. 2003. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York: Pantheon Books.

1.

Themes – The Framed Hand and Being Abstract This chapter considers how directors have used the hand as primary instrument to explore key ideas in their films. It offers close readings of several films that establish human decision, desire, agency, and potency as their principal concerns, and it presents a variety of ways in which metaphysical and ontotheological questions have been rendered on screen. It looks at films that have something to say directly about the labouring human hand: whether Marxist ideas about industrialisation, Lukács’ notion of reification of the working subject, or questions about the changing conditions of work in the modern age. Within the context of debates around free will and determinism, and representations of individuals who suffer manual dispossession, it evaluates films that ask ethical and moral questions about the disempowerment of suppressed, minority, or marginalised individuals and groups. Key Words: Free will and determinism; gendered labour; creativity; origins; consciousness

Natural and Supernatural Phenomena: Matter Becoming Consciousness Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein’s Monster and James Cameron’s John Connor’s Model 101 were very much creatures of their time. As their designations – Monster and Model – attest, they were conceived and projected into science fiction contexts that reflected the contemporary states of positivistic knowledge and experimentation at the periods of their conceptualisation. But although they are separated by two centuries of scientific progress, the fundamental questions invited by both characters and by those of their diegetic and extra-diegetic inventors, have not altered much. Foremost among these are the interrelated themes of the origin of sentient life and man’s relationship with, and capacity for, intervention into the process of the creation of intelligent, living beings. As much as both stories interrogate the appropriateness

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of man’s ‘playing God’, they demand reflection on the consequences of his having done so for society at large, for the designer, and for the created being. Made at roughly the historical mid-way point between the first sound cinematic adaptation of Shelley’s novel, the 1931 Universal Pictures production directed by James Whale, and Cameron’s second Terminator film from 1991, was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). While Kubrick’s diegesis is stretched to cover an expansive period of human history and evolution, and addresses key ethical and ontological questions, in his narrative they are confronted centrally and explicitly. Character traits and the personality of the Artificial Intelligence entity HAL are designed with some degree of futuristic creative projection. However conceptual possibilities for the scope of AI consciousness were very much a part of technological debates at the time of the film’s production (see Malik 2000, 294–318). From the narrative logic established in the opening sequences of 2001, we can infer that from man’s earliest stages of primal growth, his intellectual progress coincided with a developmental capacity for the creation and use of tools. The logical and teleological consequence of this, given enough epochs of evolution, was the design of an artificially conscious piece of hardware that was capable of intelligence and emotion, and some degree of autonomy in both. HAL’s dying words move from expressions of enthusiasm and confidence – which we can interpret as forms of communication set in place by programmed reactions to certain stimuli – to the pathetic and emotively plaintive: ‘Stop Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave’. Because homo sapiens is posited as the creative force behind this designed consciousness and self-consciousness, it is fitting that Kubrick has already shown us the dawning moment of humanity’s intellectual shift when, with his hands, the primitive creature uses the femur from an animal skeleton as a tool: specifically, as a weapon. The focus on the hands of characters at moments of their creation or dawning of intellectual capability or consciousness is a recurring trope in cinema and is evident in the Frankenstein and Terminator films. In these and in several others representing bionic, anthropomorphic, or cyborg forms of life, the framed limb is used to denote the artificial creatures’ coming to life or passing away. In this recurring iconography of the anthropomorphised form, we are given framed, close-up insert shots of the still hand beginning to twitch and move, or the twitching and moving hand coming to rest. The association between the consciousness and the mobility of the living entity is set up as a triangulation between that being’s design, its intellect, and its hands. This association has long roots in the discourses of Western thinking and the consequence of this longevity – and of the founding connections proposed between (divine) creation, consciousness and intelligence, and the

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hand – is manifest in the significant and ubiquitous repetition of manual iconography in certain films. The themes of these stories continue to struggle with an important ontological and metaphysical question that haunts so many philosophical, ontotheological, and scientific debates to the present day: how can inorganic matter become consciousness? We find that this question had an original focus on the human hand, and the ramifications of that attention have endured across the history of artistic representation, finding a comfortable and logical outlet in cinema. The earliest records of debates that invoke the ontological position and role of the human hand are repeated in contemporary literature concerned with arguing the supremacy of that part of the anatomy by its association with the evolution of creativity, consciousness, and culture. The original conflicting positions were taken by the Greek philosophers Anaxagoras and Aristotle, whose assertions were separated by almost two centuries. A lecturer in science and philosophy, the Athenian Anaxagoras had suffered some discrediting by the time of his death in 428BC for his proposal that the planets were not Gods in the Heavens, but solid formations of matter suspended in the distant skies. Less controversially, he claimed that hands contributed to man’s intellectual evolution. Man had become a being of supreme rationality because he possessed the nimble and capable limbs. Inverting this premise, a century and a half later, Aristotle argued that man was not intelligent because he had hands, but that he had been given hands by divine design because his intellect positioned him above other creatures. The subject matter and philosophical motivation informing this foundational debate were not consigned to history. As recently as 2007, in his book God Is Not Great, the polemicist and journalist Christopher Hitchens recollected a personal experience in his own atheistic awakening. Having set up the context of an informative moment from the earlier years of his education, Hitchens quotes his primary school teacher: So you see, children, how powerful and generous God is. He has made all the trees and grass to be green, which is exactly the colour that is most restful to our eyes. (2007, 2)

In a reflection that contained resonances of the ancient Greeks’ declarations, the shocked young pupil recalled his reaction: I simply knew, almost as if I had privileged access to a higher authority, that my teacher had managed to get everything wrong in just two sentences. The eyes were adjusted to nature, and not the other way about. (2007, 2–3)

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Here he explains that, for reasons of religious faith, motivated causes and effects and their teleological consequences were inverted for proselytising purposes. This contemporary example is preceded by recurring historical philosophical interventions which have sought to explore the relationship between human agency and its corporeal manifestations. Several recent commentators summon the voices of earlier authors, and many begin their arguments with the Anaxagoras and Aristotle case. In his book The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, Frank R. Wilson quotes the anthropologist Charles Bell: In his landmark treatise on the hand, Sir Charles Bell noted that ‘we can hardly be surprised that some philosophers should have entertained the opinion, with Anaxagoras, that the superiority of man is owing to his hand.’ Bell, taking exception to what he judged in Anaxagoras to have been excessive regard for a mere bodily appendage, opined that these hands were given man ‘because he was the wisest creature’. (1998, 290)

In her exploration of the metaphorical and practical use of the hand in Shakespeare’s work, Farah Karim-Cooper references the Greek Physician Galen, who determined ‘that the hand was a sign of human dignity and intelligent design for its ability to grasp, hold on to objects and manipulate the environment’ (2016, 13). Raymond Tallis also invokes the ancient philosophers when he considers Heidegger’s juxtaposition of thinking and handicraft: Against Anaxagoras, however, who asserted that it is because he has hands that man became the most intelligent among animals, Aristotle argues that, to the contrary, it is because of his intelligence he has hands. This view corresponds to Heidegger’s. (2003, 246)

He quotes the phenomenologist’s work What is Called Thinking? in which the latter has argued: ‘Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and be handy in achieving works of handicraft’ (Heidegger 1968, 16). Setting up the context for his informative commentary on Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki’s mobilisation of the hand in sections of their f ilmmaking, Volker Pantenburg succinctly centralises the importance of the classical philosophers’ argument. With the locus of this historical disagreement being perspectives on the limb, Pantenburg proposes that the Anaxagoras and Aristotle debate ‘contrasts two positions’ and ‘sets

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the course of the discussion for the following centuries’ (2015, 223). The Aristotelian position can be found in creative reiterations, cultural practices, and representations down through the centuries. With its various expressive incarnations in different artistic forms, a sense of the supernatural found its way into generations of depictions and ritualised uses of the human hand. Karim-Cooper references Microcosmographia, the 1615 ‘Description of the Body of Man’ by Helkiah Crooke, who was the court physician to King James I. She indicates by this example that the tendency to associate the physical, anatomical qualities of the human hand with the metaphysical interpolation of the divine had been firmly established in the most orthodox of contemporary scientific doctrine around the time of Shakespeare. John Napier goes as far as to focus his attention on the precision and complex role of the thumb and calls upon the writing of previous commentators in its significance: The thumb, the ‘Lesser hand’ as Albinus called it, is the most specialised of the digits. Isaac Newton once remarked that, in the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince him of God’s existence. (1980, 65)

Examples in support of the importance of this position abound. There was, as Karim-Cooper has suggested, a conspicuous rise in the symbolic depictions of the hand even in secular art which testify to earlier religious and supernatural connotative portrayals. One significant theme offering reflections on the nature of the infinite or sublime was evident in ‘emblematic images’ which ‘show a saint or person placing their hand into a flame, which almost always represents constancy’ (2016, 12). This idea is referenced in a scene from Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Mean Streets when Charlie (Harvey Keitel) goes to a church to pray. In voice-over, we hear his supplication: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to eat your flesh. Not worthy to drink your blood’, before he repeats the second line aloud. As he stands from the altar, a second voice-over conversation continues: charlie: Okay. Okay. I just come out of confession, right? johnny: Right. charlie: And the priest gives me the usual penance: right, ten Hail Mary’s, ten Our Father’s… ten whatever. Now, you know that next week I’m gonna come back and he’s just gonna give me another ten Hail Mary’s and another ten Our Father’s and… and I mean, you know how I feel about that shit.

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With these last words, Scorsese inserts a close-up shot of the marble hand of a statue of the dead Christ figure holding some roses. Charlie’s imagined dialogue goes on: charlie: Those things… they don’t mean anything to me: they’re just words. Now that may be okay for the others, but it just doesn’t work for me. I mean, I do something wrong, I just want to pay for it my way. So I do my own penance for my own sins. What do ye say? Eh? johnny: That’s all bullshit, expect the pain right? The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite.

On Johnny Boy’s line ‘No you don’t fuck around with the infinite. There’s no way you do that’, Charlie moves his finger to hold it over the flame of a candle. Again, in voice-over, we hear his interlocutor add: The pain in hell has two sides: the kind you can touch with your hand, the kind you can feel with your heart. Your soul; the spiritual side.

The connection between the natural world and the infinite spiritual is borne out with a focus on the hand. The religious associations had become so well ingrained in rituals of faith that Jean-Claude Schmitt has identified in writing as early as the seventh century the publication of lexicographies of spiritual gestures: liturgical gestures were codified in ordines and explained systematically by Amalarius of Metz. Iconography (such as that of the Utrecht Psalter or the Stuttgart Psalter) emphasized the central role of the hand of God as a pattern for human gestures and the main tool for ruling man and transforming the world. (1991, 66)

The residue of these pre-Enlightenment tendencies can be found in nonreligious representations of handiness and, from the earliest days of cinema, use of the horrific or possessed hand bore the reiterated theme of the earlier association that something supernatural or metaphysical could take hold of the limb. Hands’ capacity for channelling or mediating between worlds of the natural and supernatural is represented in several films that deal with curses, spells, and spiritualism. Handholding often facilitates the connection with the dead, and gestures of the moving fingers of the witch

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or wizard mark the potency of that character’s magic. It can happen that whole films are dedicated to the exploration of the enchanted powers of the limb. Such supernatural elements provide the initiating action and drive the plots of And Now the Screaming Starts! (Roy Ward Baker, 1973), Demonoid: Messenger of Death (Alfredo Zacarías, 1980), and the Rodman Flender 1999 slacker teenage comedy Idle Hands. What stands out in these films, unlike the provision of a rationalistic resolution to the narratives of the Hands of Orlac adaptations and many similar narratives of corporeal possession, is that there is no naturalistic scientific explanation providing plot denouement or conclusion. On the contrary: the animating force by which the human hands are seized is explained by the intervention of a supernatural power. And Now the Screaming Starts! tells the romantic tale of recently married Catherine (Stephanie Beacham) who moves to the country residence of her husband’s ancestors. The mansion is inflicted by an inherited curse that manifests itself in strange occurrences like the appearance of a detached animated bloody hand that threatens the female protagonist and lies or floats ominously around the house. The legacy of the murderous limb has its origin in a tale that is told by Catherine’s husband Charles Fengriffen (Ian Ogilvy) to Doctor Pope (Peter Cushing) after the physician has examined Catherine and failed to conclude a definitive diagnosis following the onset of her hallucinations. The legend, presented in a flashback sequence, narrates how Fengriffen’s grandfather (Herbert Lom), a promiscuous and extravagant character, abused the authority of his ownership of his estate. In drunken licentiousness on the evening of the marriage of Silas, one of his workers, Fengriffen assaults him and claims his right to ‘take’ the young man’s virgin bride. In defence, Silas attacks Fengriffen and the latter says: ‘Twice today you raised your hand against me… It shall not happen again’. With this he chops off Silas’ hand. Speaking to the rapist as he leaves, Silas curses him with the threat that vengeance will be meted upon the ‘next virgin bride’ to come to his estate. In a cut to the present day, as Charles finishes his tale, it becomes clear that Catherine is the victim of the woodsman’s oath. Several horror tropes are used for dramatic and tonal affect to sustain the possibility of a rational explanation for the events depicted. Two factors are noteworthy in respect of this. First, the diegetic balance of natural or supernatural justifications for the unusual happenings is maintained until the final moments of the film. Second, most of these judiciously placed plot pieces, scenes, and sequences are based on references to hands. Early in the film but following the inexplicable appearances of the severed hand, Catherine takes a walk in the woods and stumbles across a cabin. Inside she finds the Fengriffen estate Woodsman (Geoffrey Whitehead; also cast

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as his grandfather, Silas) who is washing his submerged forearms in a barrel. Because his hands are concealed by the soapy water, Catherine seeks confirmation that both limbs are intact: catherine: Take your hands out of the water. woodsman: Which one would you like first? catherine: Either. woodsman: Either. Well as I’m right-handed… How about this one? [He raises the left] Is that the one you want? catherine: Now the other one. woodsman: You want to see this one? catherine: I’ve just said so. woodsman: [He lifts it slowly, teasingly from the water] Two hands. Eight fingers, two thumbs, back, front, nothing special about them.

As the Woodsman delays the point of revelation for Catherine, the audience is similarly taunted by the suspense. This trope is generically true to the horror, but within the context of the present narrative, the character’s hands are invested with the potential to indicate the direction in which the plot’s resolution may occur, whether natural or supernatural. Several other generic tropes modulate the spectator’s uncertainty throughout the film. At times, a ghastly hand appears to one character but has vanished when another arrives. At others, the murders perpetrated – pushing people to their death, strangulation, violent assaults – are identifiable with manual capabilities, but none is confirmed as an act of an avenging severed limb. Ultimately, the film concludes – again respectful of generic convention – when the camera tracks from Catherine in her bed holding her new-born son (who is missing his right hand) and descends the stairs to the library. There, in a closing shot that confirms the supernatural authenticity of the preceding events, it lingers on an open bible. The opening sequence of the B-movie horror Demonoid: Messenger of Death places the narrative unequivocally in the realm of the supernatural. This takes the form of a satanic backstory that establishes both the mythological context of the diegesis and the tonal situation in which the main part of the plot will take place. In a pre-credit scene, a group of robed men wrestles with a female and chains her to the walls of a cave. One raises an axe and chops off her left hand. As they place it ceremoniously into a small sarcophagus, exterior shots of a devil-like high priest on a misty hilltop are intercut with their proceedings. The film is beset

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by many of the f inancial limitations one might expect from a B-movie and the quality of its special effects and stylistic vicissitudes is uneven. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy as a film in the generic category for its rare presentation of the demonic hand as variously severed and independently mobile and then attached to its victim who is, in turn, wholly possessed by its power. The early representation of the hand-chopping ceremony acts as a coda for the supernatural motivations of the action that follows. Unlike the earlier Roy Ward Baker picture, there is never any question as to the characters’ sanity and self-certainty as they witness the series of bizarre events showing the ghastly cursed limb take hold of one victim after another and then evading capture. The plot is designed along a series of set pieces, with little variation on the cause-and-effect structure: as the hero and heroine pursue the killing hand, it moves from host to host, turning moral and sane characters – a doctor, a policeman, a priest – into possessed lunatics. As with And Now the Screaming Starts! the divine (or satanic) nature of the original curse is given religious provenance when lines from the King James’ version of Matthew 5:30 are recited in one of the final scenes: If my hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it aside. For it is profitable for thee that one of my members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

Although the hand is ultimately burned, in the characteristic inconclusive ending of the horror, the last scene shows a package delivered to Mrs. Baines. She opens the gold box to find a mysterious pool of water on her desk beneath it. A series of atmospheric insert shots builds tension until, on a sudden beat, the hand leaps from her sink and grabs her hair. She spins around and falls through a glass table-top to her death. These accounts point to a certain anxiety over the indeterminacy of the origin of consciousness and similar films play with that primal anxiety by invoking supernatural explanations, tradition narratives, and myths. Faith in deistic determination is rarely the theme of the films, but rationale for otherworldly events is offered within belief contexts. Some films focus on a primal anxiety about the origin of human consciousness and pose questions about our being-in-the-world as sentient, cultured, and social entities. Both cases nonetheless seek to threaten the centrality of homo sapiens as one of supremacy among other life forms. One of the principles of Darwin’s evolutionary teleology of man is the establishment of humanity’s sovereignty over other species. Many

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commentators emphasise the possibilities granted to the hand when it was freed from brachiation; the mobility afforded to the emerging biped by swinging from branch to branch. Frank R. Wilson has offered a useful synopsis of much of this writing: Darwin is credited with the first formulation of the potential impact of an upright walking posture: a hand freed of the obligation to support body weight can take on other tasks. (1998, 28)

A later consequence of the liberation of the arms and hands was the emergence of fully operating opposable thumbs, through the f inger-thumb juxtaposition. John Napier situates the moment at the core of our intellectual advancement: Through natural selection, it promoted the adoption of the upright posture and bipedal walking, tool-using and tool-making which, in turn, led to enlargement of the brain through a positive feed-back mechanism. In this sense it was probably the single most crucial adaptation in man’s evolutionary history. (1980, 68)

As several writers attest, the relationship between the hand and the other senses and mind was eventually externalised, so its relationship with the world accelerated the development of self-consciousness, social connection (through language) and, finally, culture. One of the first steps in this evolution was a move from tool-use, to the construction of ‘meta-tools’ – implements designed with the specific purpose of creating other enhanced tools. Raymond Tallis determines a new self-awareness that was required for the emergence of culture: What the hand brought to the table was not simply increased dexterity but an utterly different sense of self. This is how the hand comes to be the key awakening of the ‘cultural’ human being out of the natural pre-cultural animal. (2003, 273)

In this way an evolutionary dialectic was set in motion from the earliest moments of humans’ manual manipulation of their environment and subsequent tool-use. Frank R. Wilson summarises the phenomenon thus: The brain keeps giving the hand new things to do and new ways of doing what it already knows how to do. In turn, the hand affords the brain new

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ways of approaching old tasks and the possibility of undertaking and mastering new tasks. (1998, 146)

However, even beyond the stages of post-brachiation tool-use, meta-tool adaptation, linguistic development, self-conscious reflection, the onset of social connectivity, and then cultural identities, a holistic interpretation of man’s position in the universe had yet to be proposed. Following centuries of theoretical advancements that challenged mankind’s position of centrality in the cosmos, the phenomenological approach came to reset the experience of being by dismantling the subject/object duality. The individual was no longer simply posited as objectively apart from the world. For Edmund Husserl and his disciples, the human mind was actively involved in reaching out to grasp its surroundings, as the same settings impressed themselves upon consciousness. In much phenomenological writing, direct references are made to the hand as both symbolic and actual operative in the mind/ consciousness interface. Addressing the position of the body in the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Russell Keat traces an analytical through-line from Galileo to Descartes to Husserl. Keat sets up the context by explaining how ‘humans came to be seen as composed of two distinct substances, consciousness and matter, mind and body [in which] Descartes’ dualism is essentially a philosophical elaboration of this Galilean conception of science’ (1982, 2). After a centuries-old separation ‘between primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities’ (ibidem, 2–3), Keat argues that ‘the history of Western philosophy has consisted in a series of unsuccessful attempts to overcome this dualism, leading up, as it were, to Husserl’s successful phenomenological attempt’ (ibidem, 3). With an argument that has a focus on the sense of sight, which he will later enhance in an extended consideration of touch, Merleau-Ponty elucidates his point: [O]ne cannot say that man sees because he is Mind, nor indeed that he is Mind because he sees: to see as a man sees and to be Mind are synonymous. In so far as consciousness is consciousness of something only by allowing its furrow to trail behind it, and in so far as, in order to conceive an object one must rely on a previously constructed ‘world of thought’, there is always some degree of depersonalization at the heart of consciousness. (2006, 158)

With a similar line Adam Roberts reiterates Martin Heidegger’s concentration on the centrality of the hand in operations of human intelligence and cognition:

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Thought, for Heidegger, is not a disembodied or merely cerebral process; it is part of the way our bodies function. More specifically he argues that thought is actually a species of Handwerk – ‘handiwork’, the valorized process of creative engagement with the world. (2009, 56)

The location of the hand at the interface of corporeal selfhood and the objective world was paralleled for the phenomenologists with the point of contact between inner cognitive being and outer bodily essence. Throughout their writing the hand is mobilised as both objective correlative and symbol for this connection. Maurice Merleau-Ponty repeatedly explains the subject’s sense of being-in-the-world by recourse to the hand/mind/body interrelationship. In an important passage from Phenomenology of Perception in which he discusses the ‘spatiality of situation’ – when the body forms an intentional ‘attitude’ in relation to the world – Merleau-Ponty imagines the hands as protruding ‘leaders’ for the rest of the body: I know indubitably where my pipe is, and thereby I know where my hand and my body are […] if my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be, in front of it, important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body image is finally a way of stating that my body is in-the-world. (2006, 115)

In a useful synoptic treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s dissolution of Descartes’ (and later Henri Bergson’s) mind and matter distinctions, Jennifer Bullington explains a coterminous interpenetration of both: The body understood as a lived body is necessarily ambiguous, since it is both material and self-conscious. It is physiological and psychological, but Merleau-Ponty asserts that these terms are not as dichotomous as one would imagine. There is mind in the body and body in the mind. (2013, 25)

While there may be enough ambiguity in the phenomenological dismantling of Cartesian dualism, to favour a unified Dasein of immaterial and material, one should exercise caution in overstating the authority of the hand. The relationship drawn by Heidegger between the organ and thinking must not be read as imposing intentionality on that limb. While the phenomenologist moves beyond arguing for a dialectic of hand and brain interaction of stimulus, he stops short of bestowing upon manual dexterity its own self-governing agency. Rather, with near-immediate interactivity and relative

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simultaneity, thoughts and mental iterations find incarnation in the motions and actions of the hand just as those same movements, gestures and postures are coterminous with new thinking and ideas. In line with this, many ‘possession’ film narratives explain the misbehaviour of the hand by a pathology of the mind. Films that represent a corporeal possession or disruption of cognitivemanual intentionality present a fundamental rupture in the delicate line of evolutionary progress that placed man in a position of supremacy in the natural world. The ultimate terror, therefore, was not merely an interference with a causal, intellectually motivated set of gestures, postures, actions, and abilities. The invocations of the horror represent an overthrowing of man’s divinely instilled moral purposiveness or a dethroning of nature’s sovereign species in a dissolution of the difference between man and other animals. While Darwin’s work sought to present a continuity between species and unseated man from his supreme position, this line of distinction is severed in films that use manual dispossession to undermine human agency. Because the hand has been used as a focus to enlighten our understanding of self – and for so many theorists this focus is of central importance – what is being possessed in the ‘supernatural films’ is not just the hand (or even the hand as a metaphor for something else) but our improvements through materialist evolution. Adam Roberts justifies the possibility of this horror by invoking a novel by Philip K. Dick; an author perennially concerned with the f ine lines separating human consciousness, artificial intelligence, and inorganic matter. The intertextual reference to a Kubrick film – one in which human agency and control over technology, society, and the self are core themes – is apposite for this study: Another Dick novel of the 1960s wears its indebtedness to Dr Strangelove rather obviously in its title, Dr Bloodmoney: Or How We Get Along After The Bomb; and here the malign character of Hoppy Harrington is identified by his monstrous lack of hands: thalidomide having left him a phocomelus with flippers instead of arms. (2009, 64)

In Dick’s cited work, the equation of hands and development – the natural outward growth into finer parts – and a removal of those fine-tuned limbs, is marked as an evolutionary regression. It is one thing to be impaired by possession and the challenge of coordinating and manipulating one’s environment, but it is another entirely to have full manual dexterity and to choose inactivity and indifference. Darian

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Leader has written about the 1999 teenage slacker movie Idle Hands in this regard, and quotes Isaac Watt’s 1715 poem as the source of its title: In works of labour or of skill I would be busy too; For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do. (quoted in Leader 2016, 56)

In Flender’s film, the slothful stoners are punished for their lethargy by an ancient curse that takes control of their ‘idle hands’ for murderous and destructive purposes. The young characters’ susceptibility to the supernatural possession, it is assumed, is not merely because of a literal manual stasis or actual comatose corporeal immobility, but because their minds are as inactive as their hands. In Idle Hands, the greatest affront to this freedom and agency is lethargy: when the brain is switched off and manual functions are anaesthetised into apathetic inactivity, another external force intervenes and stimulates the subject’s whole being, from the hands inwards. Indeed, with the titular allusion to Watt’s eighteenth-century verse, the film invokes the demonic proclivity for victim selection based on the moral vacuity of idleness. In this way Idle Hands brings the themes of paranormal infiltration of the body (and the hand, more specifically) full circle back to the domain of the religious. Lapses of faith leave the individual prone to supernatural infestation. All cinematic representations work through the premise that ‘seeing is believing’. This concept informs basic operations of the apparatus and facilitates playful narrative tropes such as the unreliable narrator (in films as diverse as Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon [1950] and Bryan Singer’s 1997 The Usual Suspects) or the mentally unstable protagonist (like Scorsese’s Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island [2010]). Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up (1966) is a celebrated case of how a film can tease its spectators by undermining the basic assumption that what is seen on screen (with or across the diegetic and extra-diegetic divide) can be automatically taken as true. However, it is often the case that when an epistemological incongruity occurs, for example between the visual and audio tracks, we are likely to trust the ocular representation over its acoustic counterpart. The credulity afforded to sight over sound has precedence in the scriptural story of doubting St Thomas. In John’s account, the apostle refuses to accept that the Christ character has risen from the dead and exclaims: ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails,

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and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe’ (20.25). Prompted by the tactile references in the ensuing biblical passage, and with allusions to Caravaggio’s seventeenth-century painting The Incredulity of St Thomas, several commentators have drawn attention to the role of the hand in the confirmation of reliable evidence. Scrutiny of the Italian’s painting reveals that the eyeline of Thomas does not match the angle of Christ’s wound. Rather, it is his raised finger – and not his vision – that seems to be confirming the fact. Touch, therefore, and not sight, is the sense that bears witness. Trajano Sardenberg reaffirms the hand’s connection to belief noting: ‘The gospel by John is clear to state that Thomas needed not only to see, but also touch Christ’s wounds in order to believe his resurrection’ (2002, 20–21). Once again, the hand is positioned as a mid-way point between the natural and supernatural realms, this time acting as a dependable instrument for measuring the veracity of a claim. However, while the tactile is of concern in these instances, there are other ways in which deistic belief can be explored, and interrogated or confirmed through the cinematic hand. Atheistic scepticism is a principal theme in the f irst installation of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1988 Dekalog (Dekalog, jeden). The film explores the relationship between the rationality of science as a means of understanding existence and explanations of a transcendental, spiritual origin. It tells the story of the relationship between Krzysztof (Henryk Baranowski) and his young son Paweł (Wojciech Klata) as the latter follows his father’s vocational interests in the world of technology and science, with a special passion for computer programming. Krzysztof is an academic dedicated to positivistic empiricism and he is surrounded by technology. Some of the electrical devices in the family apartment are automated by a workstation, significantly removing manual labour from the operations of lighting and temperature control. Paweł’s mastering of the technology is a source of pride, but when he needs the computer to calculate a certain ‘fact’, the machine is inept. Paweł’s mother is abroad, so the boy asks his aunt if the device can help him understand or know his mother’s thoughts and dreams. She confirms that it cannot but dishonestly reassures Paweł that his mother is dreaming of him. Tragically, the calculation that indicates that the ice on the frozen lake can support the boy’s weight while skating turns out to be incorrect. Paweł drowns in an accident that takes the lives of a number of the local schoolchildren. The limitations of the artificial intelligence and the reliability of a purely positivistic and rationalistic approach to understanding existence are thus problematised. The associations between hands, knowledge, and intelligence are marked at two important moments in the film.

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In an early scene, Paweł attends one of his father’s classes and watches him through a projector stand in the middle of the lecture hall. In a point of view shot, the lecturer’s hands are framed as he demonstrates the complexity of a mathematical theorem. His manual movements dramatise his explaining a scientific detail of the universe, as they gesture to the class. Kieślowski lingers on these long enough to accentuate their movements and to emphasise their involuntary gesturing. The hands of the scientist – perhaps like the mind of the sceptic – are detached from their transformative capabilities and, like the functioning of Paweł’s computer, they can only relate to the environment in an intellectual capacity, without sentiment. The prolonged sequence during which Krzysztof comes to realise that his son is one of the victims of the skating tragedy is punctuated by a string of ominous events. Reports about the accident from occupants of his apartment block, the sound of a distant fire brigade siren, and the ringing of his doorbell, all contribute to a sense of his emotional fragmentation and ultimate collapse, as the fatalistic outcome dawns on the professor. Before having confirmation of the accident, Krzysztof is shown writing at his desk. He notices that his ink jar has inexplicably leaked, and he watches as the blue dye seeps through a stack of pages on his worktop. He attempts to clean the mess and dispose of the spoiled sheets but stains his hands. In the final scene Krzysztof goes to a decrepit church where he sees an icon of the Virgin surrounded by candles. The image is washed in blue light and exposed to the audible wind outside. He overturns an altar, and some fallen candles drip white wax onto the icon so they resemble tears. On the boundary of finding faith – neither believing enough to offer supplications for forgiveness or justification, nor doubting so completely that the statue and holy place are beyond his punishing desecration – the bereft father breaks down. Krzysztof’s final act, one that moves beyond the relative passivity of his hands as computer programmer and college lecturer, is one of manual destruction and rage against religion and its divine representations.

The Nature and Origin of Creativity If cinematic interrogations of the origins of intelligence are played out with a concentration on characters’ hands, then it is logical to assume similar types of exploration of the nature and origins of creativity. Several films that deal with the processes of artistic invention and expression establish protagonists whose hands are the focus of attention. Raymond Tallis posits

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the primal tactile interrelationship between the left and right hands as an initiating point of self-consciousness: it is possible that something not too far from knowledge comes out of the encounter and a division – of the kind necessary to raise self-consciousness – or a bodily awareness that generates bodily self-consciousness, emerges. (2003, 125)

The point of manual differentiation on the grounds of tactility as a form of perception is invoked by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who marks the experiential dissimilarity of both left and right as a sensory and corporeal doubling: My body, it was said, is recognized by its power to give me ‘double sensations’: when I touch my right hand with my left, my right hand, the object, has the strange property of being able to feel too. We have just seen that the two hands are never simultaneously in the relationship of touched and touching each other. (2006, 106)

Concentrating more closely on the possible explanations for the emergence of a creative impulse from a burgeoning self-consciousness, Tallis suggests that its origin might reside in the asymmetrical physiology of the human grasping limb. He proposes that the instrumentality of the hands, and the altered relationship to our bodies that arises retroactively from this, is by this asymmetry underlined. The non-superposability of our hands […] is an important aspect of our wakening out of our bodies and their mechanisms to ourselves as agents using our bodies for definite purposes. (2003, 122)

Not entirely dissimilar from Lacan’s primordial ‘Mirror Stage’, we might find in Tallis’ description a certain Spaltung in the visualisation of the left and right hands that instigates a primitive notion of possibilities of representation in the subject. Differentiation facilitates recognition of variation from a norm: a mode of awareness that is the rudimentary first step in any creative act. Tallis implies this idea of copy and original when he considers the reflected physicality of the two limbs juxtaposed: The interlocuters in the dialogue between the left hand and the right are enantiomorphs; that is to say, they are similar but not identical, ‘the

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same and not the same’; rather, each is related to the other as an object is related to its image in a mirror. (2003, 122)

From this preliminary moment of recognition, an evolutionary process set humanity on a course from primitive tool use to the formation of social systems and cultural landscapes. With specific reference to the appearance of tools in the teleology of human development, John Napier inserts a considerable cognitive wedge between tool appropriation, application, and construction. The distinction, Napier argues, between man’s ‘using and making’ tools is a significant one that separates Homo sapiens from other animal species. This, he states, is largely an affair of the central nervous system and involves a qualitative shift in cerebral activity from percept to concept. Abstract thinking is not a talent of non-human primates which live on a strictly ‘here-and-now’ basis and for whom the past and the future have very little meaning. (1980, 113)

For biologist Edward Wilson the process has entirely pragmatic consequences. Bipedalism liberated the hand for alternative activities, facilitated man’s refinement of hunting practices – increased speed and agility and precision aiming – and improved dietary conditions. Wilson connects the development of society and humanity to the sharing of meat, which brought about collective cooperation firstly through hunting and then through campfire consumption of the meat that was cooked in later evolutionary stages. Communal hunting subsequently encouraged the development of cooperative communication (and language), while later gatherings for fire-lit feasting brought about a new acculturation through campfire ‘conversation’. While Wilson states that ‘it is of consuming importance to estimate what the ancestral humans said and did in the firelight’ (2018, 22), his namesake, neurologist Frank R. Wilson, elaborates the thesis. He is in no doubt as to the consequence of this line of teleological development: When people created formal languages, they created mechanisms for sharing knowledge, and in so doing authenticated the existence of mutual awareness and cohesive purpose in their lives. The word that we use for that arrangement is ‘culture.’ (1998, 37)

With a philological focus, the author delineates specific aspects of cognitive development by referencing the work of prominent linguists David Armstrong, William Stokoe, and Sherman Wilcox on a gestural morphology

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that connected hand movements to language. Wilson quotes their study directly: with their hands and developed brain and greatly increased eye-brainhand neural circuity, hominids may well have invented language – not just expanding the naming function that some animals possess but finding true language, with syntax as well as vocabulary, in gestural activity. (quoted in Wilson 1998, 204)

The talented flexibility and adaptability of the prehensile limb is justification for its placement at recurring points in humans’ development as an essential mechanism of evolution. As this process is detailed chronologically, insinuations begin to emerge as to the nature and extent of the hand’s capacity for rudimentary cognition, one not merely acting as a secondary agent in response to the demands of the conscious mind. Raymond Tallis endows the hand with such authority and emphasises his proposal with italics: The dexterous hand is thus a choosing hand […] It is important to appreciate that the diversity of manipulations, of modes of prehension, is possible because of the relative non-specialisation of the human hand. (2003, 278)

So it is that for many authors the hands are not merely the agents that realise creative design (in terms of intent and manufacture), but they also play a fundamental role in enabling the imaginative leap from our cognitive grasping of the world to our material rearrangement of its elements. Although films that explore the creative process and personality rarely consider its moment of inception thematically, cases do occur where a certain focus on a character’s newly inherited skills are presented in scenes that concentrate on manual proficiency. Common tropes appear, for example, in superhero films when the protagonist learns of his/her acquisition of supernatural or superhuman powers. The scene in which Peter Parker discovers his web-shooting wrists and suction-climbing palms in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) is a good example of this. Frequently, the source of the creative instinct and capacity are framed when an alteration occurs in the condition of the character’s hands: the skilled piano-playing of Paul Orlac; the painter in Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet (1930); or Oliver Stone’s cartoonist Jonathan Lansdale. In these and similar cases the modification in manual ability examines the nature of artistic talent and the origins of its inspiration. When the film falls within the horror genre, the focus tends to be on provoking fear around the degree

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to which manual agency is limited to muscular actions, reactions, and interactions, and the extent to which the hand is the motivating source of these movements. In rationalistic scientific discourses, when severed from the brain and central nervous system, the limbs are only dead biological matter. They are incapable of motion beyond residual twitching as electrical pulses subside. If divested of their capacity for sensory input, no other characteristic from the former host – personality, consciousness, creativity – can continue to inhabit their material. Notwithstanding the materialist positivism of such scientific explanations, some contemporary commentators are keen to draw attention to the limitations of this biological, neurological, and psychological model. They grant the hand an active role in the generation of cognition. The premise of such arguments is that when the brain is severed from its sensory terminals it, too, is deprived of its sense-based knowledge and a rich plethora of meaningful conceptualisations of the world is lost to it. So where do these ‘sensations’ go? Even from a phenomenological perspective, the dialectic between the two points – subject/object, mind/body, consciousness/world – must first assume the relative autonomy of those positions. The fissure between the mind and the hand has inspired the thinking of many writers of science-fiction and several films have addressed the question directly. In addition to films that narrate tales of the supernatural possession of the hands, many interrogate the idea that hands can possess a degree of consciousness, knowledge, and creativity. A common version of the idea is invoked by Darian Leader in his book Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why. The author references a supernatural trope common to the horror film in which the mind is not the author of the body’s behaviour but, in a threatening inversion, the hands are capable of commanding governance: ‘In zombie and Frankenstein movies, the creatures walk with hands held out in front of them, not to suggest difficulties in vision but, on the contrary, pure purpose’ (2016, 4). While this is a useful recurring aspect of generic characterisation, other examples with specific interrogation of the hand’s creative agency have informed the themes of whole films. In his book The Clever Body, Gabor Csepregi offers a rich examination of the relationship between corporeality and creativity. With an impressive array of referenced sources that have addressed the location of creative impulses and the origins of artistic innovation within the body, Csepregi proposes that imagination and inventive skills reside as much in the limbs of their execution as they do in the mind of the producer. From different theorists, he takes a range of terminology with frequent concentration on the manual dexterity involved in artistic production. Before invoking the

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book Painting and Reality by art historian Etienne Gilson, Csepregi sets out Gilson’s rejection of ‘the view of those philosophers who claim that the art resides wholly in the mind and the hands merely execute the orders they receive’ (2006, 9). He goes on to quote the author directly: Man does not think with his hands, but the intellect of a painter certainly thinks in his hands, so much so that, in moments of manual inspiration, an artist can sometimes let the hand do its job without bothering too much about what it does. (quoted in Csepregi 2006, 9)

Elsewhere, Csepregi brings music theorist David Sudnow into the argument. Of Sudnow’s own jazz piano playing, Csepregi explains that he was able to focus conf idently on the moving of the hands and let his fingers choose the notes […] A significant change occurred in the improvisatory process when the ‘melodic hand’ was able to dispense with an abstract musical scheme or thought and, by ‘tasting possibilities,’ to produce melodies of its own accord. (2006, 65)

When he goes on to cite Arnulf Rüssel in respect of improvised musical performances, agency is granted to the f ingers as bearing ‘a readiness towards the execution of movement’ (ibidem, 67; original emphasis). Csepregi synopsises Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on the body’s ‘spontaneous improvisation’ across any number of performing arts, by celebrating its ‘singular potential for invention, variation, and adventure’ (ibidem). Csepregi then cites related writing by Jürg Zutt and Felix Hammer that challenges reductive materialistic or biologistic interpretations of corporeality, often by recourse to phenomenological approaches. In another important concluding section, Csepregi turns to Géza Révész for a terse summation of the core point of his argument. It is fair to conclude, he suggests, borrowing the words of the Hungarian-Dutch psychologist, that ‘the hand is more intelligent than the head and is endowed with a greater creative power’ (2006, 141). Many of these sources propose a manual origin for the possibility of creativity (see also Kosofsky Sedgwick, 2003). They conceive the subject’s relationship with the world – in whole or part, whether through inference or direct reference – in a phenomenological way. A decade before Maurice Merleau-Ponty turned his attention to the ontological importance of the hand in Phenomenology of Perception, Martin Heidegger had established the hand-cognition connection without ambiguity. Proclaiming that the hand is endowed with an expertise of profound significance, Heidegger explained:

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The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. […] All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. (1968, 16)

What is striking across a sample of these cases is the precision or nebulousness in the specif ic qualities that are being ascribed to the hand. While total self-consciousness of the limb is clearly impossible and its reification to pure biological matter deemed overly problematic and reductive, most of the theorists position their arguments somewhere on a continuum in between these extremes. The language used in their various descriptions is most revealing in this respect. In a sliding scale of agentive creativity and cognitive capacity, a range of thinkers might be put in the following order: Révész (1938) writes of the hand’s ‘intelligence’ and Sudnow (1993) of f ingers ‘choosing’ and ‘producing’. Hammer (1974) and Rüssel (1995) blur the line somewhat by speaking of hands’ ‘creative urge’ and having a ‘readiness towards’. In even more abstruse terms Ricoeur (1966) talks of the ‘singular potential’ of the hand, Gilson (1957) of ‘not thinking with, but thinking in’ the same limbs and, as we have seen, Heidegger (1968) loosely connects cognitive functioning with manual effect by stating that the ‘work of the hand is rooted in thinking’. The conclusions of films that situate a creative protagonist as manually challenged do so with degrees of recourse to both natural/scientif ic and preternatural/metaphysical explanations and the resolutions of their plots accord well with this duality. When the mind/body (or, more precisely, the mind/hand) relationship is explored thematically, the creative impulse is dramatised through the protagonist’s artistic skills. In the film adaptations of Maurice Renard’s Les Mains d’Orlac (1920) there are variations on the extent to which capacity for manual skill resides in the limbs that have been severed from the knifethrowing murder once they have been reattached to the concert pianist. A train accident results in the protagonist’s traumatic brain damage in the original novel and in Robert Wiene’s 1924 version and Karl Freund’s film Mad Love from 1935. In a deviation that opens supernatural possibilities, the Edmund T. Gréville 1960 remake (also titled The Hands of Orlac) has the pianist’s plane struck by lightning as a precipitating justification for his manual alteration. The same medical surgical intervention that effects the limbs’ transplantation is invoked in the empirically rationalistic resolutions

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of the films and the acquisition of violence where there was once creativity is explained by the brain injury. Owing to its surreal aesthetic and diegetic structure, Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) is less bound by conventional narrative logic, and accordingly rational motivations for action and event are downgraded. The opening is marked by the title card ‘First Episode: The Injured Hand or the Scars of the Poet’. This is followed by a scene in which a melodramatically posing artist is shown sketching at an easel. Wearing a white glove on his right hand, he uses this to erase sections of the drawing. On the second occasion he rubs out the mouth of the portrait’s face. Later, when washing his hands in a basin of bubbling water he notices that the lips have appeared on his palm. He stares at this for a considerable time, with his arm held aloft reminiscent of the pose of the man in Un Chien andalou (Buñuel & Dalí, 1929) who discovers ants crawling through a small hole in the centre of his palm. Another intertitle explains: ‘Taken out of a portrait where the naked hand had constructed it like leprosy, the drowned mouth seemed to fade in the small pool of white light’. The artist becomes fixated on his hand and shakes it violently. True to the surreal aesthetic, there’s an unmotivated insert shot of a plaster head with a hand at its side: this hand has lips that are talking to the ear of the plaster head, asking it for ‘Air’. The ‘poète’ smashes a window and holds his hand outside. When he takes it in again, he holds it to his mouth in a kind of embrace, before sexually caressing his bare chest with it. Presently, as he lies asleep, there’s a second insert shot of the plaster head. When he wakes, he presses his hand onto a statue of a woman in the corner of his room. Ultimately, the film concludes with his smashing this statue; a gesture suggestive of an internal conflict between his own creative drive and an unidentified source of inspiration. While caution should be exercised in the application of the terms ‘narrative’, ‘initiating incident’, ‘theme’, and ‘symbolism’ in the context of a surrealist film, Cocteau’s piece is concerned with the idea of the inspiring muse as origin of the creative process. Although the gloved hand is engaged in the original sketch, the transfer of the drawn mouth onto it results in the lips becoming animated and sexualised. They begin to direct the process of creation until the artist is overwhelmed and destroys the statue. The ease with which the metaphorical transference of agency occurs challenges the authorial position of the creator and is evocative of the supernatural Gothic presence that haunts Basil Hallward in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and its 1945 filmed adaptation by Albert Lewin. A delicate balance is struck and set out between the creative and destructive (or pathological) powers vested in the hands in different but

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comparable ways in Alan J. Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Amadeus, the 1984 adaptation by Miloš Forman of the Peter Shaffer play. In the earlier film, creativity and pathological impulses are juxtaposed as earthbound and human, while in Amadeus, as Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) identifies Mozart (Tom Hulce) as his nemesis, he admonishes God as the creator of both musical genius and insanity. In Sophie’s Choice an Unheimlich association is made between good and evil by Sophie (Meryl Streep) as she recalls the aural memories of her childhood. She tells Stingo (Peter MacNicol) about her mother’s piano playing and her father’s night-time typing of Nazi propaganda. Evidently, with the story so fundamentally structured upon the plot device of an individual’s choice, the fact that Sophie’s beloved, intellectual father has committed himself to the side of evil – literally played out in her reminiscences of his manual labour – while her mother is associated with the refined pacifism of music, is a key element of the film’s thematic interrogation. The story of Sophie’s parents is reflected in the representation of her present-day lover, Nathan (Kevin Klein), who is a diagnosed schizophrenic, but displays many symptoms of a bipolar personality disorder. He is an accomplished amateur pianist and in one scene he sits behind Sophie on a piano stool and begins to play Schumann’s ‘Of Foreign Lands and Peoples’. As he performs, during a shot that tilts to his hands and then up to the couple, Sophie tells Stingo: When I was a little girl, I… I remember I lay in bed, and I hear my mother downstairs playing the piano. And the sound of my father’s typewriter. I think: no child has a more wonderful father and mother ever. And a more beautiful life.

Nathan’s pathology is symbolically enacted as he transforms the slow rhythm of the Schumann piece into an up-tempo ragtime version. As it concludes, with the camera tilting again towards the keyboards, Sophie and Stingo have begun adding notes to the melody, with five interacting hands dancing on the keys. Later in the film, Sophie juxtaposes the creative and destructive impulses within a broader cultural socio-historical context when she says of her father: ‘He was a civilised man in an uncivilised time’. Divine purpose, human creativity, and insanity are brought together in Amadeus when Antonio Salieri explains his incredulity towards God’s purpose in bestowing Mozart with such magnificent musical talent. While this is a recurring thematic concern for the rival composer, it is foregrounded in several important scenes. In one instance, when Salieri promises to speak to the Emperor on Mozart’s behalf about the threatened censorship of his

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new opera – The Marriage of Figaro – the young recalcitrant gratefully kisses his hand, to which Salieri replies: ‘Please, please. Herr Mozart, please: it’s not a holy relic’. They both laugh at this, but the irony is that for Salieri, it is precisely a blessed thing. His confessed hatred of God comes from the fact that he believes Wolfgang’s hands are in fact holy and have been a conduit for divine utterance. In a climactic expression of loathing, Salieri tells the young priest Father Vogler (Richard Frank) about his intention to murder the composer. In sinister retribution, his plan is to convince Mozart to write his own requiem mass and then to kill him. He explains: ‘The only thing that worried me was the actual killing. How does one do that? How does one kill a man? It’s one thing to dream about it: it’s very different when you have to do it with your own hands’. As Salieri finishes his monologue, in a medium close-up shot he raises his hands to his face. In both Sophie’s Choice and Amadeus degrees of distortion of the manual artistic self-expression erase distinctions between creativity and insanity. They complicate the origins of impulses towards good, beauty, and the ethical on the one hand, and evil, profanity, and immorality on the other. A formally complex f ilm that invites consideration of the thematic relationship between the creative and destructive compulsions is Oliver Stone’s 1981 picture The Hand. Based on Marc Brandel’s book The Lizard’s Tail, the film tells the story of graphic novel illustrator Jonathan Lansdale (Michael Caine), who loses his hand when it is snapped off in a car accident. In an establishing scene, in which Lansdale’s daughter is poking a detached twitching lizard’s tail with a stick, the young girl asks him how it knows she’s prodding it when it doesn’t have a head. He tells her that it doesn’t know, suggesting that it’s just a reflex. However, she shows him that the tail moves even before the stick touches it. This detail introduces an important thread of otherworldly mystery that allows a balancing of supernatural possibilities against scientif ic justif ications. Several recognisable cinematic devices are used to sustain this metaphysical navigation. Medical and psychoanalytical experts contribute articulate interventions at judicious moments to inform Jonathan about his condition and to explain strange phenomena that he encounters: from the sensation of phantom fingers in his missing hand, to the growing series of psychotic breakdowns that he experiences. At the same time, however, the f ilm is haunted by standard tropes and iconography of the horror genre: the ubiquitous presence of his black cat; the ominous expressionistic weather, lighting, and shifts from colour to black and white footage; and, most signif icantly, the extended use of point of view from the perspective of the detached hand.

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In other films using a similar device, the crawling or attacking hand is shown in the presence of the character whose psychotic state is in doubt. Here, however, Stone presents it as an autonomous living entity. Stone’s use of the hand as a pivotal signifier – one around which the question of rationalistic versus supernatural explanations of its animation revolves – undermines some of the core expectations of cinematic coding. What the spectator sees independently of the motivated gaze or scrutiny of a diegetic character is generally understood as a representation of objective (diegetic) reality. German Expressionism constructed entire story worlds as externalised correlatives of the inner mental and emotional states of its protagonists, making the internal psychological condition of the central character a ubiquitous conceit. The independent appearance of the graphic illustrator’s hand as a freely moving agent in Stone’s film works against established expectations. Having suffered several blackouts, after which he discovers unexplained drawings in his sketchbook, Jonathan discusses his concerns with Brian, a psychologist friend. The artist tells the scientist that he has been having seizures during which he misplaces things and makes sketches. To undermine the certainty of the empirical reliability of the psychologist’s rationale, Stone uses a flash insert of the severed hand in the process of completing the artwork. Taking a stereotypical Freudian line, Brian asks if the drawing was obscene and Jonathan answers affirmatively: brian: Maybe you were tired, and some automatic pilot took over. jonathan: No, I could never do work like that with my left hand. This was like the work I used to do with my right hand. brian: You never know what you can do: the unconscious is capable of anything. jonathan: Like what? brian: Guy under hypnosis: one subject spoke fluent German… Never spoke a word of it before in his life. We used experiments like that at Berkeley.

As the conversation continues, Stone inserts another shot of Jonathan doing the drawing himself with his prosthetic, and Brian explains that the new limb might have been receiving impulses from the brain. In either case, natural explanations are offered and simultaneously undermined. Some of what Jonathan perceives might be scientifically and rationally explained by degrees of trauma or burgeoning insanity. However, this is not the case with everything that the spectator is shown, and we are consistently invited to

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interrogate the conceptual ambiguity of the film’s visuals. In this respect, Stone’s film plays cinematically with the viewers’ expectations and faith in the visual much as Michelangelo Antonioni does in Blow-up. During a notable sequence in The Hand the severed limb attacks a down-and-out character played by Stone. In considering moments at which directors purposefully position themselves as victims or assailants within the diegesis – one might recall Hitchcock missing the bus in North by Northwest, or Polanski slicing Gittes’ nose in Chinatown – the droll gesture usually underscores a point being made by the filmmaker. This is precisely what the director is doing here, as Stone denies his audience any ‘easy out’ on the question of the true source of creativity and this is carried through to the final sequence of the film. In direct opposition to the conclusion of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) in which a ponderous denouement offers a rationalistic psychoanalytical explanation for everything that has occurred in the narrative, The Hand vacillates inconclusively between the possibility that empirical sciences can provide the requisite answers and thus maintains that an otherworldly justification is needed to explain the phenomenon of the possessed limb (and, by implication, the source of the artist’s creativity). The final scene begins with a monologue delivered by a female psychiatrist. It is peppered with clichéd turns of phrase and technical jargon: ‘It’s an old rage, Jon… an ancient rage’; ‘instead of facing the feeling, you blacked out… Once again you chose to eliminate someone else’s life in order to forget your own’; and ‘Don’t be afraid of the pain: just go into it. Deeper and down. Sense it, feel it, touch it. Don’t deny it…’ These hackneyed expressions are set around explanatory plot sequences in flashback insert shots. Halfway through the doctor’s monologue a medium shot reveals that Jonathan is in a hospital lab, strapped to a chair, and connected to a chiming monitor. Up to this point, the narrative resolution is firmly set within the rationalistic discourse of the expert. It builds suspense as the pace of the bleeping machine accelerates: doctor: jonathan: doctor: jonathan:

Do you want to tell me something, Jon? The hand… Where is the hand now? Near your neck…

When Jonathan warns that it might kill her, she laughs, telling him that his hate has provoked his murderous impulses. On her line ‘There is no hand’, she is violently strangled by the limb which pushes her to the floor to a bloody death. As Jonathan sits in the chair laughing, his right hand

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undoes the strap on his left and he stands up. The film fades to black. By mobilising recognisable horror conventions but subverting the generic expectations that these would ordinarily cue for the audience, the film leaves open extra-diegetic possibilities that relate to the very act of narration. Rationalistic hermeneutics, authorial control (by the filmmaker), and diegetic conclusion are undermined in ways that are usually employed to set up the potential return of the antagonist in a sequel. Here, definitive confirmation of the nature and persona of the villain is withheld: is the evil hand the true perpetrator (in a supernatural way) or are we dealing with unreliable narrators – both Jonathan and Stone – which would suggest a logical justification for the events depicted? In either case, the obvious connection between the personality of the artist and the source of his creative impulses is at the core of Stone’s thematic endeavour. Inspiration, for the director, cannot merely be reduced to materialistic or positivistic scientific principles and, while the film unsettles its audience by avoiding commitment to alternative possibilities, its real achievement may be how it reflects the irresolution of debates around the same topic. The emotive Iranian film The House is Black, directed by Forugh Farrokhzad in 1963, considers the origins of creation and creativity with a theistic focus that centralises the hand. The documentary poetically presents the inhabitants and conditions of a rehabilitation institution for individuals suffering from leprosy in Tabriz County, Iran. Its voice-over quotes passages from the Koran and the Old Testament, interwoven with original lines of monologue. Like the cine-poetic post-World War Two films Le Sang des bêtes (Georges Franju, 1949) and Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1956), The House is Black works with a lyrical juxtaposition of narrating voice, synchronised location sound, and interior and exterior images of the hospital. These include a combination of fly-on-the-wall observation shots and pictures of patients and caretakers at the Bababaghi Hospice. If, as John Napier points out quoting Aristotle, art ‘consists of the conception of the result to be produced before its realisation in the material’ (1980, 113) then the ‘material’ in this case is the human body, brought into existence by a divine power and fashioned in its own likeness. In his 2010 book Michelangelo’s Finger Raymond Tallis describes how God’s hand is the focal point of the Sistine Chapel ceiling representing the process of life’s initiation. This original act of creation was passed into the artistic activities and capabilities of our hands. Farrokhzad’s film reflects this dual quality. Through readings of excerpts from holy books it invokes the heavenly design of the human form and then juxtaposes these with images of leprosy sufferers to interrogate and criticise the divine intention behind the corporeal distortions of the disease.

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Figure 1.1: Divinely created contorted female hands in The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)

The introductory voice-over talks of notions of ugliness and how it is a decent human being’s obligation to confront it. The opening shots show boys who are scarred in some way by leprosy – facially or to their limbs – all reading from scripture that offers thanks to God. A caustic tone is taken when one boy, who has deformed hands, is heard to read: ‘I thank you God for giving me hands to work with’. Many shots emphasise the scarring or deformity to faces but the focus moves to increasing close-up framing of the patients’ hands. As an accumulation of afflictions is represented, divine responsibility is inferred and obliquely condemned. Over a fixed profile shot of men against a wall, we hear the line: ‘In your book all my parts have been written… And your eyes, O Lord, have seen my foetus’. Farrokhzad is innovative with her framing, and in her use of movement and perspective in set ups that invite us to consider the beauty of the human hand, even in diseased conditions. Where general cover might have been provided in a sequence in which a doctor examines patients, Farrokhzad conveys the personalities of the characters and captures the atmosphere of the scene in a series of close-up shots that focus on their contorted hands. The film candidly presents therapeutic sessions undergone by patients. One woman is shot from below a glass tabletop onto which her bent fingers are pressed with the aid of two weighted cushions (Fig. 1.1). Another scene shows the massaging of a hand with the stretching of the fingers. Following these shots, we are shown some men praying inside the mosque of the medical institution. A tracking shot displays several patients kneeling or standing in various positions. One man prays with his deformed hands raised: ‘Your hands, my left and my right, my north and

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my south, my sides and my destiny. All to thy command and power as there is no turning and no power except from God’. This supplication is intercut with deformed body parts – mostly hands – which ironise the power of the divine and implies cruelty of action and purpose, rather than love. Inserted into this sequence is placed – in another ironic gesture – a shot of a hand holding rosary beads. As an inspired objective correlative of one of the core themes of the film, the item for the counting of verses of prayer – how the human and divine connect – is held in the filmed hand.

Determinism and Free Will: Possession, Self-possession, Dispossession The film adaptations of Maurice Reynard’s 1920 novel Les Mains d’Orlac fall within the horror and psychological thriller genres. Aesthetic rendering varies from the German Expressionism of Robert Wiene’s pioneering adaptation The Hands of Orlac, to the subtle naturalistic reworkings of Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) and Edmund Gréville’s 1960 version. Despite their stylistic differences and changing emphasis on the degree of supernatural explanations for narrative resolution, all the remakes retain the central plot device of the pianist’s (belief in his) inheritance of the hands of an assassin and his coming to terms with the possibility that the evil residing in the organs has possessed his own soul. The films offer reflection on a Cartesian association, or disassociation, between consciousness and corporeality; cognitive functions and physical endeavours; and – in Descartes’ terminology – the extended and the unextended. The complex interaction between will and action are focused on the hands as empowered or disempowered symbols of agency. The protagonist’s crisis invites the question of the character’s self-determination. In most cases the haunting of the protagonist or monster by a demonic supernatural force overwhelms his agency. As the character is possessed by an evil entity the hands come to represent his impotency, loss of bodily control, and free will, as a new all-consuming force takes ownership of the innocent and impotent subject. While philosophical debates about humans’ degree of self-determination have existed for more than two millennia, some contemporary commentators challenge the claim that homo sapiens is a wholly free-willing, self-determining being. According to such detractors, ‘decisions’ on actions are influenced either by environmental factors beyond our remit, by series of causes and effects that have been historically set in motion and predate our involvement, or by the unconscious mind, over

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which we have no control. In theistic readings, free will is held as one of the sacred endowments granted to mankind by a benevolent deity. For such believers, the gift – somewhat paradoxically undermined in the literature by the idea that individuals have been licensed to make certain decisions – distinguishes humankind from its animal relatives by granting it the choice to act in accordance with, or against, moral guidelines and impulses. The conscious agent is therefore authorised to act ethically or in a sinful manner. A moderate course is steered by thinkers who, notwithstanding their rejection of pure determinism, claim that we are still endowed with a capacity to make free choices that are willed and prescribed by a consciously active subjectivity. Daniel Dennett and Michael Gazzaniga have written articulately from this perspective (Dennett and Caruso, 2021; Dennett, 2017; Gazzaniga, 2012). These commentators, who are referred to as ‘compatibilists’, resist any reductive determinism as a monopolising force in undermining human agency. Deniers of free will have been required to address the fundamental intuitions that we sense as active agents: deep-rooted beliefs that we feel as we embark on thousands of decision-making processes daily (see Sam Harris [2012] as a notable dissenter). Worryingly, if we concede an absence of free will, what follows is an erasure of individual agency that begs significant moral and ethical questions. If free will is illusory, the consequences are profound and compromise our intellectual and moral responsibility and culpability; essential factors on which most of our legal and religious principles are founded. Those for whom intentionality plays an undeniable role in being human have had to contend with the increasingly sophisticated analytical neurological developments that indicate that our ‘decisions’ are made in the brain seconds before they have been consciously recognised, and then executed. There are three compelling lines in the determinist argument that have contributed to keeping the debate alive in contemporary philosophical fora. Firstly: there are too many external environmental factors over which we have no control putting us in circumstances that curtail our available options. Even when we seem to choose one course of action over another, the decision is made within a limited range of possibilities, on a pre-determined set of binaries – ‘to do or not to do’ – based on our available intellectual capacities and the material conditions of our setting. Secondly: our minds, understood by some as biologically consciousnesscharged matter, are products of genetic and environmental causes that pre-date our existence or have impacted upon us (by accident or eventuality) without our consent or choice. Our DNA works, like other involuntary bodily operations – from minute chemical fluctuations and our autonomic

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nervous system, to larger organ functioning – in ways we do not regulate. We are evolved organic entities to whom life and its various propensities, instincts, and modes of operation have been given without our conscious involvement or selection. Thirdly: series of neurological experiments have concluded that decisions we make in a conscious way have already been subconsciously processed in our brains seconds before we become aware of our decisions. This final challenge proposes that an uncontrolled, internal automatic pilot is influencing our resolutions in advance of knowledge. The fundamental rebuttal to this line of argument, posited by the compatibilist school, is that this blanket denial of our conscious intervention still does not completely obliterate the individual’s personal involvement in degrees of self-determination and action. It merely recalibrates the definitional terms of the debate and repositions the source of our agency to another part of our neurological networks. Ultimately, they argue, our personalities remain active entities through which unplanned, predetermined, or unexpected option-eventualities are filtered before we respond with real-world actions, thoughts, and resolutions. What is important for our current consideration is not how different films offer a verdict on one side or the other in the dispute. When the topic is approached thematically many cinematic narratives hover between both possibilities and create horror around the chance that there may not actually be any clear resolution. As organisms either we are wholly responsible for our engagements with the world, and the consequences of our actions and thoughts, or we have absolutely no control over our fate and behaviour. To be caught between both poles is a proposal with terrifying social, political, moral, ethical, and ontological consequences. It is with the agony of being trapped in this liminal space – caught between free will and determinism – that the horror f ilm of possession creates its tone. The hand is the limb most frequently presented in cinema as influenced by a force beyond the natural and scientific world. Discussing the image of the severed hand in her study Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern Katherine Rowe insists on the connection between agency and manual capacity. She proposes that the dead hand ‘represents a specific relationship between human intentions or will – collective and individual – and meaningful action in the world’ (quoted in Karim-Cooper 2016, 5). The 1961 B-movie The Devil’s Hand by director William Hole is a film noir with an unlikely supernatural undercurrent. It tells the story of scientist Rick Turner (Robert Alda) who has recently left his job and is having nightmares about a femme fatale-like character who beckons him amorously. The

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question of his self-control is introduced early on when, finding himself one night outside a shop that sells model dolls, his voice-over declares: Some will stronger than my own brought me here. Nothing was familiar to me. I’d never been here before and yet… I wasn’t lost. An unknown force was guiding my steps. Leading me to this courtyard…

As the plot unfolds, he is drawn into a voodoo cult run by high priest Francis Lamont (Neil Hamilton) who has been posing as the doll shop owner. Rick leaves his fiancée Donna (Ariadne Welter) for the woman in his dreams, who turns out to be another cult member. While not the central theme of the film, it is still concerned with bodily possession and voodoo ceremonies, and emphasises the role of the hands as agents of will and intervention into the lives of others. The limbs are foregrounded during the ‘cult of Gamba’ sacrificial rituals and in scenes involving the replica doll models. For the members of the supernatural group, the ultimate reward is empowerment with self-determination which, Bianca Milan (Linda Christian) tells Rick, she has already obtained. Bianca informs Rick that she can ‘control [her] destiny’, but he is later warned by an ex-cult member to save himself: ‘You become a robot without any will of your own’. The implication is that we are all versions of manipulated voodoo dolls and that only by joining the cult can we achieve liberation from the forces of fate and biology (it is significant that the soon-to-be cult novice, Rick, has already left science behind). In its thematic concern with supernatural intervention and the relationship between free will and determinism, Roman Polanski’s 1971 adaptation of Macbeth centralises the hand and its agency in similar ways to The Devil’s Hand. It reproduces the manual references of the original play including scenes when Macbeth tries to take hold of the dagger which he imagines, the imagery of his blood-soaked hands following the regicide, and Lady Macbeth’s reference to hands that must be purified by ‘All the perfumes of Arabia’. The witches’ burial of a detached forearm in the Polanski version acts as a symbol for subsequent questions of magical intervention in faith and the protagonist’s ambitious self-determination. The Henry Cass film The Hand (1960) implies a connection between the free will and determinism debate and latent characteristics of the individual’s personality. Its complicated narrative begins with a flashback sequence in which three captured English soldiers who are fighting in Burma are being coerced into disclosing military information. When they refuse, each one has his right hand amputated in punishment. A title card announces: ‘LONDON TO-DAY’, and the events reveal that a man has had his

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hand surgically removed in order to sell it to a mysterious character. After a series of complicated temporal shifts and confusions over identities it is revealed that one of the soldiers taken by the Burmese army had not suffered the punishment amputation but had given the captors strategic details to save himself. The same soldier has later been attempting to obtain a severed hand to keep it as proof that he lost his while guarding the military secrets. The film follows the investigating detectives as they try to understand why the self-preserving informant Roberts (Derek Bond) is leaving a trail of handless corpses or victims in his wake as he flees the authorities. Ultimately, the narrative resolves with an indication of a deterministic sense of universal justice: although Roberts evades capture and arrest, in flight he falls down a railway embankment and tumbles so that his hand falls onto the tracks. The final shot shows a train speeding forward to the point where it will run over and sever the limb. Allusion is made to another inevitable aspect of predetermined personality when Inspector Munyard (Ronald Leigh-Hunt) and George Adams (Bryan Coleman) discuss why two of the three tortured soldiers withheld the information, and the third buckled under the threat: adams: Some men are born strong, others weak. So who can judge Roberts? inspector: So you and Brody made the sacrifice for nothing? adams: I suppose so. Who can blame a man for being what he is?

While the pro-militaristic propagandist message is clear, as the film explains the unchangeable nature of one’s character, the atavistic impulse towards ignoble treason is played out through the plot of the severed hand. Atavistic psychopathology and the inevitability of one’s genetic inheritance are key themes in Peter Sasdy’s 1971 film Hands of the Ripper. These are played out by concentration on the hands of the perpetrating assailant. In this instance, it turns out that the murdering female is the daughter of Jack the Ripper and her predisposition to homicidal attacks is sparked by ingrained memories of her father’s slaughters, primarily the fatal attack on her mother. These murders are rendered as superimposed flashbacks, many of which show the killer’s hands in action. A sense of balance is introduced by Laura (Jane Merrow), a blind girl who tells the Ripper’s daughter Anna (Angharad Rees) that she sees ‘with her hands’, thus suggesting a connection between the haunting deterministic drive of history and the possibility of (literally and symbolically) finding one’s way in the present. This is further complemented by a scene in which Anna’s psychiatrist Dr. Pritchard (Eric Porter) takes her to see a palm reading medium who

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confirms that the girl has been possessed. Throughout Sasdy’s Hammer horror, hands provide a connection between past, present, and future, and are consequently established as the medium ensuring a teleological line of fatalistic cause-and-effect. In Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965), a multi-plot narrative that tells the story of five characters on a train journey who meet the strange Dr. Schreck (Peter Cushing), there is a passing allusion to the relationship between hands and fate. The travellers strike up conversation with Dr. Schreck and hear that his name is the German for ‘Terror’. He has attracted their attention by playing with a deck of cards that he calls his ‘House of Horrors’. With varying degrees of scepticism, they listen to his explanation of how the cards can predict their future with supernatural capability. As he shuffles the deck, preparing them for a ‘reading’, he says: ‘I do not manipulate them. They use my hands to manipulate themselves and to present your destiny’. Each hand of cards reveals a different personal narrative. In the fourth, we hear the tale of Franklyn Marsh (Christopher Lee). He’s an art critic who has harshly reviewed the work of a painter publicly at a gallery. When presented by a curator with another painting, he approves it, but is mocked by his audience when it turns out that the producer is a chimpanzee. In revenge for his public humiliation, he follows and knocks down the original artist with his car. The man’s hand goes after Marsh in a series of vengeance attacks that culminate with Marsh crashing off the road, distracted when the hand appears suddenly on his windscreen. The sequence ends with him waking in hospital now blinded by the accident. In a karmic resolution of the artist who has lost his hand, the critic ends by losing his sight. This atavistic pathology and its interrogation inform Fritz Lang’s 1931 expressionist film M. The image of the hand on the iconic poster of the film references both the contorted hands of the antagonistic sexual predator and child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), as well as the ‘M’ chalk mark transferred to his shoulder as a means of identifying him. The climactic trial scene of the film, during which Beckert begs for leniency from the underground court gathered to sentence him, is marked by Lorre’s demented twisted hand gesturing as he beseeches the jury: ‘I have no control over this… this evil thing inside me, the fire, the voices, the torment!’ Appealing to the lynch mob, his attorney says: ‘It is this very obsession which makes my client not responsible. And nobody can be punished for something he can’t help. No one can kill a man who isn’t responsible for his actions’. The psychopathological characterisation foregrounds the question of selfcontrol and free will, and as it explores questions of jurisprudence, ideas of

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criminality, and systems of punishment these are played out with a focus alternating between the hands of the accused and those of the arbitrating mob. An edited transition moves neatly between three powerful images that punctuate the film’s concluding sequence. Having attempted to explain his condition, Beckert tells the jurors ‘It’s me, pursuing myself’ as he holds spread fingers, spider-like, up to his face. The crowd gets worked up and advances furiously to lynch him, but suddenly stops and, in a dramatic long shot, they all raise their hands. A reverse shot shows Beckert rising from his crouched position on the ground looking at them astounded at their change of attitude, and in a medium shot we see an anonymous hand placed on his shoulder with the final line of the film: ‘In the name of the law’. Lewis Milestone’s comedy The Front Page (1931) and the Howard Hawks’ 1940 screwball remake His Girl Friday, differ tonally and dramatically, but each one preserves a thematic reference to the death penalty subplot that informs the central action of the original Ben Hecht play. In a significant scene reproduced with only slight modification to the earlier adaptation, the protagonist reporter Hildy Johnson (played by Pat O’Brien and then, with Hawk’s screwball gender change, by Rosalind Russell) visits deathrow prisoner Earl Williams (George Stone; John Qualen) on the eve of his execution. The question of the convict’s moral motivation and free will in discharging the gun is invoked when Hildy introduces a determinist line of argument by suggesting that Earl’s finger only pulled the trigger because that is what handguns are designed to do. Although the scene is subsumed into the comical atmosphere of the narrative, the moment is significant because of its duplication in the various adaptations of the theatrical text: hildy: When you found yourself with that gun in your hand, and that policeman coming at you, what did you think about? earl: I don’t know exactly… hildy: Well, you must have thought of something… earl: Well… hildy: Could it have been, eh, ‘production for use’? earl: I don’t know… I… hildy: What’s a gun for, Earl? earl: A gun? hildy: Umm… earl: Why to shoot, of course… hildy: Maybe that’s why you used it? earl: Maybe… hildy: That’s reasonable…

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earl: Yes… yes, it is… You see I’ve never had a gun in my hand before. And that’s what a gun’s for, isn’t it? Maybe that’s why? Sure it is. hildy: earl: Yes, that’s what I thought of: ‘production for use’… it’s simple isn’t it?

Manual agency is once again the focal point of the interrogation of the character’s intentions and inevitable determinism, and his acting in accordance with what the weapon was invented to do. The provision of the capability to affect a choice – whether by technological or manual capacity – is interrogated in several films in which ethical concerns are foregrounded. In this respect, the thematic shift goes beyond individual’s self-willed autonomy and the narrative invites moral consideration of what one should do once endowed with the capacity to act. The distinction is slight, but important. While the alteration in focus still implies a disjunction between free will and determinism, the latter is now set up as a compelling influence created by the characters’ environments, philosophical concerns, or the significant critical moment at which a course of action must be taken. Representative examples from three subsets of this thematic preoccupation position their protagonists at key moments in scenes where the morality of their own, or their associates’, actions is questioned. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) the intellectual justification of murder is examined; in Robert Bresson’s 1959 film Pickpocket the protagonist philosophises about the motivation for criminal deeds; and Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) considers the ethical practices of scientific development and its evolving technological capabilities. In each case, the directors frame the hands of one or more characters at significant moments of scenes when the thematic concerns of the films are introduced. Hitchcock employs frequent tracking and zoom shots that dramatically centralise the hands of the murdering protagonists of Rope. The college students Brandon (John Dall) and Phillip (Farley Granger) have been inspired by their lecturer Rupert Cadell (James Stewart), whom they have misinterpreted as advocating a Nietzschean application of Darwinian evolution. Convinced that because the stronger can exterminate weaker creatures, they have the duty to do so, they murder their friend David Kentley (Dick Hogan). Following the opening scene strangulation, during which Hitchcock focuses closely on Brandon and Phillip’s gloved hands, the distinction between the characters is drawn as the former perseveres in his certainty of the rectitude of the assassination while the latter grows doubtful about their rationalisation

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of the crime. As Phillip’s insecurity and panic escalate, Hitchcock pays playful and repeated attention to his framed hands. When Mrs. Atwater (Constance Collier) arrives at their soirée and confuses guest Kenneth Lawrence (Douglas Dick) with the murdered David, Hitchcock’s camera swish pans right and picks up Phillip’s hands with a zoom. One of them has been cut by the broken glass that he squashed on hearing his victim’s name. Later, the bothersome Mrs. Atwater (as one of Hitchcock’s humorous prying female characters), insists on reading Phillip’s palm. Professing her eccentric interest in the paranormal as she discusses the young man’s star sign, she continues: atwater: You’re very much influenced by the mood. May I see your hands? [She examines them] You don’t remember the hour of your birth, by any chance? phillip: No! atwater: Good fingers. Strong. Artistic. These hands will bring you great fame.

As she says this the camera closes in on Phillip’s hands until he lets them fall by his sides. Moving to the right, the camera keeps them closely framed, and tilts to his shocked face. After a beat, he goes to the piano to play. When their professor from Sommerville appears, he comments on Phillip’s recital by repeating the word ‘touch’. In Cadell’s innuendos and insinuations, we are reminded that while the intentions of the soul might be carried out by the hands, their consequences may take root in the manual disorders suffered by the perpetrator. Susan Sontag highlights the recurring question of human self-determination in the cinema of Robert Bresson when she proposes that his ‘films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty’ (2009, 186). The literal, physical incarceration of Fontaine (François Leterrier) in Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956) is developed along an existential line of questioning of free will in Bresson’s subsequent film Pickpocket. Its thieving protagonist Michel (Martin LaSalle) and the attention given to the character’s hesitations around, or proceeding with, his acts of stealing are entirely played out with cinematic attention on the activity of his hands. In the later film, the ethical question is brought to the fore in conversations between Martin and the Inspector (Jean Pélégri), in which the character’s justification for thieving is juxtaposed with its illegality. As the pickpocket’s skill is deemed more of an art than a crime, Bresson hints not that free will is non-existent, but that the self-determination of the artist is somehow

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curtailed by the absurdity of the law, and that the occupations of criminal and policeman are merely opposing roles which they perform in obeisance to their respective vocations. The point about ethical responsibility arising from options made possible by technological and scientific progress is at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. The film deals directly with the notion of human interference with, and manipulation of, nature. The opening sequence establishes the human versus nature conflict by ending with a symbolic transition shot which frames two hands in close-up: one belonging to the man who is being dragged into the Velociraptor cage as he’s attacked, the other of the man outside, who is attempting to save him. The shot underlines the question of loss of control that will inform the whole film. This is made explicit by Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) when, having seen the results of the incredible genetic experiments, he challenges the park owner John Hammond (Richard Attenborough): malcolm: If I may. I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re… that you’re using here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had you, you, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it. You want to sell it. Well… hammond: I don’t think you’re giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody’s ever done before. malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

It is significant that the same sceptical scientist has already used the hand of Ellie (Laura Dern) to explain the chaos theory. Taking her fingers flirtingly in his, he drops some water onto the back of her hand to demonstrate how the first time the droplet flows in one direction and, unpredictably, takes a different course the second time. In this instance, the variability of natural processes and the lack of human control over external determining forces are played out metaphorically and literally on the hand of the character. Brian Desmond Hurst’s 1941 Dangerous Moonlight (also known as Suicide Squadron) represents an interesting deviation from these examples: one

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in which the choice forced upon the protagonist retains an ethical core. The narrative is not informed by any critical point at which the free will of Stefan Radetzky (Anton Walbrook) is tested, but the wider question of the responsibility to take one course of action over another is played out by reference to what the pianist/fighter pilot ought to do. The manual role in the dilemma is apparent: should Stefan’s hands be put to the purpose of artistic creation or combative destruction? The crisis is imbued with nuance, however, when both options are shown to serve the protagonist’s nation in morally distinct ways. If the pilot chooses to fight, it will serve the defence of his nation and the cause of the Allied side, if the pianist opts to continue his musical career, his cultural endeavour will serve humanity’s greater good and well-being. Typically, a strong romantic sub-plot drives the action and comes to play a significant role in Stefan’s decision. The action of the narrative is initiated in a flashback sequence during which American journalist Carol Peters (Sally Gray) discovers Stefan playing the piano in a bombed building. Their first conversation introduces the question of action and inaction – or, in this case, her ‘passive’ newspaper reporting, and his ‘active’ role in the war – and this sets up Stefan’s ensuing choice. As the musician’s career flourishes, he is haunted by news reports from the war effort in Europe which tempt him back to the continent to help in the fight. After his Irish friend Mike Carroll (Derrick De Marney) returns to fly bomber planes, Stefan feels increasingly conflicted. Carol’s compelling address to him is important in its invocation of manual symbolism: Darling, do you really believe that you’re going to make any difference all by yourself in this war? Can’t you understand one important thing… that you’re an artist: a great musician? You’ve so much to give to the world. Lots of men can fly planes much better than you, but they can’t do what you can do. They can’t think in terms of lovely, exquisite music. Can’t you understand? There’s a power and a magic in these hands to play and compose wonderful music. You have a great gift. You can’t throw it away all because of some stupid patriotic notion you’ve got in your head.

Stefan is momentarily appeased and their argument is resolved. He continues with his musical touring, but his dilemma persists. His divided self is represented during a concert performance when shots of his hands on the keyboard are intercut with his reflection, framed diagonally, up-side down, on the open lid of the piano. Ultimately, he returns to the war without telling Carol. In a climactic fighting flight sequence his hands are filmed repeatedly in close-up as they operate the guns on the plane. His aircraft is

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shot down and the film returns to its opening sequence where we find him coming from a post-traumatic daze, sitting at a piano beside Carol whom he embraces as his memory returns. The repetition of manual motifs and symbolism cited in these paradigmatic cases can be found in numbers of other films which interrogate the consequences of characters’ freedom of choice. In each of these, different elements are explored: Rope and Pickpocket juxtapose moral and ontological questions, and Jurassic Park questions the ethics of scientific practice. It is often the case that the whole canon or creative and philosophical outlook of a director contribute to the free will and determinism debate. Recurring motifs of the hands are prevalent in many of these and – to foreground two noteworthy directors – Robert Bresson and Stanley Kubrick stand out as useful illustrations. Bresson acknowledges degrees of predestination: the very act of creating narrative is acknowledged by the director as sealing a character’s fate (‘in the can’), and we need look no further than the title of his prison escape film to recognise his marking of the fact. However, his reiteration of the role of hands in liberating characters or in realising their drive towards self-fulfilment and that freedom, are indicative of his faith in a divinely granted free will. The skill of the French auteur lies in what Gilberto Perez has described: If Fontaine embodies free will, the steadfast will to freedom, Bresson’s style of narrative represents inexorable predestination, and his f ilm reconciles the philosophical opposition between the two as only a work of art can. (2019, 77)

However, as with all compatibilists, Bresson’s acknowledgement of a deterministic backdrop against and within which some degree of human discretion and agency may be enacted ultimately places him on the side of endorsing the freedom of individuals to choose pathways. For Bresson, hands are both literally and symbolically liberating, and they are endowed with the capacity for emotive and intellectual expression, and are thus empowered with agency. For Stanley Kubrick, free will is an impossibility. While most of his films are not directly concerned with the thematic question (it is a fundamental ‘taken as read’ assumption for the director), at various moments one or more strands of the determinist philosophy are evident. In Paths of Glory (1957) the militaristic decisions are removed from Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), as procedural logistics and contextual requirements are dictated to him by General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) and General Mireau (George Macready). Similar situational or contextual determinism induces characters to action

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in Spartacus (1950), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Barry Lyndon (1975). 2001: A Space Odyssey presents a broader historical, teleological deterministic outlook, and psychological pathologies (often with a psychosexual undertone) are bound with compulsive behaviours in Dr. Strangelove (1964), Lolita (1962), The Shining (1980) and, to a lesser extent, in Eyes Wide Shut (1999). The question of free will versus determinism is explored in a sustained way in his 1971 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and the film presents its position on the horrors inherent in mind control and the legal and ethical consequences of disabling an individual’s agency. As Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is transformed from antisocial youth into reformed benign automaton, the complexity of Kubrick’s film lies not in the terror of the young man’s violence or in the oppressive state’s therapeutic brainwashing methodologies, but in how he explores the frailty of human agency by presenting the ease with which the former psychopathological drives can be erased or sublimated by the reprogramming process. Philip Kuberski offers a useful synopsis of the position of the director in this regard: In Kubrick’s films, we see that human being is an experience of inhabitation and self-alienation, a recognition that one’s choices are not free, but determined by appetites and drives that are alien to conscious choice and will. (2012, 89)

Furthermore, Kuberski proposes evidence in the filmmaker’s work of the three separate lines of determinism noted above. Teleological inevitability is bound to technology in the personification of the insane Nazi scientist Strangelove (interestingly, but not intentionally, a name that is an approximate anagram of ‘Strangle Glove’), and Kuberski notes that the character has lost the ability to control his limbs: He can neither walk nor prevent his gloved hand from seizing his own throat. His body in rebellion against his will, Strangelove is the intersection of the human desire for technological transcendence and the technological usurpation of human agency. (119)

On the broader question of subconscious manipulation by external forces that might undermine human volition and behaviour, Kuberski identifies Kubrick’s deviation from Burgess on the latter’s holding out the possibility of total agency. He notes that for the director: We are always conditioned and controlled, if only to oppose some form of conditioning or another. It is better to accept that, for the price of not

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doing so is the bitterness that goes with the pursuit of unrealizable and dehumanizing goals and the suffering experienced by those to whom ‘agency,’ ‘deliberation,’ and ‘choice’ are cynically imputed. (35)

In his analysis of Lolita Kuberski draws attention to the predatory psychosexual compulsions of Humbert Humbert (James Mason) marking the uncontrolled latent drives of the Freudian id in a scene that focuses on the character’s hands with obsessional intensity: It is from the ‘john’ (as he terms it) of a service station that Humbert spots Lolita conversing with the driver of a car. Washing his hands furiously, he peers anxiously through the opened window of opaque glass at the next male to whom Lolita will be given – or gives herself. (31)

This last example is noteworthy in its framing of Humbert’s hands at a moment when they are being used in symbolic representation of his mental condition. Although analysts have identified an aesthetic and thematic inclination to foreground the manual in Bresson’s canon, the quality is as apparent across Kubrick’s work.

Modernism: Industrialisation and Technology Charles Dickens’ Hard Times was first published serially in 1854 at the height of the expansion of England’s Industrial Revolution. Set in the fictional location ‘Coketown’, the novel is a bold and explicit critique of modernisation, utilitarian positivism, and the educational dereliction of emotional and creative development. Significantly, in line with Dickens’ combination of thematic clarity and the naming of characters, the factory workers – the individuals most afflicted by the hardship caused by novel mechanisms of industrial labour and its conditions and dehumanising processes in the town – are called ‘the Hands’. Writing on the 1830s and 1840s, Darian Leader points to the broader social designation for the kind of labourers described by the novelist. He notes, on the industrial age, that ‘it is during this period that we witness a new ramification of the expression of “the hands” to indicate workers’ (2016, 56). The label seems straightforward at first, and indicates how the individualism, personalities, and skillsets of the workers have been obliterated. Their bosses, the capitalist owners of production, are only interested in the corporeal element with which their worth and productivity can be measured and aggregated. However, there is

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nuanced significance to Dickens’ title beyond this initial interpretation. A few points are worthy of attention before moving into cinematic examples that explore the role of the hand as positioned between representations of the era of increasing mechanical industrialisation and the characterisation of the workers affected by this development. The first of these rests in a certain contradiction in the labelling of labourers. This stems from the fact that it is at the very moment of their transition from previous manual artistic or artisanal production, when their creative skills are replaced with mechanised manufacturing, that the designation ‘hands’ is applied. Paradoxically, therefore, it is when a narrow focus onto the functionality of the limb comes into circulation, that the individual, instinctual, or creative forms of expression and skill are severed from it. Beings become mere operators of machines, in Fordist-like production lines, or else detached overseers standardising and maintaining the hardware itself: in all cases metaphorically reduced to cogs in the machinery. The second point follows from this and speaks profoundly to the relationship between the artisan and the material of construction. Martin Heidegger noted this consequence by calling upon the example of the craftsman whose medium is wood. In terms of the artistry of the cabinetmaker, Heidegger emphasises a deep ontological connection formed by the hand between worker and material when he notes that ‘what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood’ (1968, 23). This quality, which is emblematic of the significant point of contact between the subject and its objective world, and which therefore marks an essential quality of that subject’s being-in-the-world, suffers a devastating rupture with the introduction of the technological mechanism. With this severance comes a further ontological crisis: a disconnection in our very modes of thinking. The phenomenologist goes on to warn that so long as the essence of technology does not closely concern us, in our thought, we shall never be able to know what the machine is. We shall not be able to tell what it is to which the industrial worker’s hand is related. We shall not be able to make out what kind of manual work, of handicraft, these manipulations are. (1968, 24)

Contemplating the earliest phases of our evolution and the onset of our tool use, Heidegger described handicraft as an expressive form of thinking, as much as thinking has been formally realised in handicraft. If our hands have suffered a sensual detachment from their world, so too has our cognitive connection to that environment been compromised. Writing

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on the important tactility of the human hand, Jennifer Barker references Michel Serres’ work Les Cinq Sens, in which the French philosopher extolls and underscores the centrality of the human senses in establishing one’s ontological position. Barker pays attention to the importance of the hand (among the other senses), and in doing so mentions the tactile quality that is threatened in an age of mechanical reproduction: The sensorimotor organs are the tools with which we perceive and act in the world, the medium but not ordinarily the object of our intentional project, and as such they become transparent in their usefulness. (2009, 126)

Adam Roberts indicates how technology, for Martin Heidegger ‘“enframes” the world in a way characterized chiefly by an “ordering” of things that risks alienating humanity from other modes of revelation and enframing’ (2009, 57), and further underscores the dramatic consequences of technological development as our hands become less ‘in touch’. The nature of manual labour and tool use as primitive technology and, subsequently, as highly evolved technological apparatuses of production, have been complicit in bringing about our hands’ redundancy. As the modern combined form of cultural expression and industrial production, cinema crosses many important lines. It requires a variety of manual skills for its realisation – from remote manipulation to tactile proximity – and has the capacity to represent manual labour and action in all their manifest incarnations. Jean Baudrillard references Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ in a way that is fundamental to cinematic operations. Baudrillard emphasises how ‘reproduction absorbs the process of production, changing its finalities and altering the status of product and producer’ and then explains how Benjamin demonstrates this mutation on the terrain of art, cinema and photography, because it is there they open up, in the 20th century, new territories without a tradition of classical productivity, and that are placed immediately under the sign of reproduction. (1983, 98–99)

It is hardly coincidental that in their capacity to explore ontological situations in unprecedented ways, early experimental filmmakers were fascinated with representations of the human form. Whether in the ‘ontological wholeness’ of the Lumière Brothers, or the corporeal elasticity of Georges Méliès,

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we can find an underlying sense that the new medium presented unique opportunities to capture a fundamental aspect of being. Animation is profoundly connected with the living organism, as the derivation of the word – animus, meaning ‘soul’ in Latin – testifies. The representational status of the framed body might be understood as an extension of its profilmic counterpart: the physicality of the filmmaking crew. A unique connection exists between artist, apparatus, and performer in corporeal ways that are bound up with processes of animation, rhythm, and velocity of motion, and all are intrinsically connected to manual activity. A nostalgic yearning for a pre-industrial time is drawn thematically in many of the films of French filmmaker and actor Jacques Tati. While the director situates his episodic gag-based narratives in inter- or post-War French settings – whether rural or urban – he astutely juxtaposes elements of prelapsarian innocence with details of a modern lifestyle and its trappings. Malcolm Turvey has suggested: The prevailing opinion of Tati’s f ilms is that modernization is their central theme and that they are critical of the changes it wrought in postwar France, particularly suburbanization, the widespread adoption of architectural modernism, and the burgeoning car and consumer cultures. (2020, 175–176)

However, offering a slight correction to other critics’ interpretation of Tati’s comedy as unequivocally critical of modernity and its processes, Turvey brings ambiguity to the director’s humour by detailing how Hulot’s bewildered rather than antagonistic reaction to modern environments indicates that Tati’s intention was to create in Hulot a character who is alienated from modernity in the sense that he is struggling to adapt to the rapid changes in modern life rather than being necessarily opposed to them. (2020, 179)

The era of modernisation in which Hulot finds himself is one that requires perspicacity to enter: he does not reject it outright because it is in the attempt to gain acceptance or the failure to integrate oneself that romantic notions about former times – rural idylls, primitive customs, simple folk – can take root. Tati’s comedy is frequently devised around his incongruous corporeal astuteness (disguised as awkwardness), as the character of Monsieur Hulot clashes with the physicality of disobedient objects in his environment.

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In many of these encounters between the balletic human body and the hardware of its background, Hulot’s hands are framed as dextrous and proficient points of contact with the world. While Tati’s manual routines and corporeal choreography are reminiscent of performances of the silent and early-sound slapstick comedians Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd, Hulot is never presented as the ‘small man’. In literal opposition to this, in fact, it is often his tall, strong frame that facilitates comedic exaggeration. Unlike his predecessors he is not often required to overcome insurmountable natural or mechanical challenges, or resist being incorporated into and overwhelmed by impossible forces by maintaining a superior ironic distance. Rather, Hulot (Tati) engages in a comical, physical interface with the elements that he encounters; dancing with, stepping around, and entangling himself into, their autonomous, motorised, mechanical processes in humorous ways that Turvey has called ‘a comedy of everyday life’ (2020, 5). In this respect, his films are not so much a critique of the modernity that they satirise as they are an invitation to his audiences to reconsider their engagements with their new positions in contemporary society, and its environment and mechanisms. For writers like Turvey, Tati’s form of comedian comedy was innovative in his decentring of the singular performer, and in how he invited audiences to reconsider Hulot’s visual distance and position within the frame. Many of his gags – whether they were based on disturbances of cause-and-effect logic, or skewed points of view that rendered the diurnal unfamiliar and strange – worked on a principle of displacement. Camera angles reveal objects and actions that take on comical appearance because of the novel perspectives from which they are shown; the sources of sounds, or the vagueness of their indexical logic are confused; and objects are repurposed or reconfigured so that their use or applications are invalidated. Turvey explains how the director mobilises certain camera techniques to accomplish these effects. In close analytical attention to the humour, he evaluates how Tati, with ‘long takes, long shots, deep staging, and deep focus often stages several events simultaneously in different parts of the frame, thereby making it difficult if not impossible to watch them all’ (2020, 145). In this respect, the manual activities of Tati’s characters generate comical moments by virtue of the visual diminishment or complete absence of their hands in the frame. We are frequently shown the consequences of hands’ actions without seeing the finer details of how they were accomplished. Citing a typical scene in which manual effort should have been involved, but is ostensibly removed for comedic effect, Turvey offers an example from the 1958 film Mon Oncle. What we see on screen is an incidental action, normally achieved through

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basic hand functioning. Here, however, although it is performed with the same effect it is done without human intervention. Turvey explains: Earlier in the party the guests relocate from one part of the garden to another. As two of them carry a table down some steps in a long shot, the most prominent sound is of liquid, which directs our attention to the contents from a jug on the table pouring perfectly into a cup because of the incline. (2020, 166)

Elsewhere, Turvey describes a scene from Les vacances de M Hulot (1953) in which the humorous aspect of a conversation between characters is exaggerated because we are beyond audio range, but can see Hulot’s manual gesturing as he narrates his tale: The convention of sound perspective dictates that we cannot hear what he is saying because he is too far away, but we can imagine his words as he mimes the sequence of events to his incredulous interlocutors. (2020, 170)

The relegation of the position of hands and manual labour in these examples works in accordance with Tati’s broader ‘democratic’ style: one in which the spectator is empowered with the option to concentrate on any aspect of the framed action. In many instances in the Hulot films, as the character struggles with some task or absurd goal, he politely requests of passers-by or other bystanders if they might be able to ‘Lend a hand?’. The reference is slight but significant in terms of the comedy that invites the audience to consider thematically the human position in various conditions and contexts of modernity. These receive sustained thematic address in Jour de Fête (1949) in which the actions of Tati’s hands as the postman provide comical characterisation as well as a point of intervention into reflection on how traditional ways are being replaced by modern era apparatuses. One of the key moments of the film juxtaposes old and new professional methods – specifically, here, in relation to the job of the postman – by introducing a newsreel-style film presented for the rural French villagers by a visiting carnival. After the postman has become involved in a drinking game, which leaves him inebriated, his friend calls him to the carnival’s documentary projection: ‘Postmen in America’. As they peek through the back of the tent, they learn from the infomercial about the efficiency of the American postal system: how mechanised, labour-light and, therefore, effective it is. The subtitles report: ‘Three million letters a day are delivered with minimum delay. [Over shots of machines that are sorting letters] Many

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countries still use outmoded methods. But the American postman, always in the vanguard of progress [Over a shot of a helicopter taking off ] … now has the helicopter at his disposal’. The mechanical routine and sense of precise, steady, and utilitarian proficiency of the modern system is set in direct contrast with the operations of Tati’s postman, François. The episodic construction of the narrative of Jour de Fête is set around disruptions to, and distractions from, the route that François should ordinarily take, unimpeded, on his delivery rounds. After we have seen the propaganda film about the postal service in the U.S., one character says: ‘He’s right, François. The Americans have the resources; you know how our Civil Service is’. This might be read as a critique of the mechanical ways that replace the older manual methods, but other overarching themes of the film suggest a nuanced possibility. The man’s criticism is directed towards the French civil service, and away from the American methods. Jour de Fête looks at some of the pleasures lost when human connections are mediated by apparatuses of modernity. This is reflected by Turvey, as noted, in Tati’s penchant for ‘long takes, long shots, deep staging, and deep focus’, which deconstruct many of the interventionist and leading qualities of the cinematic machinery itself. Instead of rejecting outright the modern postal system as presented in the film, many of the ways that François uses to deliver his mail the next morning replicate modes that he has seen in the documentary. Although he makes his round more quickly, his methods remain ‘artisanal’ in their manual gags. For example, he drives through a stack of burning hay, delivers a letter, and goes up on the rope of a church bell, puts one into the pipe of a corn sorter so that it falls through a series of shifting shelves and is delivered on the other side to the addressee. Elsewhere, it is the velocity of his delivery and not his efficiency that is humorously castigated by the villagers. While his profession is about connecting people, achieving this goal with speed ironically distances him from his customers. One mishap leads to his plunging into a river from which he is rescued by an elderly lady who tells him that there’s no advantage to speeding things up. She carries the soaked postman to a field where some farm labourers are gathering hay. They call him: ‘Hey François! Come and help us a bit. Is your American escapade over?’ He joins them as they return to their traditional kind of pre-modern manual labour. The film ends on a sequence that maintains a certain nostalgic fondness for that simple lifestyle, but not without a slight visual twist that is typical of Tati’s sophistication. As the carnival waggon is packed up for departure, six wooden merry-go-round horses are positioned hanging over the back end of the truck. A young boy skips after the vehicle as it accelerates away

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and, with light melodic carnival music tinkling on the extra-diegetic track, a reverse shot provides a high angle on the boy from behind the horses. As the truck gradually speeds up to leave the child behind, Tati establishes a doleful note as the carnival accoutrements are whisked away from the town, looking back towards the young one in playful pursuit. The labouring body of the industrial age is dispossessed of its creative agency, as technology intercepts the process of production at the very point of contact between the hand and the rendered material. This objectification of the human being, reified as mechanical hardware with a diminishing subjective role, goes beyond a materialist and physical relationship with one’s environment. It has important consequences for the individual’s sense of being in the broadest sense. As technology becomes a point of mediation between man and the world, and threatens the condition and function of human being, the critical position of the hand is compromised as our ontological connection with our environment is weakened. For both Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty the limb was at the heart of the phenomenological process of contact with, and perception of being in, the world. Reification of the individual is not merely a demotion of productivity, of which the worth and value are only calculated in terms of material output and capital. It entails a fundamental detachment of mind from body – a becoming of corporeal thing – to which Merleau-Ponty refers in a paradigmatic example when he focuses on the mechanical, automated labour of his own hands: It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflex for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort. (2006, 166)

Beyond the purely Marxist reading of industrialised corporeal reification by mechanical interpolation, there exist alternative ideological possibilities for the reprogramming of the human mind and body. One such variation is explored thematically in Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, where the objectification of the new recruits to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman’s (R. Lee Ermey) unit is established in the opening part, which begins with

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the shaving of their heads in a symbolic foreshadowing of the complete obliteration of their individualism. During their training in preparation for their combat in Vietnam, when the fledgling privates are instructed in becoming killing machines and told that they ‘are not even human fucking beings’, Kubrick places repeated emphasis on the hands of the young men. Philip Kuberski marks the annihilation of the men’s humanity in corporeal terms and describes how, when divested of ‘their identities, their hair, and their privacy, the Marine trainees in Full Metal Jacket are treated as little more than unformed flesh’ (2012, 96). Kubrick’s framing of their manual skills is central to this reification. One is singled out for particularly violent abuse because he is overweight and less sharp than his peers. Private Pyle (Vincent D’Onofrio) is identified by Hartman as posing a threat to the development of his project: to create a regiment of efficient and unfeeling killers. When Pyle is first punished, Hartman holds his hand in front of Pyle’s neck, and orders him to choke himself by leaning his weight forward onto the strangling fingers of the sergeant. Later, Pyle confuses his left and right sides, hesitating over which of his shoulders should be holding his rifle, and he is singled out for further reprimand in a line-up inspection of the rookies’ hands when Hartman discovers his footlocker latch open. Kubrick grants brief respite from the emotional intensity of Pyle’s victimisation during a sequence in which Private Joker (Matthew Modine) gives him additional training. The tender interaction between the men, displaying the vestiges of humanity in the marines as they are transformed into mechanical assassins, is portrayed across a series of exercises in the development of Pyle’s manual skills: at rifle assembly and care, and boot lacing. As his dehumanisation is fully realised, commensurate with his rising efficiency as a soulless, murdering automaton, and the effective display of his marksmanship, Pyle earns limited sarcastic commendation from his tutor. The training segment of the film ends with the emotionally, mentally, and physically tortured private sitting on a latrine loading his magazine. Hartman enters screaming abuse at Joker for not reprimanding the wayward trainee, but Pyle ignores the outraged orders of Hartman to put his weapon down. He shoots the sergeant before turning the gun on himself. His attempt to repossess his humanity, fatefully rendered through Pyle’s reaffirmation of agency and autonomy, results in the only way that Kubrick can logically conclude: by suicidal, self-annihilation. The behaviour of the broken trainee private is presented by the fluid, almost balletic, manual dexterity with which he manoeuvres and uses his rifle. At the moment of his declaration ‘I am… in a world of shit’, his achievement of utilitarian competence is shown to have been emptied of all humane feeling.

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The ideological critique of reif ication that Kubrick presents is rarely seen beyond the generic context of the war narrative, and even less frequently achieved with such detached clinical observation. Recalling the sensuous qualities of the human physical connection to the environment, Gabor Csepregi points to a paradox at the heart of technological development: our sense of mastery over our environs that is founded upon, and facilitated by, scientific progress in automation and hardware is commensurate with our corporeal detachment from those same milieux. He indicates the reasons for this illusion and claims a certain incongruity in it: Due to the division of labour and the expansion of mechanization and automatization, the sensory contact of workers with the various material realities – stone, iron, or wood – becomes scarce. As the power over our natural environment increases, the bodily interaction with it decreases. (2006, 3)

In discussing the solitude and social outsider characterisations of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd, Gilberto Perez assesses the different ways in which the cinematic pariahs seek romantic connection that involves them in other comedic attempts to master their environments with degrees of manual effort. For Keaton his struggle is often with the sublimity of nature. This is graphically rendered to connote the character’s loneliness which, as Perez suggests, ‘is hauntingly conveyed in those long distance shots, typical of Keaton, in which he appears as a tiny figure amid large empty surroundings’ (1998, 96). However, Keaton’s trials at controlling his natural situation – the wayward forces of love, landscape, and weather – are occasionally drawn in parallel with the protagonist’s trying to (re)gain manual authority over machinery and mechanical apparatuses. Once again, Perez outlines how two plots with parallel aspirations become interwoven in the film The General (1926) when Buster’s two passions – his girl and his train – ‘run away’ on him: Buster is on his own. This is, after all, a personal matter: his locomotive has been stolen, and his girl, though he doesn’t know it yet, is being kidnapped along with it. […] As in The Navigator, it is through his mastery of the machine’s rituals that he manages to get the girl. (1998, 98)

With Charlie Chaplin, romantic acquisition is not always set as the inciting incident for the Tramp’s self-fulfilment. However, like that of Keaton

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and Lloyd, his struggle to bring domineering machinery and mechanical hardware under control is an entirely corporeal affair. The comedy is often generated as the ‘small man’ takes on the gargantuan task of battling against processes and products of industrial modernisation. When he identifies a related tendency in Keaton’s work, Perez juxtaposes notions of mechanised duplication and rigidity with the randomness and chaos of corporeal agitation. He explains how Keaton was the geometrician of slapstick, at opposite ends from the unruly variety exemplified by Laurel and Hardy or Mack Sennett or the Marx Brothers, in which things can be counted on to get madly out of control. Things in Keaton can be counted on to adhere rigorously to a system, a pattern as imperturbable as a line of tracks. (1998, 100)

Therefore, if in Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, and their contemporaries, the body is the site of a reified, capitalist oppression, then liberation from its systematisation must be activated through the same corporeal centre. Furthermore, if the lines between the human form as producer and its industrial product are blurred in the same process of reification, then the hands of the machine worker, manager, and maintainer, are at the nexus of this operation. In this respect, opposition to rigidity through the bodily agility of slapstick and the concentration on manual dexterity and fluidity are recurring elements of this re-empowerment of individualism. Perez invokes the work of Henri Bergson to put the pliable kinetic body of the actor front-and-centre in the generation of comedic effects. He points to Bergson’s idea ‘from his well-known essay on laughter, that the human body becomes comical in so far as it behaves in the manner of a machine’ (1998, 103–104). The work of Keaton and Chaplin provides evidence that the comedy generated by the mechanically fixed behaviour of the human body is only a starting point. I would propose extending this to suggest that the humorous beats are based in the individual’s resistance to the overwhelming, seductive, or oppressive rigidity and reification of machinery. In his essay on the capacity of the medium to give prominence to the corporeal, Karl Schoonover suggests that cinema’s registration of physicality is uniquely situated to disputing modernity’s attempts to reify human life in the body, to regulate its vitality in measurable units, and thus to reduce its potential force for change by assuming to know the shape of history ahead of time. (2014, 105)

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I would add that variations in the mode of cinematic representation – allowing alterations in motion velocity, rhythmic variations established by editing, and management of proximity to action by close-up or long framing – are all unique aspects of the medium that contribute to essential tonal qualities of slapstick engagement. Christina Petersen uses a term offered by Stanley Hall in her reading of slapstick as a valid form of rebellious subversion. Peterson is affirmative when she indicates: Chaplin and his colleagues’ ability to incorporate the jerky rhythms of the assembly line offered a means of reviving the ‘aloof, apart and desiccated’ modern human subject. (2018, 235)

The condition of the industrialised, reified worker is characterised by a rupture in the corporeal and environmental relationship. Slapstick has the capacity to draw attention to the violence inherent in this break by exaggerating it and ridiculing its latent elasticity; an elasticity that machinery is incapable of facilitating. Andrew Stott has implied a certain absurd Unheimlich in this, which is exemplified in the gestural performances of the best slapstick comedians: By examining the identity and utility of things and playing with the space they occupy, their dimensions, properties, and cultural significance, the body’s relationship to the external world is made strange. Typical gags might involve disproportionate sizes, the animations of the inanimate, the slowing down or speeding up of events, the personification of objects, and the reversal or rejection of linear cause and effect that allows things to be re-contextualized or entirely reused. (2005, 94)

If, as Stott expresses, ‘slapstick is where the body meets the world of things, [and therefore] is suitably fascinated with objects’ (ibidem) then there is no better site for a disruption of mechanised dehumanisation than the hand of the labourer. In cinema the distinctive facility for a literal and symbolic focus on that limb is readily available to the filmmaker. Across his canon, Chaplin combines moments of bodily mobility with playful manual gesturing and performance. The worker’s incorporation into the industrial machinery in the celebrated sequence in Modern Times (1936) is a climactic moment in a series of scenes in which the character’s hands are tested in efficiency and suffer the consequences of his interaction with the industrial equipment he is required to master. Opening sections of the film derive their comedy from absurdly exaggerated manual dexterity, such

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as his early hand-cranking of machines to make them run, and the shots of Chaplin at a conveyor belt where he acts as the ‘nut tightener’. The gag comes from the speed with which he effects this task and the twitching that continues when he has left his post struggling to regain corporeal control against a mechanical muscle memory. The ‘Bellows Feeding Machine’ is a ludicrous construction designed to reduce the manual involvement in feeding so that the workers’ hands are not occupied during lunchtime and may be better put to the task of their routine productivity. Following a break, when he returns to the production line, instead of immediately resuming his position, Chaplin stands beside the conveyor belt, takes a small file from his pocket and starts to manicure his nails. This defiant gesture, which ironically marks the hand as fetishised aesthetic object as opposed to tool of productivity, has an equivalent at the end of The Gold Rush (both the 1925 and 1942 versions). The new-found wealth obtained by Chaplin and his associate, Big Jim, after a successful career of gold prospecting, is comically denoted in the final sequence when both men are shown in extravagant clothing. Chaplin’s excess is absurd as he appears decked in an abundance of fur coats and jackets, while the end of Big Jim’s days of manual toiling is shown by his decision to have a manicure. The men’s affluence and future of leisure are demonstrated in a succinct aside, and in the 1942 version by the addition of Big Jim’s line: ‘No not the nails’, says he, ‘the corns!’ There is an inevitable, problematic association made in both films between a gendering of their characters and the moment when manual labour is jettisoned. This is rarely overtly stated, but an example of such a case is evident in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). When the reluctant side-kick Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) is being ordered to push a lever to save the trapped hero from being fatally squashed, Indie (Harrison Ford) screams at her to make haste. For the creation of narrative tension, a series of innocuous and easily surmountable obstacles slows her progress; each one dramatically creating the mood with an ironic juxtaposition of Willie’s trivial concerns and Indiana’s life-or-death emergency. At one point, the female character pauses to examine her hand, declaring with melodramatic despondency: ‘Oh, I broke a nail!’ The frenetic self-preserving manual activity of the hero as he tries to jam the mechanism to prevent his being compressed is playfully intercut with the complaint of the passive heroine for whom the immediate concern is the damage to her fingernail. Inasmuch as the feature is related to general manual activity, the means by which masculine and feminine labour relations are explored is significant thematically.

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Gendered Hands The industrial cinematic labour of female artists and technicians has often not only remained, literally, behind the scenes, but their contribution has also been frequently marginalised in writing on the art form. Charlie Kiel and Denise McKenna offer a useful revisionist reading of the contribution of female performers to film roles involving the kind of ‘physically demanding stunts or comic pratfalls that rivalled those of their male counterparts’ (2018, 121). Significantly, Kiel and McKenna begin their study with a brief, but important, mention of a separation of gendered labour in the medium: Whereas most of the crafts necessary for film production were rationalized by gender divisions – meaning men worked as grips or constructed sets while women typically labored in costume departments and editing rooms – acting remained open to both sexes in roughly equal numbers. (ibidem)

While this tradition, identified as ubiquitous in early cinema, has persisted to the present, it has not always been to the absolute detriment of the female creative contribution and many of the most celebrated male directors have had long-standing associations with female editors. In one of the most important meta-cinematic films ever produced, Dziga Vertov’s 1929 Man With a Movie Camera, the on-screen editing was performed by Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova, who also acted as the film’s assistant editor. Martin Scorsese’s extensive work with Thelma Schoonmaker and Quentin Tarantino’s collaboration with Sally Menke are obvious mainstream examples, but it should be pointed out that Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws was largely the masterpiece it became because of Verna Field’s editing; a task that was not only accomplished with superlative aesthetic ingenuity, but which was severely disadvantaged by the dearth of material returned from set by dailies. To evaluate a contribution to cinematic history by female artists working in front of the camera requires a certain excavation of performance styles that have not had close attention in respect of slapstick and comedic gestural acting. Karl Schoonover has provided a fascinating study of the counterreification possibilities in certain forms of histrionic performance and points to the acting of Giulietta Masina in reflecting the historiography of cinema. With close attention focused on Federico Fellini’s La strada (1954) and Nights of Cabiria (1957), Schoonover proposes how Masina’s impromptu performance style can be read as working against both the fixed (and historically set)

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operations of the apparatus and undermine the ideological closedness of the same: These films use gesture to demonstrate how cinema’s images are always part improvised and part premeditated, and thus less amenable to political dogma. (2014, 94)

For a considerable section of his paper Schoonover is affirmative in the possibilities for the interrogation and subversion of dominant performative styles, and the gendered component is critical in this respect. Within the slapstick mode, the spontaneous gesturing of Masina operates in a (re) humanising way, in which corporeal agency is not fully repossessed by the actor but mobilised against the stultifying and reifying discursive processes of cultural production. In this respect, Masina’s manual choreography is of key significance. The potential in such corporeal disobedience is radical. Schoonover is clear about the role of the actor: Gesture refuses objectification and easy instrumentalization: the gesturing body is not a symbol but remains instead a dynamic force whose central feature is persistent ‘presence,’ and which questions our sense of both what the past was and what future change looks like. (2014, 100)

Christina Petersen has identified very real and concrete effects of slapstick in provoking cinematic audiences when she explains how ‘modern clowns could innervate spectators by inciting a physical response such as laughter merely by watching other bodies on the screen’ (2018, 235), and Kiel and McKenna celebrate the gendered capability of the body by referencing the work of Maggie Hennefeld which ‘has shifted our attention to the multivalent significance of early female comic performers, identifying the slapstick comedienne’s body as a site for the negotiation of profound social change’ (2018, 125; original emphasis). It is precision in the apparent randomness of Giulietta Masina’s performance style, whether effected in large gestures or in the finer movement of her hands, that invites subversive interpretation. For Schoonover, Masina’s gestures are historiographic in the sense that they comment on the way that films have been understood to ‘write’ or ‘record’ history through bodies, and they point to the limitations of models that hitch cinema’s capacity for historical representation to a reified account of the body. (2014, 94)

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Unlike the disobedient arm and hand of Kubrick’s strange doctor, Masina’s performances do not mark a f issure between the character’s conscious agency and intentions, and what her body and hands do. Like Chaplin’s comical balletic routines, the impulsive and haphazard manual behaviours of Masina are incorporated harmoniously back into the animated physical self, as they simultaneously obstruct, undermine, and disturb the mechanical rhythmic precisions of the world and objects with which they interact. One of the possible difficulties with the politicisation of corporeal gestures, as they resist objectification through their recalcitrant animation, is a possible neutralising of their transformative agency. In many cases, their spontaneous physical movements – whether manual or involving the whole body – are all too neatly absorbed back into the performer’s presence so that harmony, rather than more potentially explosive disharmony, prevails. Actions are thus individualised, personified, and become dissociable from the player in any way that celebrates the likelihood of their effecting radical social or political change. For this reason, the ultimate gag in many comical sequences that involve slapstick or clowning gesturing, and which pit the individual body against the gargantuan machine, is not the snowball-effect consequence of maximum devastation and destruction from minimal effort. While the visual impact of this outcome offers a degree of overwhelming comical spectacle, often the humorous pay-off beat is the fact that the diminutive and (supposedly) impotent protagonist walks away from the wreckage unscathed and (for maximum comedic impact) utterly unaware of the aftermath of his or her actions. The most powerful forms of subversive intervention into modern processes like industrialised mechanisation, depersonalisation, and reification, may perhaps be a deliberate and measured retreat from those disempowering mechanisms. Rather than confront their interpolation and dehumanisation of the individual, many innovative filmmakers establish characters and story worlds that withhold corporeal and manual interaction from power structures that – as is literally the case represented in Chapin’s Modern Times – suck the individual into the capitalist apparatus of production. Barbara Mennel explores gendered labour in her pioneering contemporary study Women at Work in Twenty-First Century Cinema, and politicises the manual work of women by positioning it beyond the public sphere: In contrast to the mechanization of the industrial body, the individual gesture captures domestic and care work in the intimacy of the home and the hotel room, the space of secrets and belongings. (2019, 131)

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Mennel celebrates the potential for empowering female (and in this case female migrant) action by giving emphasis to ‘the intimate space of the private home’ and focuses on the role of the hand and on how ‘gestures also allow agency to come to the fore, as they include the potential to exceed what is necessary, inherited, and acceptable to perform tasks’ (2019, 133). As a line from Brian Desmond Hurst’s Dangerous Moonlight attests, the role of women as domestic workers is typically positioned against that of the active, plot-driving hero and his decisions. In that film, the pianist/fighter pilot protagonist is torn between re-joining the war effort and dedicating his manual skill to the national cause by composing and playing music. In one scene, after his comrade Mike announces to Carol that he’s going back to England, she expresses anger at his having failed to tell her sooner. As Mike packs his personal affairs, she offers assistance: ‘Let me help you. This is where you need a woman’s hands’. Innovative cinematic alternatives have found ways of exploring the role of female manual labour in the domestic space and, rather than relegate the importance of this work many filmmakers have centralised its significance. While such concentration on the activities of female characters forms a substantial component of the work of directors like Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arzner, Cecile Tang Shu Shuen, Agnès Varda and Jane Campion (even when they are not working within the genre of melodrama), perhaps the most sustained example of this comes from the work of Belgian f ilmmaker Chantal Akerman and her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels. With its European aesthetic and as a stylistic prototype of what would later be called ‘slow cinema’, Jeanne Dielman eschews many standard mainstream narrative structures, coding, and conventions. In this way it shifts its political focus away from the public arena and establishes a strong female protagonist within a domestic space and charges the diurnal routines of her chores with alternative possibilities. Akerman goes beyond the hackneyed option of empowering her central character by granting Jeanne narrative agency: to do that would have been a simplistic capitulation to the traditional ways in which classical plots unfold with conventional associations between character empowerment and narration. Indeed, the mere granting of active, plot-driving agency to a female protagonist does not ensure the development of fully rounded, complex, and nuanced characterisation but, in the worst cases, only provides a differently gendered duplication of what has become a mainstream ‘norm’. Nor does Akerman invite her audiences to reflect upon Jeanne’s domestic labour as charged with a significant symbolism, or to be valorised because of the alternative and special way in which Dielman’s private

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activity motivates narrative progression. Rather, the strength of the film comes from the studied and careful way in which Akerman presents her protagonist undertaking ordinary household tasks. We are unrelentingly involved with her in real time, and the rhythm and detail of Jeanne’s work draws us into intimate contact with the woman whose life and situation we are voyeuristically observing. Jeanne’s manual labour is given prominence and Akerman respectfully allows the significance (or absence of meaning) of the actions to reveal itself. The absence of suspense-creating codes and conventions (which, paradoxically in the mainstream product, serve to reassure spectators) here produces a more effective kind of tension. Akerman’s genius and innovation lie in the fact that her spectators are never entirely certain of what kind of genre film they are watching. Jeanne Dielman does not offer any interior/exterior division, or a separation and interplay between private/personal and public/political spaces as is often the case with the melodrama. Nor does the film have any of the aesthetic qualities of the musical: even one inflected by European sensibilities like French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955), Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000), or Akerman’s own Golden Eighties (1986). It does not stir the emotions with sudden impact or fluctuating uncertainty as do the horror, thriller, or film noir. Tonally, it does not follow standard qualities that inform the design of the romance, the comedy, or the tragedy. It might be considered within the framework of social realism, but even this categorisation is too limiting because its pacing and the choreography of actions, scenes, and shot compositions occurs with a counterintuitive focus and rhythm. In respect of these aesthetic qualities, Akerman’s relationship with Jeanne’s labouring hands is a useful clue as to how the whole film is working, thematically inviting us to reflect on the existential condition of its protagonist. It is worth comparing Akerman’s style with that of Robert Bresson who presents both the detail of moments and entire sequences with close-up and fastidious concentration on his characters’ hands. Manual dexterity and interaction are central to how Bresson’s narratives unfold, how his protagonists interact, and how emotional connections develop, succeed, or fail. At times, for the French director, there is no provision of extraneous or broader contextual and situational information by cutting to wider establishing shots of his mise en scène. For Akerman, precisely the opposite is true, but to no less potent an effect. The daily routines of Jeanne’s domestic chores are presented in medium shots, at a remove from the activity, and in uninterrupted long takes. The fixed camera and framing draw the spectator into the minutiae of the character’s manual undertakings as she peels

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potatoes, prepares ground meat, sits knitting, gets ready for bed, polishes shoes, washes dishes, opens a parcel, or undresses, among dozens of other tasks presented in meticulous detail but without the use of close-up proximity. The vast majority of popular cinema follows a conservative middle course between the opposing aesthetic extremes of Akerman and Bresson. When required, mainstream filmmakers cut with precision to apposite shots of hands and their activities, and thus eradicate ambiguity and, with it, the complexity of theme, characterisation, and narrative that are so enriching in the work of many European filmmakers. By trusting and empowering her audiences with their own editorial selection and focus, Akerman draws her spectators into novel modes of engagement and identification with her central character. By resisting any leading of the viewer’s gaze and rejecting the conventional cinematic codes in doing so, Akerman draws our attention onto the manual precision with which Jeanne accomplishes the most banal of tasks, increasing their relative importance for us. This stylistic mode implies a connection between the domestic labour of the protagonist and the creative project of the filmmaker. Both sets of work are juxtaposed, constructively, against their gendered counterparts: on the one hand, the reifying manual productivity of a dehumanising industrial complex in the public domain; on the other, the conservative ‘cookie-cutter’ structural approach to popular filmmaking and its limited and standardised lexicon of codes. Dielman and Akerman’s contraventions reach their climactic point in similar ways during the murder scene: the director’s by refusing any comfortable ‘out’ by modifying the tone of the sequence, and the character’s by virtue of the unexpected turn to violent action. Akerman intensifies the representation of Jeanne’s killing of one of her clients by maintaining her established visual qualities of framing and performance. Without ostensible motivation, the character takes a pair of scissors from her dressing table – an item which we have seen her use in the previous scene, but without any narrative foreshadowing, to open a package – and plunges it into the neck of the man with whom she has just had sex. For the protagonist, the transgression might be explicable by her professional situation, yet it is a sudden, dramatic departure from that personality. The film ends with a fixed framed shot (just under six minutes in length) of Jeanne sitting at her dining room table in a dimly lit room. The disruption to her life, brought about by the murder, is indicated by the tiny stain of victim’s blood on her white blouse and the drop on her left hand. Once again, in line with Akerman’s aesthetic asceticism, the director maintains her distance from the character, and frames this restraint for maximal emotional impact. The

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investigation of female agency and the evaluation of its consequences are pushed to the limit as Akerman explores modes of cinematic narration and characterisation, and an alternative style that matches those themes. In the case of Jeanne Dielman, the centrality of the female hand and its activities is demonstrative of Akerman’s faith in the cinema to present and explore core ideas by marking the importance of the limb as potent transformative entity. Although a f ilm with a male protagonist, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) is a useful counterpoint in this respect. Its protagonist discovers a portal into the mind of the eponymous celebrity. Once ‘inside’ the body of the actor, because of his manual dexterity as a puppeteer, Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) discovers that he can manipulate the movements and speech of Malkovich. On one level, the film seems to suggest that if in control of one’s hands, one has greater access to corporeal manipulation of another personality. On another, the film – and many others that represent intervention into, and meddling with, another character’s destiny – explores the idea that influencing the fate of a second party begins with the manual interference with that person’s affairs. In ironic, fantastical hyperbole, Being John Malkovich plays with the connection between cognition – human thinking, reflection, self-reflection, and consciousness – and the actions of the hands as objects for managing and controlling one’s immediate external environment. When intervention into another’s life is less absurdly represented than it is in the Jonze film, and the character who interferes with the fate of a second one is a woman, some interesting empowered protagonists have emerged. This is the case in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 2001 Amélie (also known as Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain), and in both adaptations of Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith: the 2005 television miniseries of the same name by Aisling Walsh, and Chan-wook Park’s version The Handmaiden from 2016. Each of these narratives introduces a strong female protagonist who, motivated by ambition, gets involved in the personal affairs of other characters. As the stories interrogate the morality and meanings of their main characters’ agency and determination, significant scenes are played out with a deliberate concentration on female hands. Amélie was written by Guillaume Laurent who also wrote the novel J’ai perdu mon corps which was adapted for the screen by him and director Jérémy Clapin as a 2019 animated feature film. The temptation to overstate the connections between both narratives is apparent, as Clapin’s film tells the romantic story of a severed hand making its way across Paris to find its owner. Whereas that film divides its syuzhet between the young man’s developing bond with his love interest and the tale of the struggles of the limb to reconnect with its owner, Amélie has only passing, but nonetheless

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Figure 1.2: The protagonist enjoys her secret manual pleasure in Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

significant, references to hands. Its title sequence establishes the relationship between the filmmaking process and the hands of the young Amélie. It displays the manual intervention in the creation of the cinematic narrative in a way that is echoed in the protagonist’s manipulation of several characters’ lives. The montage sequences that introduce the parents of Amélie (Audrey Tautou) pointedly contain hand references: for her mother, it’s her dislike of wrinkled hands in the bath or being inadvertently touched by another person; for her father, it’s the neurotic satisfaction he takes in a number of menial manual tasks. We are told that Amélie enjoys the secret sensation of plunging her hand into a sack of grain or lentils (Fig. 1.2). Her growing delusion that she can successfully control the destinies of folk in her world – a misapprehension born from a childhood experience in which she is accused of causing a car accident by taking a photograph – ends with her realisation that her own fate is in the hands of random universal coincidences and beyond her control. At one point she visits a fun house in Montmartre and, as she is carried in the dark on a coaster, a character in a skeleton suit – a personification of death symbolising the inevitability of fate or destiny – touches his bony hand and fingers against her face (Fig. 1.3). It may be signif icant that the one-armed grocer’s assistant Lucien (Jamel Debbouze) who, although victimised by his boss, is presented as the only character who is thoroughly contented with his lot. Shown with perfect manual agility, Jeunet gives us a sense that Lucien has achieved a harmony between self-satisfaction and no prurient need to medal with other characters’ affairs.

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Figure 1.3: The hand of fate in Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

The titles of Fingersmith and The Handmaiden indicate the nature of the intervention of their female protagonists into the higher-class lives and situations of the ladies for whom each has been hired as personal assistant. The plots of both films contain complicated reversals and revelations involving the pretence of the ‘handmaidens’, and twists of deceit and conning by other characters. The protagonists’ manual labour is underscored by their roles and is charged with potent sexual undertones when the maid and mistress in each case develop strong emotional and carnally consummated relationships. In Aisling Walsh’s 2005 television version, as the maid Sue Trinder (Sally Hawkins) and her mistress Maud Lilly (Elaine Cassidy) get romantically closer, the evolution of their sexual intimacy is played out with a focus on their hands. In an early montage sequence Sue gives Maud a white glove to put on: Walsh lingers on this with sensual attention and intercuts the moment with close-up shots of her other hand, erotically stirred. Sue’s swindle is overseen by Richard Rivers (Rupert Evans) who has arranged for her faked friendship of Maud as he feigns his own courtship of the upperclass heiress. Unexpectedly the ruse is threatened by the genuine burgeoning intimacy between the women and, as the deceitful intervention becomes an authentic carnal one, a few key sequences foreground the development of the relationship by concentrating on the characters’ hands. In one scene, Maud complains of a toothache. Sue puts a thimble on her finger and rubs the tooth of her mistress. The subtlety of the heightened sexual tension of the scene is facilitated by the close framing of Sue’s hand and covered finger as she strokes Maud’s tooth. With its penetrative symbolism, the manual activity is charged as the dramatic locus point for Sue’s interventions

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into Maud’s life and lifestyle; as romantic partner and as social-climbing aspirant. The representation of social class is bound in a gendered way to modes of manual work: the elite engage in activities of leisure: reading, painting, and crocheting, while the common folk survive by domestic labour, servitude, and ‘fingersmith’ criminality. Walsh foregrounds a literal sense of the term ‘manipulation’ in which the gesticulations and gestures of hands are shown to be as capable of treachery as they are of interacting with genuine feeling. Farah Karim-Cooper finds frequent use of the same idea in the work of Shakespeare and many contemporary artists. She genders this ambiguity concisely: ‘Hands and their touches become the focus as symbols of desire, female sexuality and its misrepresentation’ (2016, 9). Elsewhere, as Karim-Cooper identifies socially appropriate regimes of hand activity for Renaissance-period English women, she quotes a section of writing by Thomas Becon in which he delineates a certain etiquette of labour, in recognition of one’s social status: Thomas Becon argues […] ‘it shall become honest and virtuous maids to give themselves to honest and virtuous exercises: to spinning, to carding, to weaving, to sowing, to washing, to wringing, to sweeping, to scouring, to brewing, to baking, and to all kinds of labours without exception that becomes maids of their vocation’. (2016, 52)

In this reference to Becon’s ‘Catechism’ from 1564, with its prominence given to manual activity and its association with ‘virtuous’ femininity, Karim-Cooper establishes a timeline that she traces through to early modern England. It is precisely the domestic incarceration of the female – literalised in Fingersmith by Maud’s oppressive and domineering Uncle Christopher Lilly (Charles Dance) – wrought and ensured with focus on women’s hands, that Maud and Sue defy. The theme of their rebelliousness is explored through their manual interactions. In a scene when they lie in bed together, Maud expresses her fear of being intimate with Rivers for the first time. Sue proposes they practice kissing. With a continuation of Walsh’s sensuous photography, the director focuses on Maud’s wearing both of her gloves. As the sequence unfolds Sue removes them and they kiss. The sequence continues with a shot of Sue’s hand caressing Maud as she orgasms. The references to the role of hands as active agents are no less significant in Chan-wook Park’s cinematic adaptation of the Waters’ novel. With the South Korean director’s interest in multi-layered narratives and complicated intertwined plot structures, the story provides rich material for working through the key themes of duplicity, sexual liberation, personal

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freedom, and the stratification of social class systems (here rendered with a national undercurrent). In each case, focus on what characters do with their hands, alone or interacting with one another, provides significant moments of thematic development. The Victorian characters of the original version are transposed to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s; the lower-class Sue Tinder becomes Korean pickpocket Sook-Hee (Tae-ri Kim), and Maud Lilly is now wealthy heiress Lady Hideko (Min-hee Kim). The stylised sequences in which the sexual relationship of Sook-Hee and Lady Hideko evolves involve choreographed manual interactions. The sensual scene in which the maid alleviates the toothache of her mistress is played out as Sook-Hee tends to Hideko in her bath. When the latter announces that one of her teeth is sharp and giving her discomfort, Sook-Hee places her f inger in the mouth of her mistress and rubs it in and out over the cap of the tooth. The scene is shot with insert point of view cuts of Sook-Hee observing the breasts of Lady Hideko, as she gently caresses her maid’s arm with her f inger. The same plot twists of the novel are maintained although Chan-wook Park amplif ies the sexual and violent interludes in his version. He allows a dramatic framing of hands to carry these tonal extremities and to give further emphasis to core questions in the film. In a deviation from the fatal stabbing of conman Richard Rivers in Fingersmith, the retribution meted on the opportunistic corrupt Count Fujiwara (Jung-woo Ha) in The Handmaiden is a prolonged scene of torture by Hideko’s abusive Uncle Kouzuki (Jin-woong Chu). The men encounter each other as characters who have been manipulating the females of the story, and their final confrontation is marked by a disempowering of this oppressive agency. While Sook-Hee and Hideko continue to consummate their romantic attachment, fulf illing the relationship that began with sensual manual connection, the male characters enter a situation of mutual self-destruction. This annihilation is accentuated by three visual references to hands. The most prolonged of these is Kouzuki’s drilling holes into Fujiwara’s left hand as he places it into a book-binding apparatus. In a flashback sequence, Fujiwara’s pretence at his having taken Hideko’s virginity is exposed when we see him slashing her hand with a knife to draw blood to stain the marital bedsheets. Finally, as Kouzuki comes to realise that he has been inhaling the poisonous smoke from Fujiwara’s last cigarette – the deliberate ruse designed for suicide and to murder the Uncle – Chan-wook Park inserts a shot of the old man’s raised hand, twisting a shaft of blue smoke around it in a visually lyrical close-up. As was the case with Aisling Walsh’s adaptation, Chan-wook Park remains faithful to the core themes of Sarah Waters’ novel: fingers and hands are established

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and framed as agents of empowerment for the female protagonists who renegotiate their oppressive, predetermined, and marginalised positions socially, domestically, and within patriarchal norms. For their oppressors, the controlling and domineering male characters, abusive manipulation brings about destruction by their own hands. Significantly, Fingersmith – both novel and miniseries – and The Handmaiden are set either at a historical moment (in the case of the former) or in a geographical location (in the case of the latter) removed from an era of modernity at which the Fordist model of mass production reached its zenith. This distancing affords the writer and directors an opportunity to explore manual skills, labour, and leisure time activities in a way that would change radically in an age of rising consumerism. There were considerable consequences for mental and physical well-being accompanying the rise in spending power and conspicuous consumption that occurred with the decline of hand-based processes of creation and production. The associable increase in desire for material comfort and acquisition with the dehumanising effects of the industrial and mechanical reification of humankind might go some way to explaining the attitudes towards ‘labour-efficient’ genocide and mass destruction that became the hallmark of the Nazi machine during the Second World War. Austrian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, innovative thinker in the field and survivor of the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps where he was incarcerated with his family in 1938, has written of this association with a passing mention of manual operations: In the machine age man is afraid of being robbed of his humanity by his own handiwork, the machine; witness the social fear of the evils of mass society and the psychological anxiety about losing one’s identity. (1988, 44)

In a gendered way Betty Friedan triangulates consumerism and notions of female self-worth with a purposefully manufactured, capitalist-technological decline in manual labour in her influential 1963 work The Feminine Mystique. In that study, Friedan details the increasingly liminal position into which females of a post-War generation were forced, by restricted possibilities for access to education and vocational options, and undermined in their oppressive and limited domestic roles by virtue of contemporary developments in domestic appliance availability. By taking her female protagonists outside a domestic realm in which manual labour was increasingly technologised, Waters affords herself an opportunity to empower her characters by exploring an historical moment in which the work and actions of hands were still fundamental to personality, personal aims, and self-realisation.

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Works Referenced Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext[e]. Becon, Thomas. 1564. ‘Catechism’. In The Works of Thomas Becon, 431–434. London. Benjamin, Walter. 2008. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Second Version’, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility and other Writings on Media, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, 19–55. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. Brandel Marc. 1979. The Lizard’s Tail. New York: Simon & Schuster. Bullington, Jennifer. 2013. The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective. Stockholm: Springer. Csepregi, Gabor. 2006. The Clever Body. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press. Dahlquist, Marina, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson and Valentine Robert (eds.). 2018. Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Dennett, Daniel C. 2017. From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Dennett, Daniel C. and Gregg D. Caruso. 2021. Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. London: Wiley. Dickens, Charles. 1995. Hard Times. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Friedan, Betty. 2010. The Feminine Mystique. London: Penguin. Gazzaniga, Michael S. 2012. Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. London: Constable & Robinson. Gilson, Etienne. 1957. Painting and Reality. New York: Pantheon Books. Hammer, Felix. 1974. Leib und Geschlecht: Philosophische Perspektiven von Nietzsche his Merleau-Ponty und phänomenologisch-systematischer Aufriss. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag. Harris, Sam. 2012. Free Will. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, New Delhi: Free Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper Row. Hitchens, Christopher. 2007. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. London: Atlantic Books. Karim-Cooper, Farah. 2016. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York, London: Bloomsbury.

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Keat, Russell. 1982. ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of the Body’. Unpublished Manuscript, University of Edinburgh. http://www.russellkeat.net (Accessed September 15, 2018.) Kiel, Charlie and Denise McKenna. 2018. ‘Risky Business: The Early Film Actor and Discourses of Danger’. In Dahlquist et al., 119–133. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kuberski, Philip. 2012. Kubrick’s Total Cinema: Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Leader, Darian. 2016. Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why. United Kingdom: Penguin, Random House. Malik, Kenan. 2000. Man, Beast and Zombie: What Science Can and Cannot Tell Us about Human Nature. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Mennel, Barbara. 2019. Women At Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2006. Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge Classics. Napier, John. 1980. Hands. New York: Pantheon Books. Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Perez, Gilberto. 2019. The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Petersen, Christina. 2018. ‘“The Best Synonym of Youth”: G. Stanley Hall, Mimetic Play, and Early Cinema’s Embodied Youth Spectator’. In Dahlquist et al., 231–248. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Révész, Géza. 1938. ‘La function sociologique de la main humaine et de la main animale’. In Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 35: 26–49. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Roberts, Adam. 2009. ‘Is SF Handwritten?’ In James Holden (guest editor) Writing Technologies, 55–69. Vol. 2.2. Rowe, Katherine. 1999. Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. California: Stanford University Press. Rüssel, Arnulf. 1995. ‘Gestalt und Bewegung: Psychologische Grundfragen der Sprechspur’. In Psychologische Beiträge 2: 409–438. Sardenberg, Trajano et al. 2002. ‘Evolution of the Representation of the Hands in Plastic Arts’. Acta Ortop Bras. 10(3) – July/September, 2002, 15–24.

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Schmitt, Jean-Claude. 1991. ‘The Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries’. In A Cultural History of Gesture, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 59–70. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Schoonover, Karl. 2014. ‘Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation: Masina’s Cabiria, Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism’. Cinema Journal, Volume 53, Number 2, Winter 2014, 93–116. University of Texas Press. Sontag, Susan. 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics. Stott, Andrew. 2005. Comedy. New York and London: Routledge. Sudnow, David. 1993. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tallis, Raymond. 2003. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Tallis, Raymond. 2010. Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence. London. Atlantic Books. Turvey, Malcolm. 1997. ‘Seeing Theory, On Perception and Emotional Response in Current Film Theory’. In Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 431–457. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Waters, Sarah. 2007. Fingersmith. London: Virago Press. Wilson, Edward O. 2018. The Origins of Creativity. Penguin, Random House: United Kingdom. Wilson, Frank R. 1998. The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture. New York: Pantheon Books.

2.

Symbolism – The Semiotic Hand Abstract In this section the hand is analysed as a tool of communication, f irst by assessing how the creation of on-screen meaning relates to sociallyestablished codes of expression, and then by considering how filmed hands play a role semiotically in the creation of new hermeneutic possibilities. It also looks at a compilation of films that focus on manual movement as a part of denotative or connotative coding, or as it makes meaning through established social hand gestures, signalling, or conventional sign language. This section works with a tripartite structure and divides representations of the hand into categories of the metonymic, the metaphorical, and specific cases in which both are combined. Key Words: Visual metaphors; visual metonyms; memory; hand gestures; communication; sign language

The Meaningful Hand and Metonymy A quick glance through dozens of framed hands on screen invites questions about the function of the images within the overall film. When the hand is more than just a hand, we must investigate how its supplementary meaning is working and whether its signifying role is contributing directly or indirectly to one or more of the central themes of the film. In one instance, the hand might symbolise evil, fate, redemption, retribution, and it may or may not continue to do so emblematically as an objective correlative elsewhere in the same work. However, in another film it might have a wider interrogative scope representing the irascibility of evil, the inevitability of fate, the speciousness of redemption, or the futility of retribution. In the latter instances the singular cinematic moment is connected to a key thematic question. This chapter will consider the former set by evaluating moments when the meanings produced by symbolic use of the hand are either tangential to the main thematic consideration or offered as a transitory contribution in the overall construction of the narrative.

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_ch02

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For Giorgio Agamben, a demotion in the importance of gestures in the late-nineteenth century resulted in an interiorising of personal expression. Writing of the period he noted: ‘An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate’ (1993, 137). Agamben points to the cinematic medium as a possible outlet for gestural expressiveness; a kind of repository for various corporeal modes of communication. In time it might even evolve its own syntactic lexicon. His assertions that gesture ‘rather than the image is the cinematic element’ (ibidem, 138) and that cinema ‘leads images back into the realm of gesture’ (ibidem, 139), indicate the first steps by which social (corporeal) communication could become semiotically revitalised by the medium. Elsewhere Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, and Valentine Robert have noted the dialectical relationship between the social meanings of gestures as captured on screen, and how that reframing gives renewed meaning to the same gestures (2018, 173–174). In the early years of the medium, interpretation of the gesture was not yet assisted by a supplementarity of language, and this opened the possibility of free association between and across units of expression. Words and phrases were subconsciously attached to the movements of the face, body, arms, hands, and fingers, and this invited a range of possibilities for visual symbolism. Adam Kendon suggests the creative potential inherent in the gap: Such communication was seen as employing devices quite different from those of spoken language and it was regarded as having sharply different functions. ‘Nonverbal communication’ was seen as having to do with the processes by which interpersonal relations are established and maintained. (1982, 53)

Christina Petersen has referred to the writing of G. Stanley Hall who marks the connection between various silent modes of speech in the modern era and cinema. She notes that: With the decline of gesture, communication had become increasingly less expressive of internal emotional states. For this reason, Hall heartily approved of gesture’s recent resurgence in silent cinema. (2018, 236)

For Petersen what was once within the social context a functional mode of interpersonal communication stimulated a wealth of creative symbolism when framed on screen.

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Gestures possess the linguistic quality of arbitrary sliding signification. As evidenced by Romana Lefevre’s playful 2011 book Rude Hand Gestures of the World (see also Wundt 1973; Burke, 1991; Bogucka, 1991; Roodenburg, 1991; Spicer, 1991; Leroi-Gourhan, 1993; and Stimson, 2008), they can simultaneously perform cultural specificity and universal commonality. Between both there is room for hermeneutic possibilities that the cinema can preserve and supplement. Several theorists have celebrated the medium’s unique capacity for this preservation and supplementarity. Keith Thomas implies the importance of the role of cinema when he encourages the study of gestures sociologically: ‘[film] can offer a key to some of the fundamental values and assumptions underlying any particular society; as the French historians would say, it illuminates mentalité’ (1991, 5–6). The following chapter will advance along the lines of this argument, developing it to propose that a certain distillation of gestural expression takes place in the cinematic art form. The wealth of this syntagmatic or lexical register occurs when hand gestures become charged with a double articulation and when manual mo(ve)ments are opened to meanings beyond what they are manifestly presenting (or were originally signifying in social contexts); that is, when denotative transforms into connotative representation. The human hand bears infinite potential as a mode of symbolic expression by metonymic association. As with the verbal metonym, ideas can be connected to the limb by displacement from a related concept. This echoes the ways in which the human hand can gather knowledge of an object by touching or feeling it. In other words, a manual metonymy charges the image with additional meaning by taking hold of it in a proximate way, just as the functioning hand reaches towards something that it seeks to understand. In the cinematic examples below, the new interpretation of the hand-as-symbol is not thematically sustained throughout the whole film, although it may relate to a number of themes. In the case of metonymic symbolism, meaning is deferred beyond the text and positioned away from its core interrogations. As Laura Oswald has suggested: By its very nature the metonymy inscribes in the text an absent signifier. The relation of this absence to the spectator is an even more important feature of the metonymical operation than its role in generating the diegesis. (1983, 123)

For example, in some cases already discussed – such as The Hands of Orlac, The House is Black, The Hand or Dekalog, jeden – the cinematic framing and representations of the hand establish meanings that are complementary

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to the key themes of those films. They do this by moving centrifugally out from the image of the limb and then diffusing across the broader questions that the filmmaker is asking. In the examples mentioned these include, respectively: Can we control our fate? Does the mind control the body or vice versa? Is the divine hand a malevolent tool? Can science master the laws of nature and dismiss the supernatural? In the films below, when concepts are generated by the metonymic framing of the hand, they contribute additional information to our understanding of the films, but the supplemental meanings remain outside the narrative space. Dudley Andrew cites Christian Metz in respect of the cinematic metonym that he describes as ‘the figure of association by which we pass from one aspect or image to a related one in search of a satisfying final picture. When this process becomes fully secondarized and elaborated in logical (i.e., semiotic) patterns, we have before us a filmed narrative’ (1983, 135). Cases of metonymic symbolism often occur when the concept of association is abstract or abstruse and best rendered concretely. Filmmakers use hands as objective correlatives to suggest ideological or hegemonic positions, or complex relations between individuals or groups. Any number of other objects might have been used in the same way, but the advantage in using the hand is its ability to reach out with affirmative or threatening intention. One typical example of this is the third of George A. Romero’s ‘zombie series’, his 1985 feature film Day of the Dead. While Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) had already used grasping arms and hands, and crowds of possessed zombies as the antagonistic menace, Romero’s later film represents an apocalyptic moment at which only a small group of survivors is embattled by the now largely possessed zombie population. In his dystopian nightmare Romero unfolds a historical materialist dialectic where the extremes of hyper-masculine aggression are confronted by, and seek to destroy, the mindless masses. The political violence is mobilised against ideological corporeal and mental control, and the director positions a strong female character between both. In the film, gendered possession and aggression are in violent conflict. On the one hand, intellectually vacuous, semi-conscious, and spiritless creatures multiply and advance to ‘convert’ the remaining minority. On the other, the unit of soldiers and their sergeant are charged with fanatical testosterone-fuelled hostility and blood lust. Culture and society have broken down and the regression is marked by characters’ use of language. In the case of the zombies, speech has become incomprehensible moaning and groaning, for the army men, their militaristic turns of phrase are charged with sexually explicit and misogynistic aggression. Romero suggests deeper meanings to the two kinds

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of possession, and this is played out through manual symbolism. Unlike his previous films, in Day of the Dead the zombies are in the majority with the only hope of deliverance falling on the shoulders of a depleted unit of the U.S. Army. Both sides are void of human reason and compassion, and Romero withholds the possibility of any affirmative outcome. The symbolic displacement of hands used metonymically is compressed into an important opening scene which is not clearly identified as diegetically prior to, or after, the main body of the film. In the sequence that establishes the narrative context, we find protagonist Sara (Lori Cardille) sitting in a white-bricked space. She looks and walks towards the opposite wall of the brightly lit cell to where a calendar is hanging. She contemplates the utopian image for the month of October and slowly raises her hand to touch it. Unexpectedly, dozens of zombie arms and hands burst through the surface of the wall flailing and reaching threateningly. Sara screams and the scene cuts rapidly to show her sitting in a helicopter. Her reflective expression establishes film’s antagonism firmly on a symbolism of the hand. Although the belligerent manual activities of Romero’s soldiers are underscored by a gendered aggression, associations are often made between manual labour and masculinity less violently. There is historical precedence for representations of the working male hands being contrasted with their delicate or passive female equivalents. Farah Karim-Cooper quotes sixteenth-century author Thomas Becon as he lists in his Catechism some of the manual activities to which women should commit themselves in order to avoid the temptation of ‘whoredom and sin’. It is assumed that less strenuous activities (quoted in Karim-Cooper 2016, 52) might protect the delicacy of the female limbs which, when on display, ‘were expected to be physically perfect, providing visual evidence of inner virtue’ (55). Barbara Mennel discusses the framing of domestic manual labour in Philippe Le Guay’s 2010 Les femmes du 6e étage (The Women on the Sixth Floor), and points to the characterisation of the group of Spanish immigrants who have moved into a 1960s Paris apartment. In a brief moment when a manual gesture is used metonymically to indicate one maid’s contentment with her situation of domestic labour, the film establishes a clearly gendered ideological position. Mennel notes how, with a succinct symbolism, one of the maids ‘moves her hands to signify ironing, sharing how much she enjoys the activity. These opening gestures accompany speech and encapsulate labor’ (2019, 137). In the same chapter, Mennel discusses an equally significant ideological moment from Giuseppe Capotondi’s La doppia ora (The Double Hour, 2009), at which point the touch of the female hands is used to position the character of Sonia (Kseniya Rappoport) in a submissive or passive position with respect

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to her lover Guido (Filippo Timi). Mennel summarises her interpretation of The Double Hour and The Unknown Woman by connecting gendered characterisation with home spaces, referring to the manual symbolism of both films: They capture the gestural economies of intimate work in the domestic sphere. Whereas romance privileges the somber heroine with a precise gestural vocabulary that makes her an ideal candidate for domesticity, the thriller depicts work in the house as a possible ruse for criminal intentions. (2019, 152–153)

Farah Karim-Cooper analyses Medieval and Renaissance discourses around the female hand and foregrounds the extent to which the limb could symbolise the whole of a feminine personality. While the gendered hand was inherently bound to notions of labour, or at least the kind of manual work to which the virtuous lady should be dedicated, Karim-Cooper notes that in ‘the palm of the hand was encoded a person’s character and identity, upon it, their social status and gender’ (2016, 6). The significance of status is considerable in many representations of the symbolism of the gendered hand on screen. This is evident in the adaptations of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and its best-known screen versions from 1938, co-directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, and George Cukor’s My Fair Lady (1964). Both films have a passing reference to the hands of flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Wendy Hiller and Audrey Hepburn, respectively) as she confirms to Professor Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard and Rex Harrison) that his venture at passing her off as an aristocratic lady has been successful. To demonstrate that his training in social manners and proprieties has led to her refinement, she tells him: ‘I ain’t dirty. I washed my face and hands before I come, I did’. With her social class ascent Eliza has entered a world of leisure in which domestic chores are left to the servants. She no longer has the dirty appearance of a street vendor whose hands and face are inevitably muddied by the common labour of her trade. Examples of metonymic references to the hands of the working-class male are common, and association is frequently made between the condition of the masculine hands and aspirations of upward social mobility. As we have already seen, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush concludes with the successful prospectors celebrating their newly acquired wealth by demonstrating how they have left their manual labour behind. One appears adorned in impossibly cumbersome clothing, layers of opulent coats that make his movement, not alone any physical goldmining activity, impractical. Meanwhile, his

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accomplice is presented having a manicure. Early references to the hands and hand work of aspiring male protagonists are made in films as thematically diverse as The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy, 1933), and the Brian De Palma version of Scarface (1983). In Murphy’s adaptation of Eugene O’Brien’s play, when the ambitious Brutus Jones (Paul Robeson) has left his humble African American community to seek his fortune, he gets work as a shoeshine boy on a train. During his first task Murphy’s camera lingers on the manual labour, and Jones’ exchange with his partner Jeff (Frank H. Wilson) not only introduces the men’s desires for social advancement, but also fittingly ends with a turn of phrase that implicates the role of the hands, by metonymic suggestion, with the endeavour. Jeff raises various pairs of polished shoes and discusses the possible wealth of their owners. Comparing one set he surmises that the items belong to a wealthy, newly married couple. With colloquial inflection Jeff remarks: ‘Number Five. A whole section. That’s a honeymoon couple. That’s a natural. If you plays your hand right, it means the long green’. At a later party scene when Jones is introduced to, and shakes the hand of, a new acquaintance, the latter comments: ‘Gee that’s very strong’. Despite Jones’ desire for social refinement, the strength and size of his hands are an obstinate reminder of his humble origins. As the narrative unfolds, and the social standing of the protagonist advances, Jones’ hands are occupied in different ways. He is variously shown throwing craps dice during a gambling scene, stabbing another man, and counting money. When he recognises that his demise is imminent, he uses another turn of phrase that bears metonymic significance to the role of his hands in his rise and fall. As his subjects desert him, he declares: ‘Well, I reckon I overplays my hand this once!’ References to the anti-hero’s hands are not sustained in Brian De Palma’s Scarface, but in an early scene the symbolic relationship between the ambition and social position of Cuban immigrant Tony Montana (Al Pacino) is established. When Tony is being interviewed by the American customs, he tells them that he works ‘a lot with my hands’. One makes a comment about the tattoo on his hand before violently grabbing it and asking about the scar on his face. In a subsequent scene, before Tony has been inducted into the world of the criminal bosses, he sits taking a break in the street food kiosk where he works as a dishwasher. A group of handsomely dressed gangsters emerges from their cars accompanied by their richly outfitted girlfriends. Having spotted Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) Tony comments on his modest social standing. He raises his hands and looks at them with a gesture that creates a metonymic connection between his aspiration and desire to move from humble manual work to the lifestyle of the wealthy drug barons. The

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ideological connection between the decency of hard grafting and righteousness of character is carried forward in the film with the implication that as rougher manual labour is replaced by frivolous or decadent activity, the morality and virtue of the individual are compromised. This use of metonym is manifest in the most clearly established way, although handled with a different tonal register, in Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator from 1940. In that comedy, the modest Jewish barber is confused with Hynkel, the Dictator of Tomania (both played by Chaplin), because of their physical resemblance. The remarkable similarity culminates in the barber’s being mistakenly placed on Hynkel’s podium to address the gathered masses of Tomanians with expectation of an inspiring militant call to arms in support of the national cause. Early in the film, before the erroneous swap occurs, an exchange takes place between the barber’s love interest Hannah (Paulette Goddard) and Mrs. Jaeckel (Emma Dunn) in advance of a date with him. As she prepares for the meeting the chat establishes the connection between honest work and its physical manifestations: mrs. jaeckel: hannah: mrs. jaeckel:

Oh my dear, those hands… What’s the matter with them? Those callouses: they’re so rough.

The apprehensive female date replies that perhaps she shouldn’t go out to meet the barber but is told ‘Don’t be foolish: he knows you do housework’ as Jaeckel leaves to borrow a pair of gloves for her charge. The integrity associated with the lowly manual work of the housemaid and barber is contrasted with the framing of the ruler’s hands as their gesturing makes the characters absurd, ineffectual, and redundant. Their political aspirations and ideological positions are ridiculed by metonymic connotation through their hands. When we find Hynkel in his private sanctuary he is unengaged and bored. In a well-known sequence he plays with a large floating balloon depiction of the world, benignly misrepresenting his ruthless ambition for its complete possession and domination. With nothing else to do, Hynkel’s ennui has him idly passing his time in a lyrical, choreographed dance with the airborne sphere as he tosses and kicks it around his chamber. Later, when he meets Napaloni, the Dictator of Bacteria (Jack Oakie), the salutes of the malevolent leaders are ridiculed as they engage in a farcical hand-gesture game of ‘salute versus handshake’. One gives a salute while the counterpart holds out his hand for a shake, and then they reverse this, missing each other with confused swaps. The scene ridicules the fascist hand salute gesture and everything it represents.

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Because of the working-class situations in which we find the protagonists of several of the ‘angry young men’ British social realist films of the 1960s, both the labour and leisure activities of those characters are symbolically charged by references to their hands. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) by Karel Reisz, and Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film This Sporting Life are exemplary in this respect. In several scenes in the former, Reisz lingers on the framed manual labour of mechanical worker Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) as he performs his industry line duties. Both the size and strength of his hands are metonymically charged with a tension and restrained anger which are carried over into his romantic interactions with the females whom he pursues. Seaton’s inability to express himself emotionally or to see his romantic dates as anything other than objects for conquest are characteristics presumed to result from his own reification like a pair of Dickensian working hands in the industrial operation. What should be intimate, gentle, tactile, and sensitive connections with the women he encounters, are presented as cold and functional seductions. Seaton’s hands, like his personality, have lost their capacity for human touch (both physical and emotional), and the efficiency with which they undertake their professional duties reveals the reduction of this humanity to utilitarian mechanics. In a sophisticated way This Sporting Life sublimates masculine violence into aggressive rugbypitch competition. There are frequent hints that protagonist Frank Machin (Richard Harris) is charged with a volatile repressed anger best suited to his sporting performances. Following an accident during the opening sequence match, Machin is taken to the dentist to have his teeth repaired. Recognising the violent disposition of the injured rugby player, as the dentist sedates Machin, he warns him: ‘Keep your hands in your pockets’. References to Machin’s hands are metonymically wrought with a tautness that associates the angry personality with labour and gender. Mr. Johnson, Machin’s older surrogate father-figure and sports promotor, is the focal point of this association in a conversation between the sportsman and his landlady Mrs. Hammond (Rachel Roberts), whom Machin fancies. The exchange begins with Hammond criticising Johnson, whom Machin affectionately calls ‘Dad’: hammond: He’s never had a job of work in his life. machin: How do you know he’s never worked? hammond: Because I’ve got eyes. You just look at his hands. He’s got awful hands. They’re all soft. machin: [Raising and examining his own hands] What have hands got to do with it? He’s got awful hands. I’ve got awful hands. We’re not all women.

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The position here reinforces long-standing gendered symbolism in relation to hands and work. The association between ‘awful’ and ‘soft’ in the dialogue prioritises an affirmation of active manual labour over avoidance of the same; valuing work done in the capitalist industrial sphere over that of the domestic, emotional, and tactile uses which are attributed to the feminine. The gendered separation of the public and private domains, overlaid with political and personal implications, can often be embodied in a single personality. In such instances, the character is represented as divided and in conflict over the dual roles associated with (predominantly) his private, personal domestic nature and the public, political, and professional duties he is required to fulfil. Such a schism informs the characterisation of prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham) in Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger. As the film narrates the events surrounding the 1981 hunger strikes by republican inmates in the Maze Prison, McQueen establishes Lohan as the conduit to the interior operations and events in the jail. Long before we meet the main protestor, Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), we follow the prison guard from his morning domestic preparations to the inside of the Maze prison. The spatial transition and related shift in Lohan’s role are encapsulated in the locker room scene in which he changes from his civilian clothing into his official uniform. From the opening shots of the film McQueen marks Lohan’s mobility between spaces by concentrating on his hands, and this metonymic association, positioning Lohan’s identity as divided between private personality and public persona, continues with a framing of his hands in fixed, close-up shots. Because Hunger interrogates the motivations behind the hunger strikes by working through a politics of the body, the importance of symbolic references to hands is emphasised. Following opening shots of bin lids being banged on the ground in boisterous protest at the mishandling of the republican prisoners, McQueen inserts a title card announcing ‘Hunger’. He cuts to the first of a series of shots of the prison warden’s hands as Raymond Lohan washes and soaks them in a basin. Barely noticeable wounds mark the knuckles and the back of his left hand as he holds them under the water. After a brief shot of his reflection in the mirror, he puts on two rings. The juxtaposition of the manual injuries – yet unexplained – and the jewellery, symbolically establishes his liminality as he is set between his private domestic life and his official public role. The drama of this association is compounded when following his quiet, diurnal breakfast routine, he leaves the house and checks the underside of his car for a bomb. While his hands are the locus of this symbolic in-between space of private and public, they metonymically echo the playing out of the prisoners’ political protest on their beaten, nude, and starving bodies. The

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use of the naked bodies as a site for the prisoners’ political remonstration and symbolic martyrdom haunts the representation of the Northern Ireland political situation. This is embodied in the dirty protest when the prisoners smear their excremental waste around the walls of their cells in an abject inversion of ‘washing one’s dirty linen in public’. In the jail changing rooms another shot of Lohan’s hands offers a disturbing merging of the political and the private when he puts his rings beside his gun into his locker. Following one of the violent assaults on the prisoners by the guards, and after a scene of the prison guards’ lunch break, there’s a sustained shot of Lohan’s face in the mirror above a sink in which he is, once again, soaking his wounded fists. As he places his hands into the water with a shot that echoes the opening ones, the bloody damage now confirms the provenance of the injuries that we have already seen. In contrast with the violence marked literally on the hands of the warden, a later scene shows prisoner Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan) in his cell, with a shot of his hand poking through a metal grid on the window. With gentle contemplation, he strokes a fly with his finger and turns his wrist as he allows it to walk around his hand. This long and slowly paced moment is juxtaposed with the cacophonous brutality of scenes in which the prisoners are violently manhandled, beaten, and physically abused by the wardens. Other minute details of manual activity are framed with Bresson-like attention by McQueen to accentuate the humanity of the captives and the brutality of the state officials overseeing their custody. Finer actions and movements of the hands are meticulously captured in several situations; prominent cases include scenes in which prisoners snort folded paper texts into their noses, set up the contraband radio, and surreptitiously pass written communications. These moments are significant because the notes and the wireless represent modes of correspondence between the inmates and the exterior world. As the public (outside) and private (interior) spatial transgressions occur, hands are used metonymically to symbolise the linking. The symbolised ‘connection’ of the characters’ hands can be understood in terms of the displacement or interchangeability of concepts such as manual touching and contact. In Hunger, the contact is not always literal, but bridges the private and public realms and blurs personal psychology and political motivations. In other films the metonymic use of the hands as symbols enacts an actual touching and feeling so that personal relationships are visually layered with secondary meanings. Representations of human contacts between the living and the dead, or characters’ attempts to establish communication between the two are frequently rendered in a tactile way. This quality is used in séance scenes

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when participants sitting around a table hold hands to communicate with the spirit world. This performed round-table endeavour visualises what the cinema cannot communicate: the feeling and sense of touch experienced by those partaking in the mystical affair. The hand can embody the sense of tangible contact that is absent when the characters purportedly ‘connect’ with supernatural entities. The visual connection between the living and the dead correlates with the visual linking of the scene on screen and the extradiegetic spectator, and the hand is used to communicate this symbolically. In the following films the hand is used in a metonymic way to bridge the gap between Cartesian extended and unextended as it represents characters’ attempts to connect the natural and supernatural worlds. Many stories dealing with ghastly hauntings or supernatural phenomena contain séance scenes in which characters join hands to contact the dead. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 Biutiful is a useful example in which such manual mechanisms are used. The film begins with tender shots of father Uxbal (Javier Bardem) holding the hand of his daughter Ana (Hanna Bouchaib) as he tells her about the history and provenance of his mother’s ring, which he has placed on her finger. Uxbal is a medium who is in the late stages of terminal cancer, and in several scenes we see him joining individuals with their deceased loved ones communicating by manual touch. When the opening scene is replayed later and the characters are shown again holding and interlinking hands, we know that Uxbal is close to death. His voice-over narration tells the story of his birth and connects the realms of the living and the dead generations as the characters caress each other’s hands. The metonymic use of hands framed in these repeated shots emphasises a continuity between the past and present; time frames with which Iñárritu plays. Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962) extends the metonymic link between hands and the numinous realm. Harvey’s film is layered with impressionistic aesthetics and production design suited to its representation of the purgatorial liminal space where we discover Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss). It tells the story of her wandering through an otherworldly space after a car accident we believe that she has survived. When she emerges from the wreck, zombie-like people populate the unnatural setting. Mary is a church organist, and the introduction of this religious element with her musical skillset enables numerous symbolic references to the actions of hands. In one scene she sits at a chapel organ and, after insert shots of her hands playing, she notices the words ‘CAST OUT DEVILS’ on a mural. The same wall contains saints and other characters extending their hands in exorcism-like poses. This scene is intercut with shots of the hands and

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arms of figures rising from a body of water and is followed by an exchange with a priest whose hands touch Mary’s as she plays the organ. He tells her she is being let go as organist but is welcome to seek out the security of the church. Presently, zombies chase her from the ‘carnival’ space and the film closes with a sequence where Mary’s crashed car is pulled out of the river, revealing her drowned inside. The continual framing of actual or painted characters’ hands in Carnival of Souls emphasises their function in reaching out literally – as they do at the end of the film – to save (or attempt to rescue) the drowning girl, and metonymically mark hands’ role in rites of salvation, benediction, and exorcism. In Harvey’s film, Mary is haunted by her suspension between the real and paranormal worlds. Through its proliferation of framed hands Carnival of Souls foregrounds their mystical role in religious myths, in the creation and sanctifying of life, or in their capacity to destroy or save it. This destructive impulse underwrites the dramatic tension in Peter Sasdy’s 1971 f ilm Hands of the Ripper. Like Carnival of Souls, the horror concentrates on details of manual violence, making metonymic connections between the living and the dead after a series of murders. Sasdy introduces a psychological element as the culprit is revealed to be the daughter of Jack the Ripper. A pre-title flashback sequence shows the young Anna (Angharad Rees) witnessing her father’s murder of her mother. Her psychopathological acts are thus open to natural or supernatural interpretation; either atavistically passed from father to daughter or as a result of paranormal possession. Close, lingering framing of characters’ hands contributes to the metonymic representation of the limbs as connecting generations, the living and the dead, and perpetrator and victims. The tactile and visual senses are linked when Laura (Jane Merrow), the blind fiancée of Michael Pritchard (Keith Bell), feels her way around the house and, on meeting Anna for the first time, says ‘I see with my hands’. This merging of tangible and intangible facilitates a parallel interpretation of the hands’ preternatural ability to connect the physical and metaphysical. At one point the benevolent psychiatrist John Pritchard (Eric Porter) who is attempting to help Anna, is warned of the threat by Mr. Dysart, Member of Parliament: dysart: Doctor, I saw it. She was possessed: her whole body was contorted. Her hands… [He raises his hands into frame and looks at them, moving them slightly] …they weren’t her hands at all. pritchard: Really, whose were they? dysart: How should I know: she was possessed.

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This exchange suggests that a hypnotised Anna is responsible for murdering the latest female victim. However, the Hammer Horror is less concerned with working through any psychological realism than it is with presenting the aesthetics of its violence and in creating dramatic tension around the chase set piece of its climax. This scene takes place in the aftermath of Dr. Pritchard’s stabbing and the tension escalates as he tries, seriously injured, to rescue Anna. She has gone with Laura to the balcony dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral so that the blind woman can ‘show’ her the bird’s eye view. As Anna leads Laura up the winding steps, the latter says ‘give me your hand’, which she does to assist the young woman. On the balcony the traumatic experience of Anna’s youth consumes her again. Laura offers her arm to help her down, but Anna hallucinates and begins strangling the blind woman. Pritchard is standing on the tiled floor below and when he shouts to Anna ‘Come to me’, she throws herself over the rail to her death. With a detailed reflection on Jan van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfini Wedding, Farah Karim-Cooper uses the 1434 painting as exemplary of contemporary and later historical uses of the hand motif in art. In the van Eyck work it is not only the touching and connection of the couple’s hands that is significant, but also the way in which the husband displays his wife’s hand as metonymic symbol for her whole social and romantic position in relation to him. Karim-Cooper explains how Arnolfini not only holds his wife’s hand, but presents her open palm towards the viewer, a gesture of courtesy, but one that demonstrates the ‘liberality’ or ‘bounty’ with which she places her body, life and identity into her husband’s hands. (2016, 54)

One of the nuanced examples of this is Marion Hänsel’s use of hand holding and touching in her 1982 film Le lit. It tells the story of Martin (Heinz Bennent) a dying man who is confined to his bed on a boat where he is cared for by his current wife Caroline (Francine Blistin) and his divorced spouse Eva (Natasha Parry). The tenderness of characters’ interactions is played out through manual touch and contact, but the complexity of their relationships is subtly communicated by the position and gesturing of their hands. As Caroline struggles with her feelings towards Martin and his imminent end, she discusses their past with Bruno Nanteuil (Johan Leysen), the physician who has been overseeing his palliative care. The intricacies of their former romantic involvement are not articulated but emerge in the details of manual performances.

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Figure 2.1: Bruno takes hold of Caroline’s hands in Le lit (Marion Hänsel, 1982)

In one scene at the dinner table Caroline and Bruno’s hands are revealed in a medium shot, resting on the table beside their plates. Caroline talks about the difficulty in her having to love Martin even in the late stages of his life when his consciousness is declining. She retraces her memories of when Martin was first ill in hospital, and Bruno tended to him. In a single shot, having panned between their hands – revealing the doctor’s face with a tilt up – as Caroline speaks, the camera frames her hand on the table where it is taken in both of his (Fig. 2.1). With an unobtrusive transition, Hänsel cuts to a second (later) dinner scene in which Caroline is now dining with Eva. The cut is not a graphic match, but the director invites association between the hands of the female characters by using them as a focal point on the tabletop. Hänsel’s metonymic use of hands communicates characters’ self-reflection when verbal interaction has broken down or is simply inadequate. In one instance Eva washes cutlery as the camera lingers on her hands. At first their rhythm and shape performing the diurnal task appears normal so that Hänsel’s deliberate remaining on the action begins to make it unfamiliar. After several seconds the camera tilts to Eva’s face and we discover her emotionally distraught. The love triangle at the core of the film might have been rendered by connections between all the lovers’ hands, as has been done comically in other films when the innocent lover holds her partner’s hand as he, in turn, surreptitiously holds that of a second woman. (See Gerard Stembridge’s About Adam [2000] for a comical example of this.) Hänsel does not use this

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method in Le lit. In the emotionally complex climactic scene when Martin dies, Caroline holds his hand and Bruno takes hers. The importance of this point of human contact is presented without superficial symbolism. Following a convention established earlier in the film, the director withholds close-up shots and inserts, and positions the camera back from the intimate moment, framing and lighting the scene like a Caravaggio painting. One of the powerful metonymic uses of hands occurs when Eva has put Caroline to bed, promising that she’ll wake her when the doctor arrives. As Eva listens to the horrific sound of Martin’s heavy rhythmic breathing, she turns under the covers trying to avoid it. A spot of light is cast on one part of the bed and her hands are set in it as they turn and shift painfully, until she pulls the covers over her head to muffle the sound. The opening sequence of Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), plays with the expectation of romantic, human contact ordinarily represented by the tactile interaction of lovers. Morvern (Samantha Morton) is lying beside her partner and her hand movements replicate a post-coital touching and caress as she reaches towards the man prostrate at her side. The sequence gives special attention to the female protagonist’s hands and the languid gesture and movements are complemented by the warm lighting, the slow pace of the editing, and Morvern’s calm expression. Although it seems the scene is one of serenity and fulfilment, it turns out that Morvern’s partner has killed himself. The setting is established by Ramsay in the conventional guise of a tranquil post-coital moment, using a warmth of mise en scène and slow rhythm that references recognisable cinematic tropes. However, the director subverts these aesthetic codes with specific framing of the character’s hands. This focus endows the features with a significant symbolic attention that will continue throughout the film. As the story unfolds, and as the female protagonist embarks on her road trip, the metonymic use of her manual actions and gestures comes to mark her growing agency and independence. One of the first details in Morvern’s growing autonomy and unconventional liberation is when she deletes her boyfriend’s name from the novel on which he has been working. It is the point that secures her receipt of the £100,000 which the publishers will advance to her when the manuscript has been submitted. Numerous f ilms – far too many to analyse independently – contain examples of couples’ manual interactions metonymically representing the entirety and complexities of their relationships. Four cases represent existing categories that demonstrate how tactile interactions of a romantic nature can give nuance to degrees of volition: from the repressed, to the unrequited, to the passionate, to the pathological.

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Figure 2.2: Hands trap the cricket, symbolising repressed emotion in Cecil Tang’s The Arch (1968)

Cecil Tang’s 1968 film The Arch (original titled Dong fu ren with the director’s Chinese name Shu Shuen Tong) tells the story of Madame Tung (Lisa Lu) who falls in love with visiting Captain Yang (Roy Chiao), but who represses her feelings to enable the attraction of her daughter – Wei-Ling’s (Hilda Chow Hsuan) – to the same man. Tang encapsulates the subtlety of the woman’s emotional situation with condensed restraint as she allows a moment of manual interaction between her protagonists to carry the metonymic potential of the framed cinematic hand. In a key scene the complexity of Tung’s emotional condition is enacted through slight tactile detail. Tang’s camera position offers engagement with Tung’s self-imposed restraint as she struggles with her own burgeoning desires and her awareness of Wei-Ling’s feelings. Tung and Yang are alone in a room. In one shot they bound towards a cricket they are trying to catch. Tang offers a close-up shot of Tung’s hands cupped over Yang’s as they cover the trapped insect (Fig. 2.2). The camera pulls back to reveal that they are looking at each other. After a beat, their hands separate and Tung turns and exits the frame. Rather than leave the moment with its poignant symbolism, the director returns to a close-up of Yang’s hand as he gently allows the cricket to crawl from his capped fingers. The visual symbolism facilitates different levels of interpretation of how the mother and visiting officer relate to each other, and the degree to which feelings might be mutual or unfulfilled. Yet the intricacy of their interaction and its possible emotional undertones are rendered with visual economy; a restraint that is made even more potent by virtue of the scene’s silence.

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An enticing manifestation of romantic attachment is often hinted at by restraint in tactile interaction. In the 1967 film Accident directed by Joseph Losey, the possibility of an illicit sexual encounter is suggested with tense hesitation of manual interaction. The married Oxford College lecturer Stephen (Dirk Bogarde) has become enthralled by a visiting Austrian student, Princess Anna von Graz (Jacqueline Sassard), and his ethical struggle is only self-censored because Anna has attracted the attention of fellow student William (Michael York). At one point Stephen’s hand is on a fence tantalisingly close to the hand of the Princess. The mid-frame centrality of the potential contact point between them draws attention to the temptation and ethical dilemma that the professor must confront. The metonymic use of the limb has the potential to capture a plethora of meanings relating to human emotions not easily expressed in dialogue. It often happens that a pathological threat is layered sexually onto manual points of contact, and in numerous films a lexicon of gestures has been historically established. The spectator’s ability to make distinctions between a caress that is affectionate or menacing (or moves from one to the other), is dependent upon a series of metonymic references. This connotation is informed by intricate dialogical connections between the performing hands, their owners, the mise en scène, and the narrative context. While these are frequently benign, malevolent undertones can be subtly inferred. Several interesting examples of this exist in the psychological thriller The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934). In the film, Bela Lugosi plays Vitus Werdegast, a doctor who meets a honeymooning American couple on a train in Hungary. After a coach accident, he takes them to the home of his old friend Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) who is ostensibly an architect but is secretly a Satanworshipping priest. Both Werdegast, who has lost his wife, and Poelzig who secretly married her and then Werdegast’s daughter, make inappropriate amorous advances on the new bride, Joan (Julie Bishop). What initially appear as innocuous gestures by the men – such as brushing a strand of hair from her face or touching it with the back of their hands – are charged at different times in the film with ominous undertones. When it is revealed that Poelzig is involved with ritualistically sacrificing young females, his manual tactile and gestural interactions take on deathly significance. The roleplay of hands at a key moment of stand-off between the Werdegast and Poelzig occurs when the two men play chess to determine whether the honeymoon couple, now Poelzig’s prisoners, will be released. A disturbing perversion and threat are wrought with manual metonymy in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). Kubrick represents the pathological carnal obsession of Humbert Humbert (James Mason) with the underage nymphet

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Lolita Haze (Sue Lyon) without forcefully presenting the amorous deviancy of the attraction. The film aligns Humbert’s perverse obsession with distortions of the metonymic relations between tactility and the object of the character’s romantic infatuation. Kubrick fetishises elements of the sexualised body by visually detaching them from the young girl, or by immobilising and restraining the sensory and sensual possibilities of manual contact. Philip Kuberski draws attention to the images accompanying the credit sequence, in which the camera lingers on the hand of Humbert and the foot of Lolita as he paints her toenails. A sense of dissociation of manual touch from its direct erotic consequences is created without diminishing the sensuousness of the point of contact, by diffusing the energy from the corporeal forms into an intangible, numinous source. For Kuberski this tone is achieved by means of lighting, and he argues that it seems to emerge from hand to foot, as if we witnessed a true epiphany or showing forth of the sacred. Light does not appear to be cast or channeled but to be released from Lolita’s flesh, as a manifestation of Humbert’s veneration or abjection before the beloved body. (2012, 76)

Moral ambiguity is sustained in a significant scene in which Humbert and Lolita have stopped on their road trip to fill his car at a gas station. The professor suspects that they are being followed but is uncertain as to the exact reason or the person involved. From the rest room of the garage Humbert looks through an open window and watches in fearful suspicion as Lolita talks to a figure in a car that has pulled up at the station. Significantly Humbert is washing his hands at the time and, as he looks pruriently at the conversation, he holds them up motionless in mid-air. Humbert’s hands have become the perpetrators of obscene intentions and desires and they have been frozen in inaction, driven by a torturous craving but caught between its realisation and consequences. In a detail that captures some of the symbolic frigidity of the older man’s hands, Humbert’s potency as omniscient narrator and impotence as sexual predator are succinctly and metonymically represented. In one scene Humbert and Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) return from a social evening and are surprised to find Lolita in the house. Secretly delighted at the serendipity, Humbert listens as the young girl describes that she left her friend’s party early, saying it was ‘sorta a drag’. She lounges around testing her mother’s patience with her idle attitude and demeanour. Humbert observes the teenager’s performance with enticing sexuality. Crossing the drawing room to some shelves Lolita picks up a statuette of a writer’s hand that is reminiscent of Humbert’s

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profession as its fingers hold a plume pen. Lolita plays with the sculpture and the nib between its fingers and mimes drawing two circles around the eyes of a model head on another shelf. The moment succinctly captures the girl’s innocent manipulation of the writer, as she takes the cold still and soulless representation of the limb in hers. More appropriate romantic and emotional advances inform a significant moment of manual interaction between Charlie (Charles Aznavour) and Léna (Marie Dubois) in François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianist (1960). As the characters stroll together for the first time, a sequence in which their hands are shot, and cut together close-up, represents his feelings for her. Charlie’s initial attempts are met with her rejection and his enthusiasm is cut short when she places her hand in her pocket. However, Truffaut reopens the possibility of amorous connection in the following sequence which presents the manual interactions between the two in a close-up shot. This mode of intersubjective expression is given additional meaning because Charlie is a classical pianist: communication by touch and tactility has been established as a part of his character. Robert Bresson is the director consistently associated with the intricacies of representations of hands on screen. Bresson composes entire scenes and sequences by focusing on the hands of his performers rather than on their faces. His synecdochal approach to representing the whole corporeal performance through the single body part is in keeping with his designation of actors as ‘models’ (Bresson 1986; Bresson 2013). When he does this in a symbolic way, the hands of his characters carry metonymic relevance. It is the point of contact, feeling, and touch, that the director wants his spectators to observe in detail and his manual choreography is layered with complex meanings. In respect of interpreting characters’ emotions and desire for intimacy as inscribed on their hands’ gestures and actions, perhaps the most relevant film from the Bresson canon is Au hasard Balthazar (1966). One of the main plot lines of the film presents the tale of the coming-ofage love between two youngsters living in the French countryside. Their story is interconnected with the fate of a pet donkey who is being kept on a local farm and is cared for by the young girl, Marie (Anne Wiazemsky). In one of the early significant encounters between Maria and Jacques (Walter Green), she has been picking flowers to adorn the head of the donkey and ends up sitting on a bench looking at the animal. As she does so, Marie holds her hand to her chest and starts when she hears a noise in the nearby bushes. She moves her hand onto the seat of the bench and, in the same shot with a panning and tilting of the camera, Bresson shows Jacques’ hand slowly appearing. It moves along a shadow on the bench until it reaches Marie’s.

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When they touch, Marie rapidly withdraws her hand and stands away from the seat. The camera rests for one second on Jacques’ static hand. The symbolism of Marie’s denial of his advance and his feeling of rejection are condensed into his isolated and rejected hand as it sits motionless where she left it. In a scene set years later, Jacques returns to the farm to profess his enduring love for Marie. They sit on the same bench and he reminds her that he can never love anyone else. At this moment, echoing Jacques’ earlier attempt at connection, Bresson inserts a shot of their hands. Another tender moment of gentle tactile interaction ensues, and the emotional tension of the scene grows as we await her reaction. The director’s concentration on the tactile not only communicates the potency and volatility of the characters’ whole emotional state, but it also intensifies it in a way that would have been diluted by conversation. Marie’s response, at first encapsulated in manual movement and then expressed directly, is poignant because of Bresson’s restraint in the latter and extension of the former. In a close-up shot of the couple’s hands resting on the bench, Marie’s now held within Jacques’, she gently removes hers from inside his and places it aside telling him that she still doesn’t share his feelings. In a prolonged moment, Proustian in its visual detail and pacing, Jacques drives away, as she asks him if they’ll ever see each other again. What each of these examples attests is that the hand, when used symbolically, is capable of bearing or inviting metonymic associations as the metonym par excellence of metonymy itself. It is invested with the capacity to reproduce the concept of verbal displacement with the literal performance of contact that it connotes. Like the metonym, that establishes contiguity between related concepts and thus forms an associative link between them, so too does the hand enact contiguous tactility through its basic modes of feeling and touch.

The Manual as Metaphorical In another symbolic possibility, the hand can be used to express a concept that is either detached from its conventional associations (gestural communications; figurative positions; meaningful actions), or that is unrelated to its role. These instances occur when a concept is condensed onto the hand so that it then signifies an unrelated idea. In this respect, the limb stands for something else. It is substituted with an alternative meaning. The hand is not literally or symbolically in contact with something, but it points to it in a metaphorical way. As with the metonymic category, films

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have used this kind of manual symbolism in fleeting, one-off moments, and in sustained ways. In both cases, these may feed into broader thematic questions or represent tangential additions to themes explored. Inasmuch as the literary concepts of metonym and metaphor may be usefully mapped onto the corporeal capacities and actions of the hands – as contact with, and pointing to, respectively – it becomes obvious that there are more symbolic options available to the director in the latter set. Actual manual contact has the connotative capability to represent concretely a range of emotional and intellectual impulses, but these are distinctly finite. Alternatively, the ability of the human hand to gesture towards, indicate, or point to a given object or idea, has a far wider range of possibilities, and it is with these in mind that a categorical overview of the metaphorical use of the limb on screen should take place. In evaluating what he calls ‘the deepest and most mysterious of all relationships, that between verbal expression and the material, or at least the extra-linguistic, world’, Raymond Tallis describes pointing as ‘the most blatant example of “deixis”, a property that connects signs with the material circumstances in which they occur’ (2010, 76). His positioning of the hand at the crossroads of communicative tool and idea communicated (akin to Ferdinand de Saussure’s division of the sign into ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’) facilitates its use for a metaphor of gesturing that is evident in countless cinematic examples. An understanding of how manual deixis can fall short of successful communication allows us to explore gaps, breaks, or fissures that can occur in the process. Geoffrey Beattie explains how such ruptures in meaning are not uncommon in iconic gestural expression: [A]n iconic gesture can convey the speed of movement, the direction of movement and also information about the size of the entity depicted in the gesture, even when people watching the iconic gesture in isolation could not determine exactly what the entity actually was. (2016, 100)

As he develops his thesis, based on work by David McNeill, Beattie establishes a hierarchy of gestural expression on degrees of specificity and the success of the transmission. He indicates that certain concepts are more easily captured and communicated by the moving hand and suggests that it is even possible to find a relationship between a verbal, semantic, and syntagmatic grammatology and how gestures function. He begins by referencing McNeill’s study and details how ‘gestures do convey meaning, but it gives the first glimpse of the range of information conveyed by them,

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and which particular types of information are best captured by them’ (105), and then concludes that character viewpoint gestures tend to be strongly associated with transitive clauses and observer viewpoint gestures with intransitive clauses. In the present corpus we found a perfect association between the transitivity of the clause and the viewpoint of the gesture. (117)

An interesting cinematic example of this, which inverts the standard metaphorical operation by allowing the visual manual gesture to complement the verbal expression, occurs in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). On the way to assassinate a group of characters who have stolen from their boss, Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) is discussing foot massages with his accomplice Vincent (John Travolta). During the conversation he uses the phrase ‘taking [someone] out’ as the colloquial version of ‘to assassinate someone’. In order to clarify that he does not mean ‘to go on a date with someone’, he raises his hand to his head with its fingers extended to represent the barrel of a gun. The supplementary use of the hand indicates a certain flexibility in the system of communication (whether verbal or visual) that becomes the very point of fissure allowing for metaphorical use of the gesture. This gap facilitates complex spectatorial engagement; one in which the requirement to create connections between concepts is ideologically wrought. Laura Oswald makes this clear when she writes about how surrealist films challenge and delight their viewers with open-ended use of symbols. What Oswald concludes in relation to metonymy follows a section in which she has convincingly amalgamated the concept with its metaphorical counterpart: the analysis of the work of metonymy in the cinema is perhaps the most theoretical issue to be pursued these days, since it raises questions as to the implication of the spectator in the film text, the articulation of the self-reflexive mode in the film discourse, and the inscription of ideology in the cinematic signifier. (1983, 118)

Because our hands have the capacity to ‘hold’ objects physically as well as they can grasp them through signification, their position in establishing our humanity with the development of societies, cultures, and scientific endeavors, allows their physiological structure to be read metaphorically. Adam Roberts offers an interpretation of a possible unravelling of the existential coherence of homo sapiens by reflecting on Heidegger’s writing

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on the limb. In this case our hands become impotent as tools for action and their unravelling leaves them only capable of bearing meaning: Our hands, howsoever useful they are as manipulators and signifiers, also represent one place where our body frays. (The hand is in danger, as Heidegger claimed: in danger, in one sense, of unpicking the body itself, as the loose threads at the end of a woollen sweater can unspool the whole). (2009, 60)

Such a threat is sometimes used when, in horror films, man is transformed into beast (or some supernatural entity) and insert shots of the hands act as the primary marker of the metamorphosis. It is as if the first undermining of human dignity and propriety in the conversion towards animality occurs in the bodily part that establishes his primordial supremacy over other creatures. We have seen how Stanley Kubrick has focused on the hands of his characters to emphasise their dehumanisation; whether reified as military weapon in Full Metal Jacket or charged with pathological libido in Lolita. He constructs a significant sequence with similar undertones in Fear and Desire (1953) when he uses the hand metaphorically. Four soldiers have been abandoned behind enemy lines and discover a cabin in which fighters from the opposing side are eating. The Americans break in and savagely assassinate the enemies. In a montage sequence, Kubrick displays the barbarism of the attackers by intercutting the acts of violence with shots of stew being dropped or spilled, becoming manifestly disgusting and abject. Philip Kuberski astutely points to one of the horrific shots in the sequence and how the relationship between the human hand and nourishing food is grotesquely disturbed. He begins by granting consumption the potential for being interpreted in contrasting ways, until the context changes: ‘Eating, however crude or polite, is something quite distasteful, if the action is dislodged from its transparency and seen for what it is’. He goes on to explain the contextual detail in Kubrick’s film. Discovering their counterparts, the soldiers break in and beat them into submission. The fists smashing into faces are intercut with shots of a hand squeezing cut potatoes and thick sauce oozing through the clenched fingers. (2012, 16)

The metaphorical association between the hand and the inhumanity of the actions, established by Kubrick in the purest mode of Soviet montage, as thesis and antithesis clash synthetically, here allows the concise image to take on a complex set of connotations.

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Universal applications of the cinematic hand metaphor are common, although they may be only fleetingly referenced. In his 1982 film The King of Comedy Martin Scorsese tells the story of the kidnapping of celebrated television personality Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis), by delusional would-be standup comedian Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) and his volatile accomplice Rita Keane (Diahnne Abbott). The eccentric couple’s incompetent criminal actions, bumbling through the seizure and detention of Langford, as well as their fanaticism in stalking and harassing the celebrity, are encapsulated in the isolated image of Keane’s hand smacked against the rear passenger window of Langford’s car after a show. Scorsese fames the moment and suspends it in a still shot that accompanies the credits. When Pupkin breaks into the same car beside Jerry he has cut his hand attempting to protect the star from crazed fans who have gathered outside the studio to get his autograph. The ominous signification of the injured hand bodes poorly for Pupkin, and Langford gives him an initialled handkerchief to bandage the wound. In a typical intertextual nod to classical cinema, Scorsese shows Langford in his apartment after the confrontation, briefly turning to watch the television. With a subtle nod towards other manual criminality, we see a clip from Pickup on South Street; a scene from the Samuel Fuller film in which pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) is stealing a handkerchief from a woman’s handbag. While the audio-visual medium is uniquely qualified to interrogate thematically the question of ‘seeing is believing’, and this has been a core preoccupation of many films, there are several cases in which the idea is evaluated symbolically. The sense of touch may provide reliable evidence in some instances, and in one scene in his supernatural fairy-tale horror film The Company of Wolves, Neil Jordan invites reflection on the nature of myth and superstition. During the flashback story-within-story world, the young Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) dreams that she is living in a folk-tale setting, in a middle age English forest haunted by werewolves. When her father (David Warner) returns from a hunt with the townsfolk who have set out to kill one of the creatures, he says that he cut off its forepaw. He opens the cloth in which he has wrapped the limb and it has inexplicably turned into a human hand. He remonstrates to his incredulous wife and daughter, trying to explain that he’s not insane and that he did in fact sever the paw of the beast, insisting that ‘seeing is believing’. At this, Rosaleen moves forward with her hand extended to touch the severed hand and asks: ‘Is it? What about touching?’ In La nuit américaine, François Truffaut’s 1973 homage to f ilm and the cinema industry, the French director explores the machinations

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and personalities that operate behind and in front of the camera during production. Playing the role of the director of the film within the film, in one sequence Truffaut combines a series of behind-the-scenes details. During the montage, as his actors rehearse a scene and technicians set up around them, the diegetic (and real-life) film director is seen intervening to reposition the hands of actress Julie Baker (Jacqueline Bisset) for the shot that is about to be filmed. This single insertion succinctly symbolises the role of the auteur in the management of the whole production; metaphorically reducing the moment to the simple realignment of the performer’s manual position by resetting her hand with his. This subtle manipulation of the aesthetic environment, encapsulated in the director’s instruction, is echoed in several films that consider how individuals come to establish their self-determination. Key moments in cases as diverse as It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) and Vivre Sa Vie (Jean-Luc Godard), symbolise characters’ moments of choice, self-reflection, or self-definition by concentrating on their hands. In the Capra film, shortly after we have met his protagonist George Bailey (James Stewart) for the first time, the voice-over introduction induces a freeze frame that pauses the narration and underscores the way in which the whole film explores options and pathways that we negotiate in our lives. As Capra stills the moving image, Bailey is holding his hands wide apart to indicate the size of the suitcase he wants to purchase for his imminent departure on world travels. ‘I want a big one’, he says, with his spread hands indicating the significance of his intended departure from his small native town of Bedford Falls. The moment of paused film, which goes against standard cinematic convention of the time, highlights fate and the irreversibility of one’s future. These ideas are central to the rest of the film that is structured narratively like Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel A Christmas Carol. A verbal description of Capra’s image which suggests how ‘destiny is in our hands’, tritely simplifies it with its literalism. However, the metaphor goes beyond this cinematically by virtue of its formal novelty as an innovative device that is meaningful for the whole plot. Ingmar Bergman’s solipsistic aged protagonist Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) embarks on a literal and metaphorical road trip of self-reflection in Wild Strawberries (1957). During his journey from Stockholm to the University of Lund, at which he will receive a life-time honorary award, Borg deviates from his route on several occasions to examine his past. Central to the character’s development is the doctor’s withdrawal from society and his loved ones. His reclusive turn is echoed in vocational decisions and we learn that he used to be a general practitioner but became a bacteriologist in

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later years. In dreamscapes and personal memories Bergman presents Borg standing to the side and in front of the enacted activities that he recalls as a detached but not disinterested observer. In one of these scenes, as Borg looks through the window of his brother’s home, watching him with his partner (Borg’s former lover), the voyeuristic doctor injures the inside of his palm when he leans on a nail protruding from the exterior frame of the window. In a moment likely making intertextual reference to Un Chien andalou, Borg contemplates the stigmata-like damage, raising his hand momentarily for inspection. The image is open to interpretation, but while a reading of the injury as symbolising a Christ-like martyrdom is possible, it need not go so far. It is enough to see in it the demise of a personality once so open as to have direct tactile medical – ‘hands on’ – involvement with his patients (at one point, a petrol pump attendant played by Max von Sydow reminds Borg that he was the doctor who assisted at his birth), but who now has become a scientist of detached observation. He now scrutinises details of the world through a microscope rather than engaging with his patients manually. Jean-Luc Godard’s female protagonist of Vivre Sa Vie finds herself at a crossroads involving critical decisions that require existential soul-searching. As Nana (Anna Karina) explores her personal self-worth and emotional relationships, she considers philosophical questions about the essence of selfhood, ethical responsibility, and free will. In a conversation with one of her friends, she discusses the idea of human freedom and references actions of the hand as an example. She asserts that we are free because we are responsible for our actions and proposes that the opposite thesis holds in a way comparable to Sartre’s tale of the lovers’ encounter in Being and Nothingness, when the philosopher discusses ‘bad faith’ (1984, 55–56). Nana lists examples to prove her point and begins: ‘Je lève la main: je suis responsible’. [‘If I raise my hand, I’m responsible’.] In a later scene, during which Godard presents Nana writing to a brothel owner looking for work as a prostitute, the director lingers on the details of her manually produced note. The moment captures the beautiful aesthetics of Nana’s handwriting shown as an essential quality of the individuality of its scribe. As if to reinforce the association between the penmanship and the personality to which it belongs, Nana interrupts her writing and stands beside the table to measure her height. She accomplishes this by using her spread thumb and pinkie as a unit to approximate how tall she is ‘in hands’. Following her new employment, Nana’s interaction with her male clients is shown in a series of encounters where Godard emphasises the role of hands in the commodification of the female body. Editorial juxtapositions of shots align her corporeal reification (by the touch of her ‘Johns’) with the same men’s

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hands. These are shown in close-up shots as they fondle for money in their pockets or pay Nana for her services. In some films, the self-destructive impulse is metaphorically captured by a concentration on the hand of the afflicted character. With fidelity to references in the original play text, several screen adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth use the close-framed hand of the anti-hero to emphasise the role of that limb in the protagonist’s ambitious self-determination and ultimate demise. Roman Polanski’s 1971 version, starring Jon Finch, is especially blood-saturated, so that in the key scenes in which Macbeth hallucinates about the dagger that beseeches him towards regicide with ‘its handle towards my hand’, or when hands are mentioned as soaked in the murdered Duncan’s blood, the director concentrates on the limbs as suspended in pre- and post-crime crisis. The corporeal infliction of self-harm, which is used as a metaphor for a general self-destructive impulse, is taken to a surreal extreme in Marian de Van’s 2002 film Dans ma peau. The body horror narrative recounts the psychological decline of an ambitious corporate worker in the aftermath of an accident at a party during which she falls and sustains a leg injury. The writer-director plays the main role of Esther who becomes increasingly fascinated with the wound and begins to engage in acts of self-mutilation; cutting off sections of her skin, preserving some and cannibalising others. As the bodily disfigurement grows more severe, de Van focuses on the role of Esther’s hands in the violence, but resists explaining the motivation behind the self-destruction. The harmful behaviour can be interpreted as Esther’s developing psychological pathology that is induced by professional stress, or from societal pressure on the expected norms of (professional) female behaviour, appearance, and deportment. Wider symbolic readings are opened because of an important scene in which de Van introduces the parallel possibilities of a cinematic shift in the film’s aesthetics and the blurring of the lines between the objective spectator’s position and the subjective point-of-view of the protagonist. As Esther dines with a small group of her corporate marketing colleagues her left hand starts to move involuntarily. She struggles to control it, but it overpowers her attempts to subdue its random actions. After a few moments, it becomes fully detached from her upper arm and lies on the table beside her. In the scenes that follow, the separated limb has been restored but Esther suffers aggressive attacks, perpetrated by herself, on the rest of her body. The metaphor of the disconnected limb can be understood as symbolising the overwhelming forces of the neoliberal corporate objectification of the individual. This sinister suggestion would pessimistically conclude that capitalist reification

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of personhood culminates in complicity in one’s self-destruction. Equally, by extension, it may offer the possibility of personal physical and mental breakdown to which contemporary participants in the capitalist system are susceptible. Both representations stem from the same concept. The ultimate logic of late capitalism is a Spaltung of the self. The resulting abjection by the divided other is something for which Keith Thomas has traced historical justification: Bodily control exemplified internal harmony and the superiority of the mind to the body. Physiognomy betrayed the character. This was one of the reasons why so little tolerance was normally displayed to those who employed a different gestural language. (1991, 8)

This ‘internal harmony’ is shattered in de Van’s film, and one of the contextual interpretations of the director’s use of the manual metaphor is a reflection on the effects of the age of consumption where the devaluing and objectification of the person as consumer leads to self-destructive impulses. Frequently in the aftermath of a murder, the killer is shown considering his (or, rarely, her) fingers and palms outstretched as if they are independent entities that were momentarily possessed by external forces. Two films use hands metaphorically in this way to represent the moral dilemma haunting the protagonist. In Miguel Ángel Vivas’ Tu hijo (Your Son [2018]), the father character Jaime (José Coronado) is haunted by questions of revenge for the attack that has left his son in a coma. Following the assault on Marcos (Pol Monen), the responsibility of taking action for natural justice is symbolically placed ‘in his father’s hands’. Jaime’s crisis of conscience is exacerbated by his vocational position which, as a surgeon, underscores his ethical commitment to healing rather than harming, and many of the scenes depicting his silent contemplation and ultimate decision on the appropriate moral course of action focus closely on the doctor’s hands. In an early sequence, he is shown in his car driving around the city, over bridges and along streets. A steady shot fixes on Jaime, evidently tormented by the choices available to him, as he lays his head on his hands on the steering wheel. After a pause, he lowers his right hand to the radio and then flexes his fingers as if vacillating between the possibility of violent retribution and passive acceptance. Having later resolved that vengeance is his only option, he attacks the suspected assailant with a scalpel. The young victim lies bleeding fatally from the neck until Jaime slowly releases his lifeless body. During and after his murder, the camera lingers on his bloodied hands. He stands on a bridge overlooking a river where he throws the scalpel, and Vivas inserts another shot of

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the surgeon’s hands. This is followed by his washing them in a basin, and then re-bandaging the injured right hand. The symbolism is economically accomplished and leaves no room for misinterpretation: the hands of the avenging father have turned his surgical scalpel from implement of curing to murderous weapon. Frank Berry’s Michael Inside (2017) is the story of a young man who is initially jailed as an involuntary criminal but who, after time in prison, becomes involved in complicated anti-social and illegal activities. As a social crime drama, one narrating the character’s move towards criminality from coincidental guilt, it grants significant time with the eponymous character (played by Dafhyd Flynn) lingering on his measured, silent contemplation and introspection. Berry intensifies Michael’s moments of self-reflection by dramatically framing his hands. He dispenses with standard and unsubtle handcuff iconography often used in the prison film to denote the arrival of the criminal in the jail. In line with the visual aesthetics of the film, silence predominates, and communication is minimalised. Even as Michael is being checked in and one of the prison officers says ‘Show me your hands’, the camera lingers on Michael’s introspective manner. When we first find him in his cell, and a voice-over track of his registration in the prison is completed, Michael looks at his hands as the camera tilts from them to his face with medium close framing. Once incarcerated, Michael is presented with opportunities for legal transgression at three significant moments. On each occasion the criminal gang leader David (Moe Dunford) approaches Michael demanding that the novice display his willingness to perpetrate increasingly degenerate illegitimate acts. David orders the new prisoner to open his hand and offers signif icant tools each time to assist in the transgressive invitation. These objects bear symbolic association with the decline of Michael’s morality and the development of his latent criminality. David first gives him a contraband mobile phone and then illegally acquired money. Finally, he slips Michael a blade to slash another prisoner’s face. The attack scenes are followed by moments in which Michael, back alone in his cell, sits in contemplation of his hands and their increasingly aggressive activity. A concluding scene offers redemptive possibility reflecting earlier moments in which the hands are open to metaphorical interpretation relating to criminal choice. Michael has been released but, notwithstanding his attempt to avoid trouble, he attacks some thugs who have threatened his grandfather because Michael has refused to smuggle drugs into the prison. Once again, in the wake of this assault, he is shown sitting on his bed contemplating his hands in a slow, intimate close-up shot that echoes the one at the beginning of his incarceration.

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Many of the examples from the films above offer situations where the metaphorical framing of a character’s hands occurs at the beginning of the narrative, at a point when the audience has not received enough diegetic information to interpret the possible symbolism. Three additional cases are noteworthy because the hands presented are decontextualised and so beyond deeper interpretation. Retrospectively, the symbolic undertones take on ironic or disturbing significance when additional information is provided. Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), All About Eve by Joseph Mankiewicz (1950) and Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are apposite examples of this device. Mullan’s film tells the tale of the abusive oppression of young females who have been incarcerated in a Magdalene Laundry, one of the Catholic Church-run institutions that were established to punish unmarried mothers. While ostracising them from society, segregating them, and taking their children, the religious authorities justify the inhumane treatment as necessary to purify the community of carnal sin and temptation. The dominant ideological and repressive positions of the Church in Ireland, and the nature of its obsessive control over the intimate interactions of the nation’s citizens (whether Catholic or not), is represented sparingly in the opening sequence. A priest is shown singing a ballad and pounding its rhythm on a bodhrán; the classical Irish vertically held, circular wood-framed drum. As the holy man beats on the goat skin, with primal intensity, Mullan’s camera lingers on his hands in a series of shots. Although set in the 1960s, the contemporary context of the film’s release confers the manual images with further, disturbing extradiegetic meaning. In the wake of the Church sex scandal revelations both in Ireland and globally, the close framing of the priest’s hands charges them with horrific associations before Mullan’s narrative reveals the shocking abuse. A seemingly innocuous insert shot of the hands of All About Eve’s eponymous heroine (played by Anne Baxter) in the opening scene of that film takes on deeper and insidious metaphorical weight as the plot unfolds. The young actress Eve is being presented with an honorary award by an established former male recipient who notes their respective ages as oldest and youngest winners of the prize. Mankiewicz underlines the laudatory peroration of the experienced thespian by inserting a shot of Eve’s hands, resting on the table at which she is surrounded by adulating peers. ‘How fitting’, declares the presenter about the coveted prize, ‘that it should pass from my hands to hers. Such young hands. Such a young lady’. We will later appreciate the layered irony of Mankiewicz’s symbolism and how the delicate pose of Eve’s hands parallels the innocent performance of the secretly manipulative and ambitious protagonist.

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It is worth briefly mentioning the innovative photography that begins Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which displays the Doctor reflected in a mirror with a point of view shot. The symbolic representation of the divided soul is carried by the image. In a previous shot, the camera tilts from the pipes of an organ showing Jekyll’s hands spread playing on two of the three stepped keyboards on the instrument. While the dexterity of the surgeon’s manual aptitude is later revealed, at this point in the film the position of his hands is used to symbolise the split soul of mankind; an attribute that will presently haunt him and becomes the theme of his first lecture. The 1970 coming-of-age film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valérie a týden divů), by Czech director Jaromil Jires, explores the sexual awakening of its young female protagonist with a narrative and aesthetics infused with a magic realism like Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves. As with the symbolism in Jordan’s folk-tale narrative, Jires focuses on the hands of his eponymous heroine (Jaroslava Schallerová) throughout the f ilm and suggests repeated metaphorical associations between them and the girl’s sexuality. The manual imagery does not propose an unproblematic or entirely intoxicating sensuality. During a scene in which a village girl is getting married, a congregation of young females is seen at one point from a high angle in the chapel surrounding Valerie. The young women look up towards a pulpit where a masked man is preaching to them. From his raised position he warns them of the threats of their burgeoning sexual impulses. In an ambiguous reference to hands, the mysterious preacher describes the maidens as bearing corruptible purity and then describes the perpetrator of such violations in the same way. He warns them: ‘Oh maidens, do you know what you are? You’re an alabaster hand proffered in greeting. You’re a pomegranate yet to be split open. You’re a boat-shaped leaf, an opening rosebud. The callous hand that would touch your breast would leave an indelible print’. A reverse shot when he steps back from the pulpit shows Valerie inexplicably alone in the church so that this, like many of the other scenes in the film, might have been one of her hallucinations. In this instance, the manual reference is used doubly to signify both sexual purity and the villainous threat to the same. A similar symbolic layering is frequently effected when a director makes associations between hands and another object, both of which bear metaphorical significance independently, but create tertiary meanings when juxtaposed. The use of engagement or wedding rings is an effective example of this trope. The symbolic items can be put on, removed, lost, or interacted with in any number of ways, and they can carry various meanings with connotative economy and silence. In both Jack Arnold’s The

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Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and the recent film Downsizing (Alexander Payne, 2007) the consequences for a couple’s relationship are explored as the husband (in both cases) undergoes the physical change suggested by the titles. In Jack Arnold’s production, once Scott Carey’s (Grant Williams) chronic corporeal reduction has been confirmed, his wife Louise (Randy Stuart) promises to be true to their wedding vows. Sitting with her in their car, he reaches for the gear stick and his wedding ring falls from his finger onto the driver’s mat. In a succinct amalgamation of both ideas – the denotation of Carey’s shrinking and the connotation of the demise of their relationship – the objective correlative carries both metaphors by association with the character’s hand. Similar symbolism is used by Alexander Payne in Downsizing when, having undergone his shrinking-inducing surgical procedure and realising that his wife has unintentionally not been shrunk as planned, Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) is confronted with the reality of his appropriately ill-fitting ceremonial band and the implications of his physical reduction for his marriage. A similar moment is framed by John Huston his film version of Arthur Miller’s The Misfits (1961) when in a gesture that might have as much extratextual signif icance as it does narrative meaning, Roslyn Taber (Marilyn Monroe) surreptitiously removes her wedding ring following the legal conclusion of her divorce. A soldier intending to seduce Andula (Hana Brejchová), the protagonist of Miloš Forman’s A Blonde in Love (1965), is shown surreptitiously removing his wedding ring. The framing of the gesture is meaningfully intensified as it comes in a film that places huge symbolic significance on the manual movements of characters. Sustained and historically established associations are frequently made between the hand and the glove, and both the literal and metaphorical connections have facilitated a variety of complex interpretations. Farah Karim-Cooper has identified the sexual undertones of the article of clothing, especially as it can be touched and handled in various ways by either men or women. She references a number of studies that consider the glove as fetish or fetishised symbol of the whole female body and sexuality, and quotes Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones who explain the hermeneutic procedures whereby the objects can, themselves, ‘become persons’ (Stallybrass and Jones 2001, 115). In reference to the same study, Karim-Cooper indicates how items like handkerchiefs and gloves may ‘typify the ways in which hands worked to construct the social self’ (2016, 49). The range and possibility for such metaphorical extension by cinematic framing has been noted by commentators elsewhere. Raymond Tallis has written about the variety of gloves, to take the example most relevant here, which can provide such

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connotation. He writes by invoking the possible ‘dialects’ which the items carry even by virtue of their fabric and formal characteristics: boxing gloves and gauntlets and oven gloves and plastic gloves and rubber gloves and so on to protect against cold and heat and water and corrosive materials and enemies and contestants and nettles and infections and bats and balls. (2003, 128)

Elsewhere, Laura Mulvey attests to the transfer of meaning from and onto the human form, and while she does not single out hands or their associated accoutrements, her argument is applicable to those elements when she proposes that in a melodramatic, cinematic, visual translation, meaning is displaced onto its surrounding mise-en-scène, invested in particular objects or inscribed onto the body through inarticulate gesture. (2005, 231)

And so we find many remarkable instances in the history of cinema where synecdoche facilitates the metaphorical displacement doubly, from the contextual meaning onto the glove and then onto the ways in which the character’s hand interacts with it. Pedro Almodóvar’s 2011 film The Skin I Live In contains a sequence in which a character who has been reconstructed by a plastic surgeon slowly covers her hands with gloves. The implications of Almodóvar’s lingering on the action take on deeper gendered significance as the details of the identity of the doctor’s patient are revealed. The use of gloves to mask a truth that might otherwise be exposed by a character’s naked hands is seen in Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel East of Eden. Believing that his mother Cathy (Jo Van Fleet) is dead, Caleb (James Dean) hears that she had beautiful hands. This is enough to make him suspicious when a local brothel owner, Kate Ames, comes to his attention and he hears that she, too, had wonderful hands, but that now she keeps them covered with gloves to hide her arthritis. Caleb’s later confirmation that Kate is in fact his mother is based on his spying on her through the window of her house and seeing her bare hands, which Kazan presents in a close-up shot. The reveal allows for Caleb’s recognition of the concealed fact as the items of clothing connote the subterfuge with which Cathy has been living. Within the context of the references to the gendered hands that proliferate in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life, an important fleeting moment occurs when the successful rugby player Frank is discussing his

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Figure 2.3: Workman’s gloves inhibit the emotional connection between father and son in Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970)

professional options with one of his club’s wealthy patrons, Weaver (Alan Badel). As Frank is chauffeured with Weaver in his car, the contrast between the two characters is marked by Anderson on a sardonic beat. As the effete, middle-class patron warns the sought-after rugby star that he is the ‘property’ of City Club, he slaps his hand on Frank’s knee laughing. The protégé sportsman looks with disgust at the gloved hand of the patron. The latter has money and influence, which give him authority and control, but his hands do not engage in tough or exercising manual labour. A similar recurring motif of the gloved hand is endowed with connotative possibility in Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces. It tells the story of Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) who has rejected the well-to-do and hypocritical lifestyle of his upper-class background in favour of a less puritanical and socially elite existence. We learn of his family’s musical background and highbrow professional accomplishments in that art but remain fixed in Robert’s point of view as he lives and works in disagreeable circumstances. His labouring on an oil field allows Rafelson to concentrate on Robert’s hands and the mechanical manual activities in which he is engaged, but we learn that he has been trained as a classical pianist. The genteel world of his ‘aristocratic’ family is represented by actions and interactions of bare hands – ping-pong on the drive, refined dining and drinking fine wine, and above all piano playing – while the lifestyle that Robert has chosen is one of toil and heavy labour that requires thick workman’s gloves. Nicholson wears these for most of the film – often in unusual places – and, obviously, on the oil fields. In one scene, late in the film, Robert confronts his ageing

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father Nicholas (William Challee) partly to address his aberrance from the family’s traditional cultural vocation, and in a mild attempt to reconnect with the old man. The possibility for intimate mutual communication is blocked, with the son’s awkward labourer’s gloves representing this hurdle metaphorically (Fig. 2.3). The frustrated scene ends with Robert’s departing without reconciliation. By the film’s concluding sequence, the protagonist has decided to leave and hit the road again. Having stopped at a gas station, he abandons his car, ditches his romantic interest Rayette (Karen Black), and hitches a ride with a trucker who is driving to Alaska. It is perhaps significant that he is now bare-handed, and the trucker is wearing similar heavy-duty gloves to those Robert had previously. In a slight nod to that fact, the truck driver comments on how cold it is in Alaska, and they take to the road. In Ben Wheatley’s 2020 adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier novel Rebecca, the new wife of Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) drops her glove in an early scene when she moves into Manderley, the home that is haunted by the legacy of Rebecca, Maxim’s deceased wife. As the new Mrs. de Winter (Lily James) fumbles to pick it up, the obstacle of ‘filling the shoes’ of de Winter’s first spouse, and the complicated negotiation of her position within the house and among the serving staff, are drawn together in this succinct image. In a much-celebrated scene from Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint) drops her glove when strolling with Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) as he is inarticulately attempting to express his romantic feelings for her. Often referenced in relation to Brando’s method acting, the performer picks up the article and holds it gently. At first he plays with it, separating its fingers, before stretching it onto his large, tough hand. Terry’s interaction with the item expresses the complexity of his situation and his emotional state concisely and more effectively than the verbally inept character might have done. In the image, performed instinctively and extemporaneously by the actor, and kept in the final cut by Kazan, Terry’s internal struggle between primal violent impulses and softer romantic sensitivity are encapsulated in a moment fraught with tension. The potency of this symbolism might bring to mind the catchphrase that circulated around the time of the infamous trial of O.J. Simpson when a prosecuting attorney asked the accused to try on a glove suspected to have been used by the murderer. Once the article was shown to be far too small for the actor’s hand, his defence lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran dramatically seized the opportunity to make the most of the failed attempt to incriminate his client. With tag-line brevity, Cochran coined and repeated the slogan that was soon circulated accompanying

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images of Simpson grinning sardonically as he held the small glove in the air dangling from the fingers of his large hand: ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’ It is worth noting, before concluding considerations of the manual metaphor, how injury or damage to a character’s hand frequently suggest the portentous indication of disaster or downfall. Numerous films invoke this kind of symbolism, as is the case with the cuts resulting from the crushed drinking glass by Hollenius (Claude Rains) in Irving Rapper’s 1946 Deception, Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) in Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947), and Brandon (John Dall) in Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). Cat scratches are the ominous injury in the three-part narrative The Uncanny (1977), directed by Denis Héroux, and even when there is no palpable wound, merely the staining of a character’s hands literally and metaphorically marks the fatalism of what follows narratively. This is evidently the case in both Polanski’s Macbeth and Kieślowski’s Dekalog, jeden.

Between Metaphor and Metonym: The Hand and Memory Having proposed a categorical distinction between these symbolic possibilities, it is important to highlight a liminal position that performs between the two. In several instances f ilmmakers use the hand as a character’s means of accessing personal recollections, and the psychic trigger concurrently becomes the site wherein the memories reside. In these cases, memory condenses recalled ideas metaphorically through the hand as the reminiscences are evoked: the limb points, as it were, to its signified. However, it then resituates the same recalled ideas back onto the manual feature with metonymic displacement. In other words, the hand is both the catalytic means by which the memory of a character is invoked and simultaneously the site of its recollection; the object wherein the reminiscence is embodied. As an active agent in memory recall, the hand metonymically points to a moment in the past, and at the same time it acts as the location in which the remembered is metaphorically held. Jodi Brooks centralises Georgio Agamben’s claim that ‘a society that has lost its gestures seeks to reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss’ in her study of gestural performances in the films of John Cassavetes (1999, 73–104). In line with Brooks’ argument, we can propose that the cinematic medium is ideally constructed for the symbolic capturing of memory, and combine this with its ability to represent the hand in proximate detail. Gabor Csepregi places the potential for making

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literal and associative connections with earlier actions and thoughts in the arena of the tactile: The act of touching illustrates the close connection between retention of past behaviour and anticipation of a particular movement. As our hand intends to pick up a glass or our foot moves towards the gas pedal of the car, we re-enact the past and expect a certain type of bodily contact with the object. The act of gently pushing the pedal or bringing the glass to our mouth involves both the anticipation and memory of a particular tactile sensation. (2006, 127)

Steven Shapiro further identifies the cinema as ideal mode of representing the abstraction of recollection in a concrete way when he analyses the films of Robert Bresson, the auteur par excellence of manual framing. On the French filmmaker’s work, Shaviro notes: Everything turns on the allegorical discontinuity between the deliberate banality of concrete expression (gestures, movements, words) and the ineffability of what is being expressed. (1993, 250)

This ineffability finds its most concrete objective correlation in the use of a character’s hands – or referencing to them – when they represent personal recollections or memories at a given moment in a film. The opening scene of Alain Resnais’ 1959 Hiroshima mon amour reconstructs the memories of Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) by juxtaposing images of her visit to bombed Hiroshima with her present lovemaking with Lui (Eiji Okada). As Resnais concentrates on the romantic embrace, he lingers on the lovers’ hands and arms, symbolically stylising the merging of past and present moments by allowing a fine-grained, shiny dust fall on their skin. The sequence includes a shot of the back of the male with the female’s hands – slightly clawed – holding his shoulders. Memory is brought into question at this moment as we hear: lui: elle:

You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. I saw everything.

Her recollections, and his denial of them as Elle attempts to reconstruct the horror they invoke, are awkwardly fused with the incongruity of their physical contact. Images of the destroyed Japanese city and its infrastructure and people are punctuated by, and aligned with, shots that return to the lovers’ hands as they caress and touch each other sensually (Fig. 2.4).

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Figure 2.4: Manual touch invokes memory in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

In a later scene Elle bemoans her inability to recall the intimacy and the reality of her dead lover. Her memory story reaches a climactic moment when, after her lover has died, she sleeps on his body and presently tells Lui that she couldn’t feel the difference between her body and his. She starts to cry out ‘He was dead’ and concludes: ‘Quatorze ans ont passés. Même ses mains je me souviens mal’. [‘It has been fourteen years. I don’t even remember his hands’.] Here, the symbolic reference is working doubly as the hand is both the metaphorical object that inspires memory and the metonymic substitute for the whole lover. The Czech film Zabitá neděle (1969) – translated into English as Squandered Sunday – by director Drahomíra Vihanová tells the story of a suicidal army officer who reminisces in flashbacks on a series of sexual relationships. With less tender recollections – although as fraught with ambiguity and psychological torment – than those in Hiroshima mon amour, the soldier’s memories are represented by Vihanová in images that focus on the man’s hands. One insert, stylistically reminiscent of the Resnais film, shows him attempting to remove a fly from the breast of one of his companions. A transitory reference to the hand as synecdoche for a character occurs in the closing sequence of the Sam Mendes film American Beauty (1999). When he is fatally wounded by a gunshot to the back of the head Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) begins to describe how, contrary to common belief, life does not flash before one’s eyes in one’s dying seconds but presents itself in a series of happy ‘moments’. At this point, his voice-over mentions a few of his fondest memories. One of them – a black and white close-up shot of an old woman’s hands – is accompanied by his narrative. Among other recollections

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he lists his ‘grandmother’s hands and the way her skin seemed like paper’. Although the moment and reference are brief, they introduce appropriate poignancy into what we now discover to have been Burnham’s (impossible) post-mortem narration. A scene that carries similar intimacy takes place between incarcerated father and son in Jim Sheridan’s In the Name of the Father (1993). Here the possibility for genuine affectionate connection is abruptly interrupted by the younger man’s obstinate emotional repression. Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day Lewis) tends to his ill patriarch Giuseppe (Pete Postlethwaite) after the older man has been struck by a pulmonary seizure. In the scene after he has set up a basin of boiling water and Vicks to assist the breathing, Gerry makes a reference to a personal memory by commenting on the smell of the older man’s hands: gerry: What I remember most about my childhood is holding your hand… My wee hand in your big hand. And the smell of tobacco… I remember the… I could smell the tobacco off the palm of your hand. When I want to be happy, I try to remember the smell of tobacco. guiseppe: Hold my hand… gerry: Get the fuck… Don’t go sentimental on me now. [Gerry reflects] Don’t be upset, Da. Look, I’ll hold your hand if you like.

The conversation continues without them taking each other’s hands and, like a similar instance between Gar Public and S.B. in John Quested’s 1977 adaptation of Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! – the moment passes with the opportunity of connecting lost. Brief allusion to memories of the paternal character is made in This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966) when Alva (Natalie Wood) is showing Owen (Robert Redford) her father’s land. Throughout the film, we learn that she has surrounded herself with dream world mementos of him. During a conversation in the cornfield where Alva walks around a scarecrow that he constructed, she takes its wooden hands. She evokes the absent man through the effigy, which is horrific in its Unheimlich, cold and clownish appearance. A flashback memory in John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road presents ‘Man’ (Viggo Mortensen), the Boy’s father playing piano with his mother, ‘Woman’ (Charlize Theron). To mark the horror of the post-apocalyptic situation in which we find father and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) striving to stay alive, Hillcoat concentrates on the hands of the parents at the keyboard during the remembered scene. In their

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present circumstances, hands will no longer be used for such leisure-time activity, but as an essential, desperate means for existing as they manually create, rummage, and find things to survive. Traumatic experiences are occasionally revisited in scenes where there is a focus on the character’s hand, and in which certain malign memories are situated. These can occur in the form of detailed recollections or as vague psychological disturbances. Compton Bennett’s The Seventh Veil (1945) falls into the former category as a concert pianist has been institutionalised for suicidal tendencies. Ann Todd plays the role of Francesca, whom we f irst meet having escaped from a psychiatric hospital and attempting suicide by drowning. In a flashback narrative, recounted by the woman to her therapist Dr. Larsen (Herbert Lom), we hear of and witness a scene in which Francesca is being punished by her high school teacher. Because the young girl is due to play piano the same day for a music scholarship, she pathetically begs the headmistress not to punish her by slapping her hands: francesca: Oh, I know I must be punished, of course, but not on the hands. Please. Not on my hands. Today is the music scholarship, and, if you cane me, if my hands will – oh, please!

Her supplication is in vain and she is beaten. In a voice-over she tells the doctor: ‘By the afternoon, my hands were swollen and blistered. I played so badly I knew I hadn’t a chance. I had set my heart on that scholarship. Music was the only thing I cared for even then’. A slight deviation from memory towards contemplative (perhaps mnemonic) hypnotic healing adds an additional layer of complexity to the role of symbolism of the hands in Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975). In the opening scene, a therapist is seen working with a young boy to assist him with some form of dyspraxia or speech impediment. She uses her hands at first as a focal point for the boy’s attention, and then transfers the locus of concentration onto his: Concentrate on your hands. Your hands are becoming tense. You’re concentrating your will, your great desires to succeed, on your hands. Your hands are becoming very tense. Look at your fingers. They’re becoming tense.

In this way, she uses the boy’s hands as a mechanism for encapsulating his suppressed speech, and then as a medium for liberating it. The successful

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attempt is confirmed when, after she encourages a relaxing of the boy’s hands and fingers, he utters a few words. The doctor continues: You try to move them, but you cannot. I’ll relieve the tension now, and you will speak clearly and effortlessly. You will speak loudly and clearly all your life. I’ll remove the tension from your hands and speech. 1 … 2 … 3! Say, ‘I can speak!’

In this sequence the hands are used like a bodily extremity for the expelling of negative energy that is prohibiting the boy’s speech. Once addressed, the repressed force can escape and is released. There is no specific reference to any traumatic experience or memory that might have produced the condition in the boy, but an intensification of his distress momentarily onto and through his hands as they literally contain the trauma ultimately facilitates his silent abreaction.

Works Referenced Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. London, New York: Verso. Andrew, Dudley. 1983. ‘The Primacy of the Figure in Cinematic Signif ication’. In Heath and Mellencamp, 133–140. Los Angeles: University Publications of America. Beattie, Geoffrey. 2016. Rethinking Body Language: How Hand Movements Reveal Hidden Thoughts. New York: Routledge. Becon, Thomas. 1564. ‘Catechism’. In The Works of Thomas Becon, 431–434. London. Bogucka, Maria. 1991. ‘Gesture, Ritual, and Social Order in Sixteenth- to EighteenthCentury Poland’. In Bremmer and Roodenburg, 190–209. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Bremmer, Jan and Herman Roodenburg (eds.). 1991. A Cultural History of Gesture. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Burke, Peter. 1991. ‘The Language of Gesture in Early Modern Italy’. In Bremmer and Roodenburg, 71–83. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Csepregi, Gabor. 2006. The Clever Body. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press. Dickens, Charles. 2018. A Christmas Carol. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Hall, G. Stanley. 1921. ‘Gesture, Mimesis, Types of Temperament and Movie Pedagogy’. In Pedagogical Seminary, 28. Heath, Stephen and Patricia Mellencamp (eds.). 1983. Cinema and Language. Los Angeles: University Publications of America.

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Karim-Cooper, Farah. 2016. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York, London: Bloomsbury. Kendon, Adam. 1982. ‘The Study of Gesture: Some Observations on its History’. In Semiotic Inquiry 2: 45–62. Kuberski, Philip. 2012. Kubrick’s Total Cinema: Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Lefevre, Romana. 2011. Rude Hand Gestures of the World. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mennel, Barbara. 2019. Women At Work in Twenty-First-Century European Cinema. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press. Metz, Christian. 1977. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celie Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 2005. ‘Repetition and Return: Textual Analysis and Douglas Sirk in the Twenty-First Century’. In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 228–243. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 2013. ‘Cinematic Gesture: The Ghost in the Machine’. Journal for Cultural Research 19 (1): 6–14. Oswald, Laura. 1983. ‘Discourse/Figure: The Inscription of the Subject in Surrealist Film’. In Heath and Mellencamp, 118–126. Los Angeles: University Publications of America. Petersen, Christina. 2018. ‘“The Best Synonym of Youth”: G. Stanley Hall, Mimetic Play, and Early Cinema’s Embodied Youth Spectator’. In Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form, edited by Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson and Valentine Robert, 231–248. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Roberts, Adam. 2009. ‘Is SF Handwritten?’ In James Holden (guest editor) Writing Technologies, 55–69. Vol. 2.2. Roodenburg, Herman. 1991. ‘The “Hand of Friendship”: Shaking Hands and Other Gestures in the Dutch Republic’. In Bremmer and Roodenburg, 152–189. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1984. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen & Co. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press.

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Spicer, Jonathan. 1991. ‘The Renaissance Elbow’. In Bremmer and Roodenburg, 84–128. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Stallybrass Peter and Ann Rosalind Jones. 2001. ‘Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe’. In Critical Enquiry 28.1 (Autumn): 114–132. Stimson, Blake. 2008. ‘Gesture and Abstraction’. In Migrations of Gesture, edited by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, 69–83. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tallis, Raymond. 2003. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomas, Keith. 1991. ‘Introduction’. In Bremmer and Roodenburg, 1–14. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press. Wundt, Wilhelm. 1973. The Language of Gestures. The Hague: Mouton.

3.

Aesthetics – The Stylised Hand: Beauty, Ugliness, Genre Abstract This chapter deals with pro-filmic hands as creative contributors to the filmmaking process and on-screen hands as stylistic elements. Thus, it considers the manual labour involved in certain aspects of film production as well as paying attention to the tonal qualities generated by different manual effects and designs across various genres. It interrogates some of the recurring ways that filmmakers have used the hand as a stylistic entity and analyses how framing the limb as a thing of beauty or ugliness can create an aesthetic effect that permeates the whole representation tonally. With a view to exploring theoretical writing on film studies by analysts who have considered the Camp aesthetic and the haptic effects of film spectatorship, it uses the hand as a starting point to propose new possibilities of intervention into those areas: in both cases attempting to problematise some of the existing lines of debate. Key Words: Film genre; Camp cinema; haptic cinema; manual labour and filmmaking

Behind the Scenes: Unseen Creative Hands Before mechanised cameras and projectors became standard, their handcranked predecessors created a direct, physical connection between the bodily motions and rhythms of the operator and those of the performer. Constant adjudication of the speed with which the hand of the machinist revolved the cogs and take-up reels of the mechanism was required to ensure accurate recording of the filmed action. With stop-frame photography the hand of the artist shifts more directly between operating the shutter and manipulating the framed object. These magical effects are applied for the anthropomorphic animation of lifeless matter and objects, but they are also

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_ch03

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used on the human body. Legs, arms, hands, faces, heads, and torsos, whether alive or lifeless, attached to or severed from their hosts, frequently undergo impossible contortions, liquefactions, and distortions for the delectation of audiences. The image of the active detached hand or arm appeared frequently in early cinema and the representation connoted or critiqued a modernist tension between mechanical disempowerment and autonomous expressions of agency and creativity. Volker Pantenburg has addressed the connection between the hand and pioneering examples of cinema by celebrating its potential – particularly inherent in the silent film – for independent articulation, and its detachment from its owner, which initiates thoughts about the alienation of one’s own body. Inserted into standardized procedures at the assembly line – Taylorism – the hand labors at its own abolition. (2015, 253)

In the Pathé short Le Rêve des marmitons (Segundo de Chomón, 1908), a group of obedient kitchen servants works frenetically and assiduously when their master is present but rebel when the man leaves. A strange, magical young boy emerges from a basket and makes several tankards appear. When the unruly servants drink from these they are anaesthetised and fall asleep. The child mimes cutting off the hands of the dozing workers and the severed limbs begin to frolic mischievously around the kitchen. The initiating action of the hand amputations allows de Chomón to toy with a range of special effects each requiring different technical devices and mechanical rendering to show the hands’ activities. The comical message is that when granted free reign the hands choose self-liberation from servitude and a rebellion against their conditions of labour. In the same year that Le Rêve des marmitons was produced J. Stuart Blackton released a short Vitagraph comedy: The Thieving Hand. The film tells the story of an armless beggar who returns a dropped key to a passer-by. The man rewards the mendicant by purchasing a prosthetic arm, which is attached to his shoulder and cranked into motion by a handle. The new limb begins stealing items from pedestrians, much to the disapproval of its new owner who reprimands it in a series of amusing asides. When the beggar returns it to the shop, it detaches itself and flees to continue its thieving. As with the short film by de Chomón, a range of special effects is mobilised to demonstrate the capabilities of the new medium, and these have consequences for the construction of the film’s narrative. The events represented occur because they have become technically and mechanically feasible in the same way that the animation of the new arm invites questions

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about its hybrid ontological state and capacities for autonomous action. In both films, the developing technological possibilities born from experiments with manually designed special effect photography are connected to the onscreen narratives of handiness and manual dexterity. Unlike the tormented, possessed protagonist of the horror film, here the gestural comedy celebrates manual agility, creativity, and self-expression. The plots of the films are motivated by a desire to harmonise the limb and mind relationship rather than to display the hand’s action in violent conflict with its owner. Film editing is another hand-cinema technique with ontological significance that merges with artistic expression. Whether designed to provide an illusion of seamless temporal and spatial progression, or creating montage disjunction, the meticulous work requires precision of manual adjustment as the process produces the illusion of motion and temporal progression by using rhythm, velocity, synchronisation, and consequentiality. This postproduction labour was complemented in many early examples of film by the practice of hand colouring individual frames. In the collection of essays The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema contributors have listed connections between the ontological characteristics of filmed elements and the role of the manual labourers in adding colour to the pictures. Verisimilitude played a critical role in motivating the visual supplement, however some images lent themselves readily to the enhancement. Jennifer Peterson justifies the interest in colouring fiction films and identifies nonfiction examples to ‘indicate that actuality subjects were also considered worthy of applied colour in the 1890s’ (2018, 83). These include ‘dance films’ and ‘an established tradition of coloured water shows in Europe: fountains illuminated with coloured lights had become a special attraction in the late nineteenth century and were featured in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1899 and 1900’ (2018, 83–84). Elena Gipponi testifies to the universal interest in such celluloid embellishments and refers to ‘the circulation of numerous handbooks about techniques of applied colour such as hand colouring, tinting and toning’ (2018, 36). Natalie Snoyman offers an in-depth study of how ‘fashion in particular was considered a good medium through which to explore colour in early cinema and beyond, with clothing often deemed important to colourize via hand colouring, stencilling, tinting, and toning’ (2018, 183). Attempts at moving towards an approximation of verisimilitude in the frame-by-frame colouring of fashion items makes another connection between the manually designed and produced textiles and their subsequent ‘finishing’ by hand-colouring. The seamlessness of these manual manipulations and enhancements of the celluloid frames has its contrary in the aesthetic practices of extreme

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avant-gardists like Stan Brakhage. That director’s visceral assault on the light-sensitive strip, and his other creative manipulations of the apparatus (whether disruptive interactions with the recording and projecting hardware, or with the sound and image captured on celluloid), testify to his interest in disturbing the normative ocular experiences of spectators by drawing attention to his interventions. Gareth Evans cites the director’s desire to combine a subjective corporeal experience with the physical elements of the apparatus and details the range of aesthetic effects in the Brakhage canon: This intimate connection to the material of film can be found across his career, from the scratched titles (that would be a signature for most of his film-making) in Desistfilm (1954) to his last completed film Chinese Series (2003) in which he made fragmented ideogrammatic marks with his fingernails, scratching off emulsion from the surface of the celluloid. (2018, 65)

Elsewhere, Peter Mudie explores how Brakhage was motivated by a passion to liberate the content of his material and the capacities of the apparatus from limitations of representationalism. In this respect, Mudie identifies the hand-painted portfolio of Brakhage as the embodiment of this dream’s realisation: Brakhage stated many times that film could construct a unique experience, freed from representation and analogy. His purely painted works epitomise his lifelong attempt to explore that space of the purely filmic. (2018, 29)

Inherent in both descriptions is a sense that the immediate, energetic, and visible incursion of the hand of the artist into the material machinery of the cinematic apparatus can have a profound impact on the act, the objects, and the ideological reception of the representation. Whereas most artists offer creations that do not draw attention to their construction, for Brakhage revelation and full disclosure of technique and manufacture had significant potential for creative and cultural liberation.

The Stylised Hand on Screen From a stylistic point of view the hand either appears on screen as an entity distinct and detached from its agent, or as an expressive element within

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Figure 3.1: Hands and the style of German Expressionism in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920)

the overall performance and mise en scène. Aesthetically, therefore, it has been an integral component in the composition of the design and the tonal qualities of scenes and entire films. The effects of the limb are given as much aesthetic inflection by surrounding diegetic details as they radiate style to those environmental factors. Extra-diegetic qualities of film can contribute to how the framed hand works artistically. The lenses, aspect ratios, framing, and the way shots are edited together, have contributed to the creation of a seamlessness (or intentional discontinuity) in cinematic styles. Aesthetic possibilities of the medium can inspire directors’ stylistic use of the hand, and the same corporeal feature can facilitate and encourage innovative forms of artistic expression. In the first instance, the expressionism of films like Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932), The Hands of Orlac, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920) has a direct stylistic effect on characters’ manual performances and the way in which their hands are decorated, lit, and framed (Fig. 3.1). As a representative example of the second case, we might consider Robert Bresson’s sustained interest in the limb’s aesthetic qualities and how it has consequences for the look, pacing, design, and tonal qualities of his films. This idea is endorsed by Lesley Stern when she articulates a useful creative opportunity: When we examine the gestural (figures gesturing) in film, we don’t look to untangle the simple transfer from ideas to bodily actions; rather, we

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take the manifest gesture or network of gestures as an instance of ideas (or charged notions) and their affects cathected through bodily action. (2008, 197)

In this respect we cannot and should not consider the aesthetics of manual framing in Bresson’s films as having been derived from ideas to which they remain subservient. Rather, in line with Stern, we can appreciate hands’ contribution to the creation of his overall aesthetics. The distinction between the Lumière brothers’ and Georges Méliès’ work is often proposed as a shift from the scientific use of the new technology to one where novel aesthetic possibilities began to take shape. For Tom Gunning this often has a corporeal focus. He has explored how the trick film, exemplified by the work of Georges Méliès, treated the body in a radically defamiliarized manner that drew on fantasy and traditions of the grotesque rather than scientific investigation. (2018, 13)

Gunning suggests that within a revision of ‘rationally constituted space’ one might find the creative potential inherent in ‘early cinema’s fascination with the construction and destruction of impossible bodies, imaginable only through the technology of cinema’ (15). André Bazin bases his interpretation of the operations of the apparatus – the fissure between artificial representation and deeper being – on that gap. He celebrates how film ‘has a thousand ways of acting on the appearance of an object so as to eliminate any equivocation and to make of this outward sign one and only one inner reality’ (1967, 62). This capacity of the medium allows for the material rendering of immaterial aesthetic decisions, predispositions, and sensibilities. Geoffrey Beattie explores how this visual quality calls attention to the human form when he references George Alexander Kennedy. Beattie notes how the body ‘according to Cicero, is like a musical instrument with the delivery or action being “a sort of eloquence of the body, since it consists in gesticulation as well as speech”’ (2016, 43). Farah Karim-Cooper selects a fifteenth-century example of this gestural aesthetic when she considers Leonardo da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper from 1495. Concentrating on the depiction of the characters’ hands, she describes how they ‘appear animated, lifelike and emotionally expressive, rather than merely iconic; Leonardo’s gestures are painted to reflect an emotional discourse rather than merely represent a set of emotions’ (2016, 19; original emphasis). With the birth of cinema, the need to create the illusion of animation was no longer a challenge for the artist. As many examples from the impressionist movements of art history

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attest – from early pictorialism through to cubism – the consequences of the new medium’s capacity to mobilise motion became both a challenge and an inspiration for the painter. Because cinema was endowed with novel capabilities associated with its energy of movement, its possibilities for a choreography of light and shade, its facility for proximity to its object, and then its editing options, the medium was ideally positioned to provide new aesthetic ways of capturing the human hand. A double articulation works at the core of everyday manual gesturing that might be understood tautologically. In order to communicate an idea by manual movement, position, or actions, the agent must perform in a way that firstly draws attention to the gesturing and simultaneously effaces the act of that indexical effort. This is evidently the case with pointing during which the extended finger must firstly be recognised as demonstrating something, but which then plays no role in adding meaning to the signposted object. Inasmuch as all gesturing is, to a greater or lesser extent, an indexical act of pointing – the indicative meaning (signified) always ‘beyond’ the concrete indicator (signifier) – we can interpret manual communications and gesturing as operating across a split. In this gap, a space opens for aesthetic expression and creation. When hands are framed on screen, the apparatus performs what the communicating subject does: namely, attracting the observer and then deflecting his or her attention elsewhere. Cinema ‘steps in’ and obviates the necessity of the primary element in the signifying process. It is empowered with near-complete control over how that process will begin and how the signifying hand is displayed and arranged for the spectator, even before it comes to mean something else. In this respect, there is a degree of resemblance in how both the camera and the hand ‘point’. Perhaps the camera might be better anthropomorphised as a hand, rather than an eye, as Vertov’s Kino-eye suggests, or a pen, as Astruc’s caméra-stylo would hold. Resistance to the idea that the film camera was a mere pointer can be found in Robert Bresson’s thinking; hardly a coincidence for the cinematic artist who was persistently determined to treat his performers like models, and to revive the human hands with a rich aesthetic and communicative capability almost as if it had no need of its performing host. Warning against a disingenuous replication or assimilation of the motion of the eyes with the movements of the camera, in his reflections on the art of film the French director noted: Obvious travelling or panning shots do not correspond to the movements of the eye. This is to separate the eye from the body. (One should not use the camera as if it were a broom.) (1986, 61)

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Volker Pantenburg astutely notes how the focus of the camera can be compared to the action of indexicality that the hands perform through gesturing. Considering the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Harun Farocki he suggests how the limb can ‘crop the picture and determine a provisional framing’ (2015, 221). This is reminiscent of a moment in Chaplin’s Limelight when the hero, returning home drunk, uses his hands to crop and centre his aim on the lock of his front door as he attempts to insert a key in the slot. Often the hands become a stylistic synecdoche for the entire mise en scène, as their makeup, decoration, or pose encapsulate the aesthetics of the film. In German Expressionist cinema the hands of characters are often held rigidly with fingers distorted in dystrophy or spread menacingly. As the film is wrought with additional texture and meaning, the role of the hand is central to the sensory experience. This feature occurs when the hand has been separated from its owner and is endowed with sentience and occasionally empowered with autonomous point of view. From early films like Segundo de Chomón’s 1908 Le Rêve des marmitons (translated as Scullion’s Dream) to recent ones like the 2019 animated feature film J’ai perdu mon corps (I Lost my Body) by Jérémy Clapin, the detached limb is mysteriously animated and acts voluntarily. Both films use the medium’s unique technical capacities to recreate impossible situations. The first case combines Méliès-like stop motion and double exposure and the second uses a blend of cell animation and computer-generated images. With these design effects their directors establish aesthetic continuity between the performing hands and their diegetic spaces. The supernatural oddity of de Chomón’s misbehaving creatures is reflective of the oneiric aesthetics of the whole film. Clapin’s animated cartoon-style narrative shifts its focus between two interwoven plots. He handles the fantastic story by withholding metaphysical justifications for its eccentricity and by foregrounding the classical style animation so that the spectator’s suspension of disbelief is taken out of the equation. As the intertwined narrative lines unfold, Clapin can legitimately alter the point of view positions normally assigned to the viewer by identification with character, and this creates an array of stylistic options for him. Clapin sets the lost hand on its quest to find its owner and so places it into irregular and bizarre situations. These include dramatic scale-shifting and shots of framed details in extreme close-up or from inaccessible angles. In sequences when we are granted direct alignment with the hand character, proximity and point of view are distorted. Everyday objects are diminished or grotesquely enlarged within the frame and the autonomous hand is constantly used as a ‘scale marker’. The resizing of recognisable items also magnif ies the hurdles

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confronting the severed limb and provides ironic alteration of our focus on details and their relative significance to the design of the mise en scène. This set of variations creates an original aesthetic through which the whole film works; one entirely different from even the scale-playing of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) (and its filmed adaptations by directors Dave Fleischer [1939], Peter R. Hunt [1977], and Rob Letterman [2010]) in which the episodic structure of the novel confines its alterations in characters and objects’ dimensions within different geographical locations and narrative sections. Because Clapin’s production is an animation in the manner of early Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera cartoons, laws of physics and biology are easily suspended. The film gives prominence to its cartoon dynamics and rhythms, yet it maintains a naturalism of character psychology and motivation. The style of the detached limb is in line with what Victor Francis Perkins celebrates in the medium when he notes: There is necessarily a relationship between the import and impact that a thing has in its world and the size of the gestures that display it on the screen. Since this relationship is not fixed, filmcraft can make it telling. (2005, 32)

Perkins then links this quality to the filmmaker’s style: At every moment the film faces stylistic choices over the degree to which it will scale its gestures to the proportions and values of the depicted world. (33)

Stylised visual distortions do not exist merely in the profilmic domain. Pasi Väliaho celebrates the earliest moments of cinematic ‘attractions’ and distinguishes the medium’s capacity for the ‘sheer movement of the image itself, close-ups, and magical transformations using the stop-motion techniques’ as principal elements (2010, 26). All these features lend themselves to, and are affected by, use of the represented hand. Although Väliaho goes on to discuss the entire human body as it appears on screen his ontological question remains true for different body parts, whether the face, the eyes, the lips, or the hands. Director Newton Arnold uses a combination of double exposure and freeze frame in Hands of a Stranger, his 1962 remake of The Hands of Orlac. An innovative stylistic sequence shows the injured pianist Vernon Paris (James Noah) having surgically received replacement hands, considering the devastating consequences of the incident for his career. At the keyboard he hallucinates playing for a concert audience. As he imagines the

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rapturous applause, clapping hands are shown in ghastly double exposure over shots of his face. A similar aesthetic is used in montage sequences in other Orlac adaptations. These narratives contain temporally compressed sequences showing the post-surgical recovery of the pianist retraining his newly acquired hands. This plot set piece uses montage to condense the rehabilitation period with ellipsis. Similar plot sections abound in films when an established master trains a novice in a new skill. In recent examples such as The Karate Kid (John Avildsen, 1984); Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986); and Kill Bill, Volumes I and II (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004) the stories entail a focus on the development of manual proficiency. One of the interesting aesthetic examples from the Orlac group is Mad Love, the 1935 version directed by Karl Freund. Following the surgical replacement of his hands, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive) sits by a river with his wife Yvonne (Frances Drake). It is the last scene before his bandaged hands are revealed and a dramatic segue into a series of close-up shots of his hands and fingers and his first reaction to the results of the operation: stephen: doctor:

They feel dead. Now try to move your fingers… Well done!

Gregg Toland’s camera sweeps into another close-up of his hands, and a series of shots is presented as a time ellipsis montage. Each of the fourteen images is aesthetically rendered, in its lighting, framing, and décor with innovative variation in close-up, and they are composed in the following order: shot 1: Two X-rays of hands; shot 2: Cloths covering them as they’re massaged; shot 3: Mini-rotating ‘buffering’ machine; shot 4: Mini-medical lamp shining on them; shot 5: An unidentifiable ‘shaking’ machine; shot 6: Medical numerical dials; shot 7: Small rotating Perspex machine on them; shot 8: Silhouetted against a fluorescent spiral lamp; shot 9: Making fists with bending fingers; shot 10: Moving fingers separately in front of a metronome; shot 11: Several hands swapping cash on a tabletop; shot 12: Mrs. Orlac – central frame – with superimposed rotating hands; shot 13: Cross-fade over sign ‘Credit Mutual’ and items of value on a table; shot 14: Sculpture on his piano of two hands; one holding the back of the other.

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The sequence performs an important role in the provision of narrative information: the progress in the musician’s healing is slow and, because Stephen has not been performing, he and his wife are faced with mounting bills. However, the aesthetic significance of the montage of shots is equally noteworthy. Both within individual frames, and across successive shots, Freund juxtaposes the humanity of the injured man – his role as cultural performer – with the impersonal, clinical tools of the medical men of science. At first the images clash stylistically but gradually they merge into a coherent synthesis. The possibility of integration of art and science, here rendered aesthetically, is placed at odds with the characterisation of the fanatical and obsessive Doctor Gogol (Peter Lorre); the man who embodies a malign amalgamation of the worlds of culture and medical science. The nature of the clash between the first shot (thesis) and the following one (antithesis) in the classical montage sequence is one that can be mapped onto the way in which a whole elliptical succession of images can sit aesthetically, or narratively, at odds with the rest of the film. Occasionally, as the temporal compression occurs across a series of pictures, the piece can achieve a degree of suspension from the narrative world, hovering between diegetic and non-diegetic levels. As a self-contained segment of otherwise mismatched shots, it is often the case that the framed hand provides visual coherence and a meaningful link across the inserted section. This is the case with the subversive 1969 film Spalovač Mrtvol (translated into English as The Cremator) by Czech director Juraj Herz. The film, which was banned when first released until 1989, tells the story of cremator Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusínský) who believes that he is liberating the souls of those whose bodies he burns. He becomes insanely obsessed with undertaking this endeavour for the good of his countrymen and, ultimately, for his family. Kopfrkingl is markedly impressed with the Nazi gas chambers as ways to accomplish his deliverance of mortals from their earthly misery into an infinite paradise. During the credit sequence, photos of body parts – one of which is a collage of hands – are layered in stop-motion and rendered in heavy chiaroscuro lighting and shade. These images prefigure Kopfrkingl’s profession, and the manual labour involved in the annihilation of his victims. Throughout the film Herz inserts fleeting expressionistic shots of the cremator’s hands as he undertakes different professional actions. The disruption by these stylised and rapidly inserted images invites, through their disjunctive aesthetic, cognitive connection to the mindset of the protagonist and his increasingly pathological world view. Like the master-training-pupil films mentioned above, those in which the protagonist trainee is a pickpocket afford opportunity for elliptical

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montage sequences that show the development and refinement of the ‘art’. Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) is interesting stylistically in this respect. In the opening train sequence after pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) has approached his mark, Cindy (Jean Peters), he tries to steal from her handbag. A series of shots is constructed, alternating between his face and hers, and his hand going into her bag as it pushes a handkerchief aside and removes her purse. In a development from the Pudovkin effect – because Fuller uses a third shot – audiences must connect the three as the angles and perspectives change. Background motion is visible in the frontal shots of the character, and provides a degree of continuity, but the same context is not provided in the tighter shot of the victim’s purse. Between the facial close-ups, sometimes the eye-line match follows a visual logic, but at other times it does not correspond to the events; a stylistic choice by Fuller that perfectly captures the performed misdirection of the petty thief at work. Aesthetically, it is the inferred action of the pickpocket and the focus on his hand that invite the associative link in creating the composition. Steven Shaviro references an equivalent sequence in Robert Bresson’s related film: No filmmaker has ever given so crucial a role to bodily postures and gestures, to physical comportments and to the motions of hands and feet. Think of the famous scene in the railway station in Pickpocket, where the camera follows the passage of the stolen objects from hand to hand. (1993, 243)

This aesthetic quality relates to the ways that framed representations are set before the lens of the camera. Framing of the form, design, action, and motion of the profilmic hand can have an impact on the aesthetics of the entire film. This is evident in Iranian female director Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black in which the limbs of characters interned in an institution for sufferers of leprosy are shown as deformed and contorted in stiff immobility (Fig. 3.2). The same stylistic continuity works throughout Jane Campion’s The Piano when mute pianist Ada (Holly Hunter) expresses herself through the musical instrument. Ada’s hands are shown as petite, agile, and dexterous counterparts to those of her male associates, and Campion lights them in soft warm hues that express the tenderness of her playing and the character’s passionate and compassionate disposition. As we have seen from several cases already, Robert Bresson’s films exemplify the intensity with which his characters’ manual interactions and manoeuvres position his ‘models’ in their aesthetic and aestheticised spaces. In films such as Un Condamné à mort

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Figure 3.2: Hands as stylistic elements in The House is Black (Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963)

s’est échappé, Pickpocket, Au hasard Balthazar, and L’Argent, the director’s lingering on hands comes to form a core part of the films’ aesthetics, not only in their postures and positions, but also in the visual and rhythmic qualities that inform his presentation of the diegetic worlds. As Roy Armes has noted of the stylistic communication embodied in the work of the French auteur: The sparsity of normal colloquial dialogue both heightens the mystery of Bresson’s films and lays stress on the role of gesture. Hands are for him as important as faces. (1976, 89)

The decoration of a character’s hands – with rings, bracelets, nail varnish, injuries, blemishes, or tattoos – serves an immediate stylistic purpose, but these adornments also frequently draw attention to the minutiae of what hands and fingers are doing. This is the case especially in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) whose haunted protagonists are trapped in worlds the directors represent with fastidious attention to manual decorations that are then integrated into the films’ general aesthetics. Carol (Catherine Deneuve), the female protagonist of Polanski’s narrative, is a manicurist who suffers increasing bouts of panic in the light of emerging memories of a childhood trauma. As she embarks on a romantic relationship, tentatively desiring its development but repressing the darker wounds of her youth, her mental health deteriorates. She works efficiently in a beauty salon, but a decline in her competence is foreshadowed when, as she tends to a customer, she accidentally pricks the lady’s finger. Her expertise as stylist is undermined gradually as the hands to which she

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once tended turn against and haunt her in sequences of hallucination and terror that culminate in a climactic attack. Thus, Polanski exaggerates the psychological horror by turning the aesthetician into victim of her aesthetic environment. In a similar way, the protagonist of Nolan’s Memento suffers from shortterm memory loss and struggles to reassemble his narrative: one that is essentially connected to his identity and the mystery of his personal situation. As Leonard (Guy Pearse) attempts a reconstruction of events and his role in them, Nolan shifts the aesthetics of the film across three strands: sharp colour and focus for the sections of plot presented chronologically backwards; black and white interludes that explain Leonard’s condition; and flashback scenes narrated as a story-within-the-story about one of Leonard’s insurance clients, which are filmed in a softer televisual style. Nolan integrates his and Leonard’s plot construction – each one trying to assemble a coherent fabula from a disjointed syuzhet – with fragments of the protagonist’s personal story written on Polaroid photographs and tattooed on his hands. Although the messages are narratively important for their declarative information, Nolan presents them – and other text drawn on Leonard’s body – with a variety of calligraphic fonts. The different elements of the bottom-up identity are wrought in different styles just as the top-down strands of the whole story are designed. Hands are framed closely as a symbolic mid-way point between the two. Nolan’s film is a story about a man piecing together a narrative jigsaw puzzle but shot with closer attention to the hands of the solver than to the emerging image, so it is only at the end of the film that the director grants the spectator a snap, pull-back shot of the overall finished picture. One case stands out among others in its novel use of the hand as an acoustic aesthetic feature. Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1991 feature-length remake of the television series The Addams Family comically plays with many conventions of the standard horror and includes among its ensemble ‘Thing’, a severed but animate hand (played by Christopher Hart). The creature is a mischievous entity that roams the mansion providing light relief in its interactions with its relatives. Sonnenfeld anthropomorphises the limb and generates comedy by attributing to it qualities that absurdly mimic the actions and gestures of the whole body and, at times, even those of a small canine. Its fingers sometimes perform as arms and legs and, in conjunction with contortions of the palm, recreate assimilations of an expressive face. As it moves and interacts with objects in the diegetic space, Sonnenfeld exaggerates the sounds produced by its contact with these things: a slight distortion of typical noises gives the character a cartoonish demeanour and,

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as it scuttles along floors and different surfaces, the tapping and scratching of its fingernails are amplified for comical effect. Films that sustain a surreal aesthetic or recreate dreamscape moments at various points in their narratives frequently use a visual exaggeration of manual imagery. The corporeal abject disgust provoked by Louis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí throughout Un Chien andalou (1929) is epitomised in the scene when their protagonist studies his raised hand as ants crawl from a stigmata-like hole in his palm. Buñuel revisits the horrific image in The Exterminating Angel, his 1962 political satire of bourgeois class lifestyles. With surrealist imagery, at one point the hand of a corpse that has been hidden in a closet falls out and terrifies one of the guests at a party where the gathered have become mysteriously trapped. As if to chastise the high society group for their idleness and lethargy at a later point a character notices a hand coming out of the same closet and crawling across the floor. Her face is perspiring and, while probably hallucinating, she sees the limb climb onto a desktop. The threatened woman plants an ornament on it to trap it but the hand resists and leaps towards her neck to strangle her with an attack that (in keeping with the oddity of the scene) it perpetrates rather gently. Finally, she pushes it onto the table and tries to stab it as it scuttles away. With a nod to the surrealist externalisation of character’s imagination, unconscious desires, and dream fantasies, Michel Gondry represents moments of manual exaggeration in his unconventional 2006 romantic comedy The Science of Sleep. As bored office worker Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) pursues his love interest Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) his creative Mittyesque caprices are narratively interwoven with his real-world activities and encounters with the girl. During a dream sequence when he muses about the tedium of his work, Stéphane imagines his hands as huge and unwieldy useless appendages. Gondry repeats the image when his mother tells the story of finding Stéphane in bed as a kid covered with vomit, as he holds two enormous hands aloft. This recurring motif – one which associates the character’s hands with labour, sex, and the tenderness of his reaching out for Stéphanie – is used aesthetically in the development of their relationship. While helping her to move a piano he injures his hand, and she tends to the wound: stéphanie: stéphane :

You have two big hands. That means you have a large penis.

This moment is followed by a tender manual interaction between the two, during which Stéphanie explains a trick to him (a ‘brain effect’) by rubbing

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the two fingers of their joined hands together. He shows her another with two fingers put together, looking through them into the distance, to reveal the ‘little sausage’. The moment of tactile connection is continued later as their relationship develops, and Stéphane affectionately asks her: ‘Stéphanie, will you hold my hand? I cannot sleep’. The work that Spike Jonze has produced in collaboration with writer/ director Charlie Kaufman is known for its challenging and complex play with narrative forms and self-referential, meta-cinematic mise en abyme structures. Their films contain amalgamations of realist and surreal aesthetics with digressions from principal storylines that justify alterations in style and conventional cinematic registers (such as disruptions in coherent point of view, a pataphysical disregard of cause and effect, and interruptions of standard narrative logic and progression). In their first collaboration Being John Malkovich (1999), the aesthetic qualities of hands feature prominently. The protagonist is Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), a puppeteer who discovers a hidden portal that grants access to the mind and body of the titular celebrity. Schwartz’ profession as controller of marionettes justifies his greater degree of proficiency in manipulating Malkovich when he ‘inhabits’ the actor. In the opening sequence Jonze shows Schwartz at work and concentrates on his hands, contorted in artistic action and expression, as well as giving screen time to the hands of his puppets. This underscores the relationship between the movement of the performer’s hands and their animation of the lifeless marionettes. Jonze takes great care to establish the intricate beauty of the puppeteer’s skill and frames details of both the man’s and marionettes’ melodramatic actions and manual gestures. His lingering on the hands of Schwartz is aesthetically significant and the puppeteer’s balletic movements are gently lit and framed in carefully choreographed detail. Their dexterous interactions with the levers and strings of his marionettes range from the slow and subtle twisting of the apparatuses, to rapid and jerking finger actions. When Schwartz seeks alternative employment to supplement his income, he finds a newspaper advertisement ‘Looking for a man with fast hands’. In his new position Schwartz discovers the celebrity portal. When the puppeteer enters the body of Malkovich, Jonze establishes an uninterrupted ‘head height’ shot from the actor’s point of view, and the angle of his camera enables consistent focus and attention on the hands of the possessed Malkovich. In Being John Malkovich the framing of characters’ hands – the puppeteer’s, the marionettes’, the celebrity’s – mark them as separate sculpted objects, rendered independently beautiful. This is reminiscent of the way in which Alejandro González Iñárritu shoots the manual interactions of

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his principal characters in the opening sequences of Biutiful (2010). Iñárritu’s pacing and the warm lighting of the tactile interactions of father and daughter establish a mood of intimacy and serenity that contrasts with the harder edge of the diegetic world that Iñárritu presents later. The title of the film and its beginning scene sit at odds with the harsher aesthetics of the rest of the story world as it narrates harrowing details of its characters’ poverty and personal tragedies. However, this incongruity is not handled by the director in an ironic or hackneyed way. Rather, the redemption of the disparity between story world and events and the title of the film occurs in the finer moments of beauty and tenderness Iñárritu proposes that we should be seeking in the hidden details of his characters’ lives. These are manifest and gently presented during instances of quiet and delicate manual interactions between them. The subtlety of Iñárritu’s manual aesthetics contrasts utterly with the use of hand imagery and iconography in the horror. In that genre the distended, distorted, repulsive, and injured limbs denote an incarnation of the supernatural threat as it reaches forward to seize or harm its victims. Whether attached to its ghastly owner, or autonomously detached and animated by its own malign consciousness, the image is depicted in gruesome mangled detail, usually with elongated fingers and fingernails which simultaneously offer menace and the intention to grab and wound. In horror films like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) where the severed limb crawls from a grave, the item is set on a path of vengeance for the violence perpetrated against its owner (Fig. 3.3). For the most part the intention of the grasping hands is dissociated from rationality and the ambiguous motivations for its actions contribute to the fear complemented by its aesthetically repulsive design. We have already seen an extreme example of the threat of grasping and clawing arms and hands in George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead when dozens of them burst through a wall to assault the heroine. A similarly horrid moment occurs in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as hideous limbs penetrate the domestic space of its psychologically tormented female protagonist. The possessed haunted house of Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006) also stretches contorted and grotesque grabbing limbs inwards onto the terrorised and entrapped victim Rose (Radha Mitchell). This recurring stylistic device and its associated iconography literally and metaphorically haunt characters of the genre and, while their invasion is symbolically significant, it is the aesthetics of their visceral and visual assault that are designed to offend and terrify. The stylistic modulations and variations across different generic cases reveal interesting interpretations of how and why the malevolent hand might

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Figure 3.3: Stylised destruction of the evil limb in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965)

provoke the horrified reactions that it does. Mark Jones uses the sexually taunting grabbing hand with a dark comedic turn in Leprechaun (1993), and Tibor Takács intensifies its sinister nature as the limb appears from under a bed in his 1987 film The Gate. Sidney Salkow reproduces Romero’s use of the convention in the zombie attack in The Last Man on Earth (1964), and Dario Argento’s first victim in Suspiria (1977) is attacked by a hand that smashes unexpectedly through a window. In The Bat (1959), which tells the story of an anonymous murderer who stalks his victims, director Crane Wilbur plays with the criminal’s identity by introducing close-up shots of a gloved hand. Sometimes the action is explained, and the perpetrator is revealed, however Wilbur manages the provision of information for dramatic effect throughout. Horror film aesthetics usually present the grotesque or monstrous hand as visually separated although not actually severed from its host. This feature suggests that there is no sense of a rationally controlling mind or any justifiable logic behind its intentions. The targeted victim may evade the tactile grasp of the offending limb, however the set piece might still involve the horrific, threatening seizing of the character’s own hand, head, or the covering of her mouth. The fact that the convention has been so well established – along with scenes representing the disabling of the victim’s ability to cry out or scream for help, as Roy Ward Baker does in And Now the Screaming Starts! – means that it is readily available for intertextual referencing and parody at moments where the device is overturned. In the horror and thriller’s penchant for providing comical punctuation at moments of intense drama, such ‘false attacks’ have become emblematic

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syntactic tools in the director’s kit. In The Crawling Hand (1963), director Herbert Strock at first stages a purported manual assault when the renegade limb is shown creeping over a potential victim’s pillow. The playful misdirection is exposed when Strock reveals that the hand was her own, but she presently succumbs to a grizzly attack by the actual murderous detached limb. Robert Foley uses the same comedic device more than once in The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), and in a conventional scene in Jurassic Park during which one of his protagonists – Ellie (Laura Dern) – has been trapped as she tries to find her missing colleague, Steven Spielberg has her breathe a sigh of relief as the man’s hand descends from a cabinet onto her shoulder. Immediately, the whole arm falls out of the locker, evidently severed by velociraptors. The fear invoked by these aesthetically wrought devices is a primal one based on the idea that the antagonistic monster, the possessed limb, the psychopathic assailant, or the supernatural creature are somehow divested of reason. The disconnected hand becomes a symbolic representation of the same detachment of the animated, autonomous body part from the rationality and logical agency of its owner’s mind. In films where the hand is still attached to its host, the contiguity extends the threat beyond the disturbed brain that controls it. As the rationale of the perpetrator’s motivations are interrogated, the hand becomes the site where the objectives of the will are played out. There are five possible reasons for why the severed or visually (although not literally) detached hand might have become an attractive recurring trope for directors of the horror genre and why these are consistently effective in terrifying the viewer. Firstly, in cases where the limb is connected to a body, a head, or some form of sentient apparatus, the spectator may be disturbed by an inability to rationalise the motivation behind its destructive reaching, grabbing, or pulling. Secondly, in contrast, fear might be provoked by the fact that there is, in effect, no motivation at all behind the violent action. In both instances we logically fear the consequences of the hand’s illogical desires. A third possibility allows for a kind of Pavlovian response in the spectator, in which the established (visual or acoustic) codes and conventions of the horror induce reactions in intertextual ways. Fourthly, any visual ‘detachment’ – whether cinematically, by the framing, the definition of the space through the profilmic design of the mise en scène, or in the editing – itself inevitably suggests an invasive amputation; the representation of a material dissection and reconstruction that works fundamentally at elemental operations of the cinematic apparatus. Finally, on a primal level, viewers harbour a fear of being touched by the unknown or unrecognisable, whether animate or inanimate. Jennifer

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Bullington condenses many of these ideas when she offers an overview of the horror film and images of corporeal fragmentation: there is no personal life or mind without a body, even though the science fiction genre often plays with the trope of a disembodied head kept alive in a jar, as in the film Cold Lazarus, or a body without a soul, as in the multitude of films about zombies. (2013, 27)

While all the screen adaptations of The Hands of Orlac juxtapose the benign (cultured, music-making) capabilities of the protagonist’s hands with their malevolent (destructive, murderous) counterparts, Karl Freund’s version Mad Love sustains the examination with a shifting performance of the character’s hands between a soft lyrical motion and a hard-lit distorted lurching. In their gentler gesturing and movements – especially while caressing his wife or playing the piano – Steven Orlac’s hands are reminiscent of Raymond Tallis’ note on the limbs’ aesthetic quality (a unique aside in his study on the human feature). Tallis comments that the ‘hand may be at rest and silent and yet still eloquent, speaking through the beauty of its structure’ (2003, 103). Images of the hand are used occasionally as a decorative feature of the mise en scène, and their design can inform a tonal or stylistic quality of the whole film. A hand sculpture is significantly placed in the background of one scene of Phantom Lady, the 1944 film noir by Robert Siodmak. The statuette ominously foreshadows characters’ suspicions about the emerging murderous impulses of its protagonist Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone). In Shallow Grave (1994) Danny Boyle uses a similar prop in a scene when he shows Alex Law (Ewan McGregor) watching television. Following the gruesome disposal of the body of their flatmate, Alex and his co-tenants Juliet Miller (Kerry Fox) and David Stephens (Christopher Eccleston) gradually sink into a post-traumatic paranoid state in which Stephens has become increasingly volatile and threatening. As Alex sits alone one afternoon after their criminal actions, an insert shot of the television includes a tabletop statuette of a hand, with fingers splayed in a spider-like position. The item is somewhat incongruous in their modern apartment, but its horrible form fits with the aesthetic qualities of the second half of the film. The credit sequence of David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) shows the psychopathic antagonist creating a set of books that the detectives discover later in a concealed room in his flat. The scratchy images, unevenly and hauntingly lit, align with the dark aesthetic of the diegetic world, and focus on both the grotesquely distorted hands of the man making the diaries, as well as other manual images relating to either his victims or processes of criminal

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Figure 3.4: Stylised mise en scène in Harold P. Warren’s Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

fingerprinting and photographing. Like the framing of differently posed hands in the opening sequence of Juraj Herz’ The Cremator, these images establish an important tonal quality that pervades the aesthetics of the story world. A similar stylistic haunting occurs with the repeated use of the shape of the hand in Harold P. Warren’s 1966 B-movie Manos: The Hands of Fate. A couple with a child gets lost looking for a vacation spot and encounters a strange human-sacrificing satanic cult whose leader, ‘The Master’ (Tom Neyman), has adorned his ritualistic space with hand-shaped imagery. While there is never any explanation of The Master’s fetishistic use of the limb, it may point to the idea invoked in the title that our fate is ‘in our hands’. However, the decorative ubiquity of the form – represented in different postures and positions – adds to the Unheimlich of the situation in which the unwilling victims find themselves (Fig. 3.4). The visual quality of the limb likely contributes tonally to a primal fear that Barbara Creed proposes in consideration of horror films generally: Severed hands feature as a monstrous image in a number of horror films […] This may be partly explained because of the link in mythology between severed hands and spiders. Minerva punished Arachne by turning her into a hand, which then changed into a spider. (1995, 144)

An interesting example of framed theatrical mise en scène within filmed mise en scène occurs when pianist Vernon Paris (James Noah) is performing for a live audience in Hands of a Stranger. The stage on which he is playing is decorated with a stylised Godot-like tree. It is positioned to the right of the

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musician in stark grey, lit to stand out from the shaded backdrop, but rises in the shape of a deformed hand with five distorted finger-like branches. Degrees of overwhelming terror are facilitated when the hand of the threatening King Kong is used as a scale-marking – Kantian ‘Sublime’ – terror-inducing device in the adaptations of that story; from Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack’s 1933 original, through to John Guillermin’s version in 1976, and Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake. In the earlier versions, which pre-date computer generated imaging, the huge hand was an effective way of communicating the extent of the threat with an actual profilmic construction that could be more convincing in its verisimilitude than the stop-animation and backscreen rendering required when representing the whole body of the monster. Another trope has been used for narrative and aesthetic purposes in horror films when the human hand undergoes metamorphosis into some supernatural creature. In these instances, the limb is designed and constructed to denote the moment at which the human-to-inhuman transformation occurs, or when the formerly inanimate being comes to life. The convenience of the restricted, close-up framing of the hand at these points facilitates the director’s withholding of the full corporeal presence of the creature. The dramatic revelation is standard practice in the genre and so the device has contributed significantly to the visual iconography of many horror films. The strategy has been employed for pragmatic reasons too: make-up artists and special effects designers can focus their attention on the limited bodily extremity – feet are used occasionally – so that they can concentrate on the meticulous details of the transformation of the isolated limb and allow the director to cut to the full body after the change. The transition creates the illusion that the biological and physical conversion was gradual, progressive, and total, rather than only to the hand followed by an unconvincing cut to a full prosthetic made-up body. The technique has been used in werewolf films by, among others, John Landis in An American Werewolf in London (1981), Neil Jordan in The Company of Wolves (1984), and Rob Daniel in Teen Wolf (1985), but concentration on the hand of the inert creature scientifically brought to life has been most famously executed in screen adaptations of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818). James Whale’s 1931 version captures the moment with a sense of the moral and ethical ambiguity of the original novel. He presents several shots of Dr. Frankenstein’s hands, even before the monster is animated, to interrogate the propriety of the scientist’s ambition. The manual performance of Colin Clive (who plays Henry Frankenstein) modulates from composed, dexterous proficiency to contorted, twisted angst as he discovers his powerful

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divine-like achievement and the ramifications of the accomplishment. When his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye) alerts the doctor to the fact that the hand of the recreated body (soon to be energised by electrical current) has fallen out from under the cover, Frankenstein tells him there’s nothing to be worried about: Look. No blood, no decay. Just a few stitches. Look. Here’s the final touch. The brain you stole, Fritz. Think of it: the brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands. [He holds his hands in front of his face] With my own hands.

Moments later, when reproached by Fritz for assuming godlike potency over life and death, the surgeon says: ‘That body is not dead. It has never lived. I created it. I made it with my own hands from the bodies I took from graves, from the gallows, anywhere’. He confirms this by raising and dropping the hand of the corpse: for him, the ultimate sign of a living soul. Once the monstrous body has been exposed to the electrical storm and it descends on the gurney, Whale inserts a close-up shot of the creature’s hand as it begins to twitch. In a shot containing him and the hand in relief, Frankenstein confirms: ‘Look, it’s moving. [At this point the hand starts to rise] It’s alive, it’s alive!’ The huge hands of the revived being are later filmed and framed by Whale with degrees of stylistic variation – mostly controlled by soft or harsh lighting and shade – to convey degrees of impending threat (when the monster attempts to protect himself from the mob), or gentler moments (as those in the scene when he is approached by the little girl). The latter encounter is softly composed with an aesthetic befitting the tenderness of the interaction between the creature and the young Maria (Marylin Harris) and contains a moment when the otherworldly being considers the enormity of his unhuman hands. Without malign intention, in a gesture that brings about his ultimate downfall, he picks up the young character and throws her into the lake where she drowns. Brian Yuzna’s 1990 B-movie Bride of Re-Animator repeatedly uses close-up shots of the twitching hand to indicate that a character or combination of recreated body parts have been ‘re-animated’. The f ilm makes several cinematic visual and stylistic intertextual references to its Frankenstein antecedents and invokes similar themes in doing so. The prospect that the human hand can be put to evil or good use – as a destroyer or creator – is foregrounded in one scene when Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) discusses the possibilities of re-composition for the body of the deceased Gloria (Kathleen Kinmont). Having attempted to design

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the ‘perfect female’, West obsessively tells his colleague Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) about his creation: The arms of a waitress. The lawyer’s hand… Case dismissed. [Raising her right hand] Look at this delicate piece. What do you think? A sculptress? [He pulls the exposed tendons to move Gloria’s fingers] A harpist? Would you believe [He pulls the tendons again so that the fingers make a fist] a murderess?

Presently, as he raises his hands in an image that echoes James Whale’s fanatical doctor, West announces that Gloria is just dead tissue, adding: ‘but in our hands… it’s the clay of life!’ Some of the interesting scenes in which characters undergo ghastly transition, either by full metamorphosis or by supernatural possession, take place in films that give time to establishing the normal pre-transformation disposition of the victim and contrast that with the evil temperament following the transition. In the 2012 film The Possession (Ole Bornedal) the hands of a young girl are aesthetically rendered both before and after her affliction in accordance with her altered personality. In a scene before she has become the corporeal medium for a demon that resides in a mysterious antique box, Em (Natasha Calis) plays a shadow hands game with her father, Clyde (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), over the lamp in her bedroom. With tender interactions like the paternal-daughter manual contact at the beginning of Iñárritu’s Biutiful, the shadow puppets are cast onto the ceiling in playful and affectionate intimacy. The warm and delicate aestheticisation of the tactile connection between the characters is contrasted with those after Em’s possession. In a later dining room scene, ostensibly focusing on the change in her manual actions, the girl eats rapidly and noisily. Clyde chastises her for the aberrant behaviour and with a sudden horrific outburst she sticks her fork into the back of his hand. Her evil disorder develops and at a climactic dramatic moment she opens her mouth as she looks into a bathroom mirror. On a shock beat two fingers appear in her throat. This iconic moment is reproduced in the film’s publicity poster, altered to represent a whole hand coming out of the girl’s mouth and grabbing her face. Such is the centrality of the human hand as potent aesthetic image (and thematically significant element) in the horror film that the limb appears regularly in posters and advertising around the genre. The dynamic labour and choreographed mobility of the hand on screen contribute significantly to the style of performances and aesthetics of characterisation in ways that are ubiquitous in their invisibility and central to

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how an actor portrays a role. Charles Darwin described a sensory sublimation of energetic movements which, when muted in the corporeal centre, might find outlet in the body’s extremities. The concept is evident in performative choices by on-screen actors: when movements, associated through habit with certain states of the mind, are partially repressed by the will, the strictly involuntary muscles, as well as those which are least under the separate control of the will, are liable still to act; and their action is often highly expressive. (1872, 54)

Geoffrey Beattie develops Darwin’s thesis in a way that enables an aesthetic analysis of manual performances precisely because they act through moments of articulation behind which there may be only subconscious iterations of inexpressible mental and emotional states. Concluding that ‘such behaviours provide us with a glimpse of our hidden unarticulated thoughts’, Beattie proposes that hand gestures actually embody our thinking through bodily action with little or no conscious awareness. […] Movements of the hands and the arms act as a window on the human mind; they make thought visible. The fact that they do this without our conscious awareness makes them particularly interesting for both psychologists and the general public in their everyday lives. (2016, 2–3)

Susan Sontag has drawn on Robert Bresson’s work to situate a similar argument within the cinematic context and notes the capacity of the medium to capture a gestural style that transcends the verbal. Using examples from his work, Sontag celebrates its aesthetic potency: Large sections of Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé and Pickpocket are wordless; they are about the beauties of personality effaced by a project. The face is very quiet, while other parts of the body, represented as humble servants of projects, become expressive, transfigured. […] One remembers Fontaine’s large graceful hands at their endless labors in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, the ballet of agile thieving hands in Pickpocket. (2009, 190)

While Douglas Gomery does not concentrate on Bresson’s manual focus, per se, he need only propose the aesthetic importance of the director’s consistent use of close-ups to identify the object of the camera’s attention. On Un

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Condamné à mort s’est échappé he notes how it ‘displays a meticulous attention to detail, having actually been shot in a prison. The style emphasized the close-up, with the central figure, on-screen throughout most of the ninety-minute film’ (1991, 381). As Bresson requires that viewers reassess the framed objects, he does so with a restraint that David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson suggest ‘focuses our attention on details of action we never notice in most movies’ (2004, 205). When an object is enlarged within the frame the spectator is challenged by a re-evaluation that mirrors the visual separation performed by the director, in which normal recognitions and meanings are severed from the object with which they are diurnally associated. Fritz Graf holds on to a hermeneutic association between gestures and their linguistic counterparts and points to an emotionally expressive quality that goes beyond the rationality of verbal communication. He evaluates early research by anthropologist Gregory Bateson who proposed a complete schism between linguistic and corporeal modes of iteration. Graf has argued: in rhetoric, gestures do not perform a function totally different from language, they underline and amplify the message of language by stressing the emotional, non-rational elements – exactly the modification made by more recent research to Bateson’s position. (1991, 41)

By referencing the cinematic work of Martin Arnold, Akira Mizuta Lippit takes forms of manual expression beyond a representational extreme and demonstrates how Arnold’s practice allows for a gestural quality that transcends corporeality and merges with aesthetic qualities of the medium. Lippit coins the term ‘digestures’ as he describes the process of absorption: Nothing is left in Arnold’s cinema except gestures without bodies, emphasizing (but also perverting) the original condition in cinema of the lost body. These gestures are not the cinematographic movements of bodies, nor are they the movements of the apparatus; they are the gestures at the end of cinema, gestures that come at the end of cinema and that end cinema. They are gestures that come from no body, digestures. (2008, 127–128)

This transcendental possibility – here, specifically, of the hand – is reminiscent of Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on the cinema that are broadly informed by his philosophical monism. His consideration of Béla Balázs’ writing endorses a potential within the image to achieve new forms of expression in the editor’s separation of the moment from its broader profilmic context. In

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foregrounding this mode of abstraction, Deleuze moves towards a uniquely cinematic aesthetic that he calls ‘pure affect’: the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Eternity. The close-up is not an enlargement and, if it implies a change of dimension, this is an absolute change: a mutation of movement which ceases to be translation in order to become expression […] the close-up retains the same power to tear the image away from spatio-temporal co-ordinates in order to call forth the pure affect as the expressed. (1992, 95–6; original emphasis)

Whereas Graf maintains a linguistic and gestural link, and Lippit offers an example from an avant garde set of work that transcends formal literal modes of communication, by holding on to expressive possibility but detaching the connotative and denotative signification of the image from its contextual meanings, Deleuze opens up a space for a purity of performance aesthetics. Carrie Noland offers a concise account of the breath of communicative detail that can be mobilised by corporeal activities, and what she describes can be intensified in the manual dispositions of the performer: The energy of the gestural can be harnessed to represent but also to construct ethnicity, sexuality, or class status. Psychological or emotional states are expressed as well as brought into being through gestures, and such states can come to define a culture’s structure of feeling. (2008, xvi)

Elsewhere, Laura Mulvey pays attention to the sexualised gesturing of Marilyn Monroe by proposing that the actress strategically mobilises stylistic elements from various connotative possibilities. Giving examples from Monroe’s performance in Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Mulvey explains: The initial gestures, such as the beckon, belong to a recognisable vocabulary and work as expressive ‘add-ons’, in which the body claims, through this physical supplement to language, its own material form of meaning. (2013, 8)

Aside from the enticing and suggestive manual motioning that mimics social codes of flirtation and innuendo, styles of manual performance

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can be broadly placed into two tonal categories. Firstly, it is possible to discern an association between general manipulation of the environment and its objects, with balletic and fluid movements that work with a wide theatrical scope in comedic performances with humorous intent. One thinks immediately of Chaplin’s interactions with props that he finds in his space (The Circus and The Great Dictator are exemplary in this instance), or the twitchy manual gestures of Woody Allen as his characters express angsty confusion or dismay. Indeed, Allen’s hand movements are so well established and recognisable that many actors who have been cast in the ‘Allen’ role adopt that performative trait of his persona when the actor-director has not played it himself. John Cusack in Bullets over Broadway (1994), Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity (1998), Alan Alda in Everyone Says I Love You (1996), and Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris (2011), are notable examples in this regard. Secondly, stylised manual performances may contain a darker undertone. In this category common features of hand actions and motions include the localised handling of items with movements that suggest sinister motivations. Degrees of insanity and mental pathology are represented in the various ways that characters hold their hands. This might involve the slow decline of a character into psychotic conscious states for which the iconography has been well established. Many of Peter Lorre’s depictions of the mentally tortured madman involve his raising contorted hands and fingers to eye-level, framed as he contemplates the character’s internal struggle with the self as the libidinous or murderous limbs are enacting the impulses of the id while the mind’s superego attempts to repossess control over them. At times the distraught antagonist holds his head in a physical effort to repress the overwhelming headache that is causing the pathological behaviour, as is the case with Jack Marlow in Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady. Examples like Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Girl, Interrupted by director James Mangold (1999) distinguish different psychiatric illnesses by the manual deportment of their inmates. If, as Heidegger has claimed, thinking ‘guides and sustains every gesture of the hand’ (1968, 23), then deviations from normative cognitive processes necessarily disrupt the healthy manipulation of that corporeal extremity. Exaggerated twitching and jiggling of the splayed fingers and rapid localised jolting of the hands connote the manic personality of Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) and the instability of Mozart’s volatile nature as played by Tom Hulce in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus. The details of these performances cannot be detached from the actors’ characterisations, but in the first instance they contribute to the stylistic moments of the design

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of the same characters, and to the overall aesthetic of the films’ diegetic make-up and context.

The Camp Hand and the Hand in Camp The style of the case studies analysed above demonstrates that the hand’s on-screen aestheticisation is enabled by a schism between its literal content and its metaphorical or metonymic use. In the former it indexically performs meanings associated with its actions or form, and in the latter it works symbolically by connoting and deferring its meaning through contextual or conventional referencing. When framed cinematically, the hand is a fascinating aesthetic entity precisely because it can possess simultaneously the qualities of ‘pure’ decontextualised objet d’art and those of functioning device (with its instrumentality playing a meaningful role in any or all the film’s characterisations, narration, and thematic explorations). It can be, and has been, used for its beauty or ugliness, or with a focus on the importance of some task it is performing where its motion and movement are balletic and enchanting to observe. It may, with a seamless and rapid gestural alteration convey an indexical piece of information and immediately negate the same. (One example of this might be when a finger clicks to gain attention, then points in the direction of something of consequence, and finally shakes vertically in the air as if to warn against the thing just indicated.) However, another mode exists that is unique in its direct denial of interpretative possibilities. Here I would like to explore the practice of Camp as an aesthetic method that offers itself as pure style. In a detailed and informative introduction to his collection of essays on ‘Camp’, Fabio Cleto argues comprehensively that the concept is consistent in its being, if nothing else, beyond simple categorisation, definition, and application. Cleto usefully synopsises his position early in the work: Representational excess, heterogeneity, and gratuitousness of reference, in constituting a major raison d’être of camp’s fun and exclusiveness, both signal and contribute to an overall resistance to definition, drawing the contours of an aesthetic of (critical) failure: the longing, in fact, for a common constant trait (or for an intrinsic, essential, stabilising ‘core’) in all that has been historically ascribed to camp, or the identification of its precise origins and developments, sooner or later ends up being frustrating, challenging the critic as such, as it challenges the cultural

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imperatives that rely on the manageability of discrete (distinct and docile) historical and aesthetic categories. (Cleto 1999, 3)

Evidence for these claims emerges from an array of studies of cinema, which is a medium that lends itself interestingly and somewhat uniquely to expressions of the Camp aesthetic. Several interventions into the area written over the last half-century testify to the variability of incarnations of the Camp style in film and to how these have been interpreted at given historical and socio-political moments. In an essay originally published in 1983, Mark Booth charges Camp aesthetics and practices with political undertones that explicitly connect them with framed performances of sexuality and gender. He notes: Camp people tend to be asexual rather than homosexual. Brummell et al. were perhaps honorary homosexuals, or homosexuals in spirit rather than in practice. In camp culture, the popular image of the homosexual, like the proper image of the feminine woman, mimicked as a type of the marginal. So, while it may be true that many homosexuals are camp, only a small proportion of people who exhibit symptoms of camp behaviour are homosexual. (Booth 1999, 70)

Pamela Robertson acknowledges Richard Dyer’s call for including the attitude and aptitude of the addressee in any understanding of the Camp mode, but in referencing his 1976 essay ‘It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going’ (reproduced in Cleto 1999, 266–282), takes issue with its Booth-like focus on male homosexuality. Robertson notes: ‘This reading of camp, which links it to gay identity and cultural politics, has become dominant with the rise of gay activist politics and gay and queer studies in the academy’ (Robertson 1999, 266). She invites a wider consideration of its potency and practice when she continues: We tend to take for granted that many female stars are camp and that most of the stars in the gay camp pantheon are women: consider Garland, Streisand, Callas, Dietrich, Garbo, Crawford, just to name a few [sic]. We also take for granted men’s camp appropriation of female clothing, styles, and language from women’s culture: consider drag and female impersonation, or gay camp slang such as calling one another ‘she’ or using phrases like ‘letting one’s hair down’ and ‘dropping hairpins’, and even ‘coming out’. (Robertson 1999, 267)

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Esther Newton expands on Camp’s possibilities by offering binary pairings of ostensibly incompatible elements that go beyond the gendered frameworks set out by Booth, Dyer, and Robertson. Having confirmed that masculine and feminine associations ‘are, of course, the most characteristic kind of camp’, Newton goes on to argue that ‘any very incongruous contrast can be campy. For instance, juxtapositions of high and low status, youth and old age, profane and sacred functions or symbols, cheap and expensive articles are frequently used for camp purposes’ (Newton 1999, 103). Camp’s persistent lack of essentialising qualities goes some way to explaining its inexorable openness to appropriation; something that Philip Core has identified in its annexation by mainstream culture, when he offers examples from cinema as his closing note: Camp becomes very obscure in this brilliant light of trendiness, reduced to a commercial phenomenon easily recognised and easily accepted by the entire public: [including] remakes of The Big Sleep, King Kong or practically any other old movie you care to name … the nostalgic bash is enormous and endless and in many ways purely and simply a money-making, public scale apotheosis of camp. (Core 1999, 86)

These articles – and many others written on the style – acknowledge Susan Sontag’s pioneering 1964 essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’. In different ways writers addressing this influential innovative work seek to challenge, critique, and expand upon one of its core theses: namely that the ‘Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized – or at least apolitical’ (2009, 277). Having listed the characteristics of this artistic method in valuable detail, Sontag proposes that Camp sensibility is useful for shedding light on how we come to evaluate taste in a general sense. Because of its separation of form (its surface performance) from content (any putative symbolic meaning), she reaches a conclusion about the style’s inherent ‘apolitical’ quality. Sontag argues that this disengagement is not merely due to a separation of surface and symbolic meanings, but comes because of Camp’s total disruption of the possibility of meaning-construction at a hermeneutic level: the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice. (2009, 281)

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The subsequent challenges to Sontag’s radical assertions were motivated by her purported disempowering of Camp’s political (‘queer’) potency of recalcitrance towards, and disruption of, heteronormative, mainstream, and bourgeois forms of cultural expression. It was claimed by many authors that, even while Sontag acknowledged the rich and variable possibilities of the style in its aesthetic excesses, she had effectively calcified it into a framework of impotence that decontextualised it from its socio-political origins and motivations. Fabio Cleto explains how ‘Sontag has been thus charged by gay critics with turning a basically homosexual mode of self-performance into a degayfied taste, a simple matter of ironically relishing an indulgence in what is “so-bad-it’s-good”’ (Cleto 1999, 10). He traces origins of the critical reactions to the 1964 essay by setting out how later theorists perceived that Sontag was effectively ‘responsible for “preventing” an originally perverse system of s/ ubjectivation by turning it into a straight taste, a mass cultural phenomenon devoid of any “queer visibility” intent, and an ironic mode which stabilises the ontological, epistemological, and political challenge of camp enacted as queer parody’ (ibidem, 17). Of course, Sontag would never have denied that her declaration of Camp’s apolitical aesthetic was, itself, taking a political position. Nevertheless, the ideological consequences of her thesis were interpreted as going as far as to have consented in and even corroborated the movement’s arrogation and disempowerment by dominant mainstream, hegemonic centres of cultural production (see Miller 1993 for an example of this allegation). In an interview eleven years after the publication of ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Sontag retracted some of her earlier claims on the extent to which the Camp aesthetic was always performing with a political neutrality (Boyers and Bernstein 1975). Whatever the degree of Sontag’s conversion, it is undeniable that cultural and political contextual circumstances of the time would have had an impact on her thinking. Notably at the mid-way point between the two interventions by Sontag mentioned here, was the release of the screen version of Gore Vidal’s 1968 novel Myra Breckinridge. Directed by Michael Sarne, and retaining the title of the book, the 1970 film is not only usefully indicative of the revolutionary sexual zeitgeist of the post-1968 period, but it is also an exemplary model of the Camp aesthetic, as Sontag and later writers have described it. In fact, because the film is an adaptation, it is even more valuable in our consideration of key qualities that might expose how the Camp is working as a style. Common to most of the writers in the field (including all of those quoted above), is the idea that the Camp always operates as a mode of performance framing. It knowingly presents its aesthetics in parenthesis, as it simultaneously celebrates exaggeration and superficiality, emotional disingenuity and engaging entertainment. Its

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spectator recognises and is complicit in a game of exuberant and demonstrative role-play, of excessive pyrotechnics that forever announce a remaking, a remoulding, and a deferred representation of something else whose source may not even be identifiable. As Fabio Cleto admits wryly: ‘The origins of camp are elsewhere – where, we can’t say’ (Cleto 1999, 5). Because Myra – as a character – and Myra Breckinridge – as a novel and film – are ostensibly framed as projections of this ‘other’, this ‘something else’, the film can be seen as an adaptation of an adaptation of a process of adaptation, in a playful meta-cinematic and intertextual mise en abyme. In short, it might be amusingly (campily?) considered a camped camping of camp! But if this example is indicative of the mood of the period between Sontag’s intellectual revision and her earlier thesis (from 1964 to 1975), how might we reconcile her previous justifications for the interpretation of Camp in her pioneering article? I would like to propose here that the answer lies in the qualities of the aesthetic that she identified as relating to the style’s use of elements that are always ‘off’; its revelling in ‘things-being-what-they-are-not’ (2009, 280). In all her examples Sontag points implicitly to this feature: one that is traceable in much of the work of French filmmaker Jean Cocteau (whom she mentions explicitly), and in my chosen film of focus. La Belle et la bête is replete with Camp uses of the human hand. By considering this case with close analytical attention, I want to argue that the framed hand is ideally suited to the Camp sensibility as described by Sontag. As she testifies, any object whatever is available for use by artists of the Camp, and Sontag gives examples from the Art Nouveau movement, which she calls ‘the most typical and fully developed Camp style’, and one inclined to converting a given object ‘into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto’ (2009, 279). Unlike other objects, however, the hand not only possesses a formal flexibility that affords it a range of iconic and symbolic representational options, but it can also blend, creatively complicate, and offer ambiguity around these. It can do so, as I have explained above, in a nuanced way when it comes to manual interactions with its mirrored counterpart or with the hands of other individuals. It can carry the weight (sometimes literally) of an array of human sentiments and yet may leave the emotional complexity open and as equivocal as the disposition of the owning human subject that masters or fails to master it. (The example of Stanley Kubrick’s eponymous villain of Dr. Strangelove attests to the latter). It might embody the whole of a character’s temperaments and attitudes, or may be pushed to representational (aesthetic) extremes on the spectrum at which this kind of synecdoche is the mid-point: either objectified as a concrete, immobile

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entity or anthropomorphised as an independent agent in its own right. The natural beauty and complexity of its biological and physiological make-up, ubiquitously celebrated by numerous writers referenced in this work, mean that the human hand is already a piece of magnificent sculpture that can have a wide range of interpretations drawn from it. Most importantly, it can stand for none of these or even, paradoxically, of all and none simultaneously. These attributes of the manual explain how it might be understood as an attractive tool for the artist of the Camp, as Sontag defines it, and how its position as celebrated feature can in turn contribute to that movement’s fundamental aesthetic celebration of ‘artifice and exaggeration’ (2009, 275). Furthermore, when Sontag identifies Camp’s relegation of thematic and political content in favour of superficial artifice and overt theatricalisation, she calls to mind elements of a performed tactility that invoke the tangible capability of the hand. Even when manual points of contact offer the illusion of touch, and are framed in a way that attempt a sensational replication of that, the aesthetic endeavour of the Camp which ‘is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content’ (2009, 278), invites an obvious association with the hand on screen. Among many examples of the modes listed in her article, Sontag refers to the artistry and personality of Jean Cocteau. The Camp quality is most evident in his 1947 version of the old tale La Belle et la bête. It is significant, therefore, that Cocteau uses and references hands throughout the film in ways that explicitly mark his Camp aesthetic. La Belle et la bête opens with a title card that eschews traditional introductions to the narrative and its context. It offers a meta-narrational reflection on the nature of the fairy tale (and this one in particular) and the credulity of its young audiences. With it, Cocteau bemoans the loss of childhood innocence and naivety in the grown-up and invites his spectator to take his story at face value: not merely as a matter of suspension of disbelief, but in order to accept things as represented in the film at face value. The opening titles conclude with the words: C’est un peu de cette naïveté que je vous demande et, pour nous porter chance à tous, laissez-moi vous dire quatre mots magiques, véritable «sésame ouvre-toi» de l’enfance: Il était une fois… [I’m asking of you a little of this naivety, to bring us all a bit of luck, let me offer you four magical words, a real ‘Open Sesame’ of childhood: Once upon a time… – Author’s translation.]

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Figure 3.5: Camp hands as functioning objets d’art in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1947)

As the director celebrates style for the sake of style in this manner his pure aestheticism rejects naturalism and political or philosophical moralising. The two ways in which Cocteau marks his interest in the sumptuous aesthetic experience are evident in various uses of the framed hand. From the introductory lines, we have been told of the enchantment of children who might ‘believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim’, and this wonderful gullibility is indicative of the imagination’s capacity to wallow in what Sontag calls ‘the element of artifice’ (2009, 280). In this respect, Cocteau’s Camp is typical of its being: ‘a vision of the world in terms of style – but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated’ (ibidem). Elsewhere, the film displays its campness as a celebration of hyperbole, what Sontag describes as ‘the “off,” of things-being-what-theyare-not’ (ibidem). This is the case when Belle’s father (Marcel André) first arrives at the Beast’s castle. The chandeliers on the walls illuminating the entrance corridor are held by protruding arms and hands. Cocteau even undermines the Unheimlich seriousness of the interior design – marking it as a camped-up fairy tale – because the arms of the candelabras shift to light the way for the character as he moves along the corridor, effectively revealing the ‘mechanism’ of their working (Fig. 3.5). It is not merely in their uselessness, as decorative features, that Cocteau’s chandelier-holding hands reveal their Camp disposition; it is precisely

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because of their overdetermined pragmatism – the excessive economy of their application – that the Camp is achieved. What better (we should be thinking) than to have inanimate ornamental utensils designed like corporeal features that become impossibly animated to serve the purpose of what they are made to do. In a film very much imbued with its own Camp sensibility, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) has a scene in which hand-shaped coat and hat hangers move into position to perform their required service by removing various accoutrements of characters’ costumes. Once again, in line with Sontag’s characterisation: ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks […] To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role’ (2009, 280). The muscular dynamism and visual variability of the hand is echoed in the ease with which Cocteau shifts between aesthetic extremes: on the one hand of excessive functionalism and on the other of meaningless performative excess. At times the director’s proclivity for stylistic abundance leads to ambiguity or contradiction, which themselves contribute to the Camp’s elevation of the surface and playfulness of form over the meanings and logic of content. When Avenant (performed by Jean Marais, who also plays the Beast) is trying to seduce Belle (Josette Day), he tells her that her sisters’ hands are too special to do the housework: their hands are ‘pale’. Continuing his implied separation of beauty and labour, Avenant looks at and takes hold of Belle’s hands and proclaims her beauty, associating the delicacy of her hands with the fact that she is ‘la plus belle’. Hands are used as markers of beauty and connected to mystical prettiness throughout the film, but they are also set as magical utilities. In one room, arms hold open the curtains that cover the entrance, while in a scene of tenderness between the lovers the use is traditionally romantic. As Belle and the Beast walk in his gardens, she goes to a stream and invites him to drink from her hands. In keeping with the fairy tale Camp aesthetic, Cocteau endows the hands of his principal characters with magical qualities; the Beast offers Belle his glove as one of the five magical objects in his possession. He explains that when she’s wearing it, she need only think of a place she wants to be, and it will bring her there. Later, having told her father that the Beast is benevolent, Belle weeps and her tears fall into the old man’s hand where they transform into diamonds. The invitation to childlike credulity and naïve wonderment that Cocteau extends might be encapsulated in the climactic sequence when Ludovic (Michel Auclair) holds Avenant’s hands to lower him into the Beast’s garden. A statue of Diana comes to life and fires an arrow into his back. Avenant transforms into the Beast, and an insert shot of his animal hands shows them letting go of Ludovic’s. At the same time,

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the Beast undergoes a metamorphosis and transformed into ‘The Prince’ he addresses the incredulous Belle: belle: Such miracles! Can they really happen? prince: Together, we’re proof of it. Love can make a beast of a man, but it can also make an ugly man beautiful. [Belle hesitates in doubt at what she’s seeing] What is it, Belle? It’s as if you miss my ugliness. belle : It’s not that, my Lord. But you remind me of someone I used to know.

By building the expression of doubt into the conversation, Cocteau acknowledges the fantasy of scene and, by association, of the whole narrative. The fantastical excess – and confessional foregrounding of the same – that contributes so fundamentally to the Camp aesthetic of the film, is played out in a world ubiquitously decorated with hands and references to them. My concentration on the details of Cocteau’s film as a case study is not designed to suggest that La Belle et la bête was unique – either before or after Sontag’s 1964 article – in its Camp enterprise. However, as the work of a director named in ‘Notes on “Camp”’, it is interesting as a cinematic work that to some extent corroborates the apolitical interpretation that informs the thesis of Sontag’s argument. It has been my contention that Cocteau’s use of the human hand (and animal paw) as a recurring image, and the ways he stylises it as an objet d’art – simultaneously beautiful and beastly, magical and mundane, decorative and functional – achieve an apogee of depoliticised aesthetic Camp that aligns it with (or explains) Sontag’s perspective. As so many rebuttals to ‘Notes on “Camp”’ have argued, the style need not, indeed should not, be severed from its socio-political contexts and motivations. Contemplation of the history of Camp cinema provides ample evidence of the charged political themes with which filmmakers have directly engaged by summoning its stylistic excesses, aesthetic exuberance, and performative playfulness. And the political attitudes of the celebrated films need not be only about issues of gender and sexuality. In The Wizard of Oz (1939) Victor Fleming conservatively endorses the values of a simple home life and obedience to forms of social organisation (whether industrial – Tin Man; agricultural – Scarecrow; or monarchy – the Lion), and Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Johnny Guitar offers criticism of the ideological backdrop of the American McCarthy era. Films by director-choreographer Busby Berkeley, such as The Gang’s All Here (1943), and musicals like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) typically framed femininity and the performing female body

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in a mode of excess (whether tongue-in-cheek or not) to entice pleasure, and the Douglas Sirk canon performed its campness of busily baroque mise en scène and design as escaping explosions of sublimated repressed emotions. All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959) are good examples of how the excesses of a Camp aesthetic can perform and proclaim a craving for human connection and communication, when their (female) protagonists fail to do so. It’s perhaps not surprising to find more explicit address to questions of sexuality and gender performance in Camp films – along the lines of Myra Breckinridge – in the years after the liberating zeitgeist of the late-1960s. John Waters has contributed conspicuously to this list with innovative films like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974), and Jim Sharman wrote and directed the cult Camp classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975. Finally, to select from an extensive list and to offer evidence of the style’s longevity, we might consider the tendency for outrageous, performative abundance in films that appeared exactly two decades after those just mentioned. Before its reincarnation as a hit television series, director Fran Rubel Kuzui introduced Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the big screen in 1992, and Stephan Elliott’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and Todd Solondz’s 1995 Welcome to the Dollhouse, were admirable critical and box office successes. The grandiosity of these f ilms’ design, performance, and emotional content is aesthetically faithful to the Camp sensibility. However, whether directors favour tight, intimate framing or magnif icent wide and long shots, the profilmic material is lush with colour and intricate in its detail but usually favours full corporeal performance and focus over localised manual action and gesture. In this respect, they stand apart from La Belle et la bête in the stylistic ways it exemplifies many of the qualities that inform Sontag’s earlier reflections on Camp.

The Haptic Experience: Screened Sensations The study of aesthetics is bound to sensory perceptions, with its contrary – the anaesthetic – being a muting of the same. The consequences of the medium’s aesthetic properties have been debated from a variety of angles in relation to the haptic: how sounds and moving images can resonate in the mind and body of the spectator with palpable, tangible results. Compelling arguments have been set out with degrees of success in respect of this topic, but caution must be exercised in applying notions of the haptic wholesale to the cinematic experience and in drawing conclusions about how film

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spectators are stimulated and affected by the engagement. Although the framed hand is not the only object through which f ilm haptics can be explored, it is a useful starting point. It marks a unique position at which a focused corporeal tactility occurs and may be seen taking place on screen. A few key points must be set out in relation to this argument in order best to explore the extent to which any understanding of the cinematic haptic might elucidate a deeper potential of the medium especially, although not uniquely, when the hand is the focus of attention. Real-life experiences can provoke reactions that might be tactilely distant from the perceiving subject, but which may have a similarly potent impact when mediated cinematically. If one’s teeth tingle or a bodily shudder occurs on sight of a nail scraping a blackboard or if one experiences a surge of visceral nausea when witnessing a bloody, violent, or repulsive scene, there is no reason to question that the haptic sensory effects of both the actual and the screened versions might not correlate. The question of comparability does not lie in the role of the mediating apparatus but in the raw nature of the initial audio-visual stimulus and its sensory transmission. In fact, on a basic level there may be no need at all to elaborate on the role of the mechanism or even to include it in the evaluation of the sensorial or haptic consequences for the film spectator. However, it has been introduced into the discussion in ways that are not always entirely clear. One of the useful ways of considering the parallels between the immediate and the mediated haptic experience may reside in Vivian Sobchack’s designations in the ontological status of the two conditions when she offers that ‘the ambivalence and confusion of sense at the movies of having both a “real” (or literal) sensual experience and an “as-if-real” (or figural) sensual experience’ (2004, 73). The point is valid but there may be something of a missed opportunity here as, instead of exploring previous writing on the paradox of fiction (see Carroll 1990; Currie 1990; Säätelä 1994; Turvey 1997; and Joyce 2000), Sobchack goes on to make connections by reference to literary terms and allusions. It is likely that the binary distinction between the words above in inverted commas is not as clear-cut as it might first seem because what we are actually having in the latter (‘figural’ or mediated) case is a real experience of the ‘as-if-real’. The idea of synaesthesia is sometimes invoked in conversations about the cinematic haptic. This psychological and neurological phenomenon – which differs from kinesthesia (see Sklar 2008) – occurs in a small number of individuals who experience a cross-wired neurological blending of stimuli and their cognitive and sensory effects. Colours might be perceived as sounds, or names, tastes, and smells as colours, and the associations may or may not be constant or can work both ways. The problem with invoking this term

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in any literal way to describe how the audio-visual registers of film might produce tactile results is that the effect is either too narrowly subjective when understood as the actuality of what occurs to (in) a spectator, or that it is so broadly applied it does not help the argument. In many cases there are basic connections and interactions between the different senses and tactility, even before the subjective, anomalous condition of synaesthesia is considered. However, as Farah Karim-Cooper implies by referencing Aristotle’s De Anima, these are not automatically reversible. The Greek philosopher noted ‘without the sense of touch none of the other senses is present, but touch can be present without the others’ (quoted in Karim-Cooper 2016, 165). Maurice Merleau-Ponty problematises the extent of the sensory interface by explaining how discrete stimuli are not easily discernible: there is not in the normal subject a tactile experience to which it is impossible to gauge the contribution of each sense. The experiences mediated by touch in psychological blindness have nothing in common with those which touch mediates in the normal subject, and neither set really deserves to be called ‘tactile’ data. (2006, 137)

In an interesting intervention into understanding the corporeal effects for a spectator of engaging with screened images of emotion, Christina Petersen discusses the results of a study from which she concludes ‘the physical response was the same, and the act of watching such emotions could have the same effect on the body as originally feeling them’ (2018, 236). Peterson cites Stanley Hall who identified a primal and visceral association between the sentient viewer and cinematic representation: Hall located a restorative and rejuvenating potential for the film spectator, returning him or her to a previous state of development and a more primitive relationship to the body through susceptibility and play. (ibidem)

The common line of argument in the work above attests to a sensorial interconnectedness – a dialogical interface of the senses, as it were – that proposes how the physically separate and distinct audio-visual functions of the cinema can have haptic effects on the spectator in a way assimilable to those produced by real-world (audio-visual) stimuli. The mystery is no more profound than that. Nonetheless, it does not preclude invitations to unpack how this operation occurs cinematically. Such investigations must advance with precision – of language and theoretical application – because the methods by which they unfold have consequences for our

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conceptualisation of how the film artist generates visceral and emotional reactions in the viewer. The stirring of an individual’s corporeal responses to the screened representation is a real phenomenon, but the justification for this must not (and need not) require either an equivalence between sensations experienced in the human body and those presented on film, or any suggestion that the cinematic apparatus bears a capacity for similar sensations. The first thesis may be rejected on the grounds that different spectators may have varying haptic responses to the same stimulus. If we witness a fictional character burning her hand we may shudder with disgust, diffused corporeal shock, or recoil physically from the image. However, we do not feel the same burning sensation we imagine the character to be experiencing. For genuine reproduction and assimilation of the experience, as Gabor Csepregi has lucidly articulated, the activation of the sense of touch must occur with movement, whether on the level of broader superficial feeling (as when I investigate the exterior qualities of the object that I caress), or at a deeper molecular, neurological level (when the heat that I sense from something is a measurement of a qualitative change in the motion of the atoms releasing energy as heat). This necessary quality of tactility is not available in the cinematic context, but its importance for the complete functioning of that sensory capability is nonetheless evident, as Csepregi explains: When we touch an object, the impression obviously originates from the movement of our hand. If our hand stops moving, the tactile impression remains constant and eventually ceases to affect us. It is the deployment of our movement that makes possible the affective resonance to an object. (2006, 32)

A similar sensory possibility is set out by Pasi Väliaho when he engages with early studies in the field, and specifically a 1911 essay by Jules Romains. Väliaho aligns his position with Romains’ when he explains how the cinema creates its own sphere of rhythmic being that requires a mode of assimilation in experience in which our corporeal rhythms become those of the silver screen. This is […] a novel configuration of corporeality, where the visual rhythms and extraordinary durations of films are lived as potential action within the audience’s affective bodily interior. (2010, 13)

A sustained exploration of the haptic in the cinema and one that builds on earlier work by Vivian Sobchack, is Jennifer Barker’s 2009 work The

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Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. By referencing several films with close analysis, Barker proposes that corporeal effects induced in the film spectator correlate with sensations represented on screen because of a haptic transfer of energy facilitated by the cinematic mechanism and apparatus, which she calls the ‘film’s body’. At the outset, Barker describes film’s potential for the very real effects that may resonate in the body of the viewer: Cinematic tactility, then, is a general attitude toward the cinema that the human body enacts in particular ways: haptically, at the tender surface of the body; kinaesthetically and muscularly, in the middle dimension of muscles, tendons, and bones that reach toward and through cinematic space; and viscerally, in the murky recesses of the body, where heart, lungs, pulsing fluids, and firing synapses receive, respond to, and reenact the rhythms of cinema. (2009, 3)

While lyrical in its biological detail, Barker’s account is broadly in line with earlier considerations of the audio-visual impact on the viewing subject: despite the spatial gap between observer and observed, what is seen and heard in real-world situations can produce discernible alterations to the body’s internal chemistry, rhythms, and physiology. However, Barker follows this explanation with an assertion that is more problematic. She goes on to establish the putative ‘film body’ as a concrete presence that is not only capable of provoking sensory responses in the spectator but that is, in-and-of-itself, something of an organic, sentient, and sensitive mechanism. She proposes: The film’s body also adapts toward the world a tactile attitude of intimacy and reciprocity that is played out across its non-human body: haptically, at the screen’s surface, with the caress of shimmering nitrate and the scratch of dust and fiber on celluloid; kinaesthetically, through the contours of on- and off-screen space and of the bodies, both human and mechanical, that inhabit or escape those spaces; and viscerally, with the film’s rush through a projector’s gate and the ‘breathing’ of lenses. (ibidem)

In this paragraph, and in much of what follows in Barker’s argument, the author endows the filmmaking machinery with a consciousness that is supported by references to the phenomenological writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with passing references to that of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. By establishing the apparatus as a corporeal entity – one

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purportedly with cognitive capacities – Barker is not merely using the term ‘film’s body’ figuratively, but in a literal sense that grants it a kind of autonomous subjectivity. With a succinct account of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘notion of the lived body and its reciprocal, intimate relationship with the world’ (2009, 17), Barker quotes relevant passages and theoretical lines from the philosopher, and correctly concludes that he understood the body as the means by which we are inserted into the world and the means by which we relate to it and make sense of it. This is not to say that the lived body constitutes the world around it, or that it is acted upon by a world that is always already determined. (ibidem)

The problem arises in Barker’s application of phenomenological interpretations of a subject’s being-in-the-world to the perceiving – and, by extension, to the purported feeling – cinematic machine and then in her comparing the ‘film’s body’ with that of the viewer, and making further, explicit tactile connections in their intersection. Film and its apparatus cannot be considered bodies either as a Dasein or a consciousness, or in any way embodied as a ‘human existence’ in the Heideggerian sense. Phenomenology has been usefully applied metaphorically to understandings of how the film apparatus ‘intentionally’ connects with the world of objects that simultaneously reach towards it, as it captures and reconstructs them for the viewer. However, while Heidegger argues in Being and Time that human existence (Dasein) is always already embedded in a world of meanings and we can imply from this that so too is the film apparatus, cinema does not embody a human consciousness even though it might facilitate (or mirror) an extension of the same. The possibility of blurring the lines of distinction can be found in Jennifer Bullington’s lucid synopsis of Merleau-Ponty’s designation of corporeal ontology: The lived body is understood as a mind-body presence always directed towards the world (otherness). Therein a field arises, an ‘in-between’, that is constituted in terms of situations to be mastered and understood. The term ‘meaning’ is expanded in Merleau-Ponty’s work, through the introduction of the concepts body schema, motor intentionality, intentional arc, habit-body, structure and structure transformation. (2013, 36)

Room for conceptual distortion can frequently be found in the work of Merleau-Ponty himself who at times leaves turns of phrase open to interpretation, but these cannot legitimately hold across the finer points of his work’s

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definitions. In one section of Phenomenology of Perception, for example, he states that to be ‘a consciousness or rather to be an experience is to hold inner communication with the world, the body and other people, to be with them instead of being beside them’ (2006, 111; original emphasis). Despite this, one would have to disregard his specific uses of the words ‘experience’ and ‘communication’ to allow any understanding of the film as Dasein or to accept a subsequent correlation between its mechanisms and those of the perceiving subject. The distinction is made later in the same work by the author when he italicises the key words that should mark the discrepancy between the conscious being and the entity capable of replicating modes of observation that are comparable to those of the Dasein: Now it is not possible to maintain that consciousness has this power, it is this power itself […] If a being is consciousness, he must be nothing but a network of intentions. If he ceases to be definable in terms of the act of sense-giving, he relapses into the condition of a thing. (2006, 139–140)

A concluding point from the same work of phenomenology encapsulates an interwoven cognitive framework of consciousness that precludes equivalence between the human body and the film counterpart. Here, Merleau-Ponty sets out the integrated nature of Dasein, human existence, and an inter-sensory ‘dialogue’ that coalesce in operations of the thinking subject: If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself. Here the ‘visual data’ make their appearance only through the sense of touch, tactile data through sights, each localized movement against a background of some inclusive position […] What unites ‘tactile sensations’ in the hand and links them to visual perceptions of the same hand, and to perceptions of other bodily areas, is a certain style informing my manual gestures and implying in turn a certain style of finger movements, and contributing, in the last resort, to a certain bodily bearing. (2006, 173–174)

In Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Vivian Sobchack uses the term ‘film body’, but stops short of granting degrees of conscious agency to the apparatus. Her often-quoted term ‘seeing myself seeing myself’ usefully describes the way in which the film can frame a subject’s mode of perception and proposes that mechanical operations of the cinematic machine are completed by – rather than separate from – the viewer’s interpretative engagement. In Sobchack’s later work Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment

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and Moving Image Culture, the author goes farther in granting intentionality to the apparatus but nevertheless offers the following caveat as a footnote when she discusses ‘haptic visuality’ and its consequences for how, in specific cinematic cases ‘[o]bjectivity and subjectivity lose their presumed clarity’ (2004, 66): I use the phrase the ‘film’s body’ very precisely in The Address of the Eye to designate the material existence of the film as functionally embodied (and thus differentiated in existence from the filmmaker and spectator). The ‘film’s body’ is not visible in the film except for its intentional agency and diacritical motion. It is not anthropomorphic, but it is also not reducible to the cinematic apparatus (in the same way that we are not reducible to our material physiognomy); it is discovered and located only reflexively as a quasi-subjective and embodied ‘eye’ that has a discrete – if ordinarily prepersonal and anonymous – existence. (ibidem, Footnote 48)

In this work, Sobchack moves closer to describing an overarching corporeal sensory experience for the viewer of the film in a way that gives greater determinacy to the mechanical means by which images and sounds are produced. However, she exercises caution by maintaining the origin of the sensual experience, even when it involves externalised and then introverted activity, in the body of the spectator: insofar as I cannot literally touch, smell, or taste the particular figure on screen that solicits my sensual desire, my body’s intentional trajectory, seeking a sensible object to fulfill this sensual solicitation, will reverse its direction to locate its partially frustrated sensual grasp on something more literally accessible. (2004, 76; original emphasis)

Because scientific evidence for claims like ‘reverse its direction’ and ‘frustrated sensual grasp’ are not terribly secure, Sobchack ends the same section using the (self-reflexively-turned) expression ‘sense my own sensing’ to describe the overall experience. Her inclusion of this synoptic phrase is indicative of how the role of the cinematic images and sound are (at most) catalytic and are (at least) irrelevant. To preserve the primacy of film – and perhaps even its uniqueness – in its capacity to harness and stir palpable physiological reactions in the spectator, Sobchack goes on to explain how this experience might be even more charged than any real (unmediated) experience of equivalent (real world) phenomena. She does this astutely by asserting that the effect is heightened in cinema precisely because the

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sensation response is not fully ‘realised’, but is thrown back onto, or into, the body of the spectator to find there a kind of realisation or terminal fulf ilment. Therefore, the argument includes the claim that the whole sensual direction is not a one-way ‘towards the screen’ experience where it finds resolution, but that it is a reflexive one that relocates the sensuality back on one’s own body; and that this all happens in an unconscious way, and not deliberately. Inasmuch as Jennifer Barker’s study integrates a phenomenological approach with Sobchack’s earlier frameworks, it is more determined in its insistence of the existential capabilities of the ‘film’s body’. The moment at which both viewpoints are amalgamated closes with an assertion that explicitly moves the rhetoric beyond the metaphorical: Sobchack mobilizes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception to demonstrate that a film does indeed live an embodied existence in the world, and that, like the other whom we recognize through the gaze and through our mutual inhabitation of a certain mode of material being, the film’s body shares with us certain modes of visual perception. (2009, 8)

Barker has already laid the foundation for the direction of her core argument by stating that ‘a sensually formed (and informed) understanding of the ways that meaning and significance emerge in and are articulated through the fleshy, muscular, and visceral engagement […] occurs between films’ and viewers’ bodies’ (2009, 4). However, this assertion is taken to problematic extremes later in the work. The equation of the corporeal reciprocity of human and mechanical ‘bodies’ in the film-viewing system works through an anthropomorphism of the apparatus that is unequivocally stated with questionable literalisms: This empathy between film and viewer isn’t simply a matter of the viewer sharing a character’s physical location by means of point-of-view shots and first-person narration […] Our bodies orient and dispose themselves toward the body of the film itself, because we and the film make sense of space by moving through it muscularly in similar ways and with similar attitudes. (2009, 75)

Use of terms and terminology such as ‘empathy between’, ‘we and the film make sense’, and ‘muscularity’ establish grounds for understandings that are ambiguous, and of which the film analyst might question the usefulness. Rather than read film spectatorship as an interaction between two

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conscious subjects, it is beneficial to consider it as an encounter of subject and performed subjectivity. To accept the experience through the second formulation avoids the murky and problematic grounds of explaining the multifarious and often contradictory experiences of the viewer that have informed much of the debate around the paradox of fiction. Furthermore, it allows for an on-going celebration of the true magnificence and magic of cinema and the mastery of the film artist, and the extension of analysis into how – and to what extent – the spectator is influenced, enthralled, and challenged by the experience. It is precisely the power of the film to perform an invocation of tactility without ever actualising it that makes the potency of the medium so striking. It is in the multiple examples of conventions that help us to see and ‘move’ and access the objective world differently (in a way that is not ordinarily open to Dasein) that the cinema can do so effectively, and perhaps even uniquely. Examples of this potential of the medium are not infinite. Nor are they reducible to shots, angles, and perspectives that do not occur in regular ocular functioning. Some of these include: the rapid cutting between visual elements; the distortion of images, angles, and colours; representations of movements of excessive or reduced speed (or into places otherwise inaccessible); the use of split screens and other framed inserts; as well as many other possibilities that are only available because of mechanical and technological mediation. By equating the constructed on-screen representations with their real-life counterparts, or by endowing the cinematic apparatus with any degree of conscious agency, one dampens down the skill, intention, and creativity of the film artist. To a certain extent, in doing this, we undermine our recognition (whether aff irmative or destructive) of the potency of the mediation as ‘real’, instead of ‘as-if-real’ (to use Sobchack’s terms), and the important ways in which we must continue to interrogate its provision of pleasure, whether perverse or not. Barker offers several analytically rich and detailed case studies that interrogate the viewer’s haptic response to the on-screen representations; her attention to Hiroshima mon amour and Repulsion are noteworthy in this respect. Both films are clearly structured with an aesthetic designed to provoke visceral responses in the spectator: the former by juxtaposing conflicting images of sensual tactility with others of corporeal destruction; the latter by invoking disturbing, skin-crawling threats to the integrity and security of the body. In these films, as dystopian terror haunts their female protagonists, our alignment with the characters’ suffering and torment is not facilitated by the transfer of their psychologically tortured conditions to us by a direct tangible, haptic encounter through the framed ‘seen and

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heard’. Rather, because both females are haunted by memories of the past which return to compromise their well-being, their recalled experiences (whether dramatised as a return of the repressed or deliberate self-reflection) are mediated for them in a way that mirrors how the events are presented by the cinematic apparatus for the spectator. As Elle (in the Resnais film) and Carol (in Polanski’s) grapple with the horror of their recollections, their mediated experience of former events problematises their access to them in ways that undermine any therapeutic benefit. So, too, do viewers of the films remain at one remove – albeit as tormented by the haptic nature of the memories – from the fragmented reminiscences, by virtue of the mediating apparatus. Filmmakers occasionally play with the haptic gap between audio-visual stimulus and subject by deliberately foregrounding the very absence of tactility. Films that deal with the topic of pickpocketing ostensibly frame the acts of theft by marking the dissociation between what is seen on screen and what is felt (both by the victim and the viewer). This is evident in the scene discussed above from Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, in which a series of shots shows Skip McCoy attempt to steal a purse from Cindy’s handbag while she remains tactilely oblivious to the crime. Similar scenes occur in Harry in Your Pocket (1973) when the thieves undertake a spree of stealing, and in each case it is the absence of tactile connection – between pickpocket and victim – on which director Bruce Geller concentrates with subtle, playful irony. Within the context of pickpocket narratives and themes on screen, it is no surprise to find the richest example of a choreography of manual dexterity wholly and deliberately detached from the tactile experience in Robert Bresson’s 1959 film Pickpocket. Here Bresson works against the stylisation of hands that so richly populates the rest of his films. In keeping with a sensory logic relating to the actions being represented, the director avoids lingering on the close-up details of the deceptive manipulation as the thief exercises his skill, and instead constructs the moments of theft across montage sequences with meticulous attention to fragmenting visual continuity in line with the dissociation of tactile experience. On the one hand (literally), the adept and dexterous fingering of money and wallets by the pickpocket is displaced from the frame. The visual construction of the moments is rendered with a sensory detachment akin to the experience of watching a musician playing an instrument without hearing its sound. On the other hand, Bresson constructs the scenes of criminal activity by fragmenting or undermining the coherence of the represented characters’ points of view. The opening sequence of Pickpocket – depicting the theft at the racetrack – is a perfect example of a case that undermines notions of the purest

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possibilities of the cinematic haptic. While it carries all the emotional intensity of the protagonist’s goal – we are rooting for Michel (Martin LaSalle) because of the way that the attempt is set up narratively – Bresson’s interrupted focus on the activity of the hands of the pickpocket is motivated by his victim’s not feeling the action. The director centralises a sensuality of ‘touch’ but divests it of any need for a sensory relationship from either the victim’s point of view (the target must not feel the hand of the pickpocket) or the spectator’s experience (which cannot involve any sense of emotional heightening because of the touching and taking represented). Therefore, what is noteworthy about the scene is the extent to which Bresson withholds shots of the hand’s activity; preferring instead to hold the drama of the piece by shooting Michel’s face behind the victim (with an accompanying voice-over which adds to the tension of the sequence). We are only granted four close-up insert shots of what the hand is doing (these total just 17 out of 110 seconds). Interestingly, with a playful nod against the tactile possibility of the images, in his voice-over after the theft, Bresson’s Michel mentions his feet, and not his hands: ‘Je n’avais plus les pieds sur la terre: je dominais le monde’. [‘My feet were no longer touching the ground… I was king of the world!’ – Author’s translation.] This lack of ‘touch’ and feeling encapsulates the non-haptic representational experience of the event that has just taken place. For different reasons another form of haptic restraint occurs in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). In the film Kubrick underscores the problematic tactility inferred between his anti-hero and the nymphic object of his desires, and the director either withholds or sublimates representation of the characters’ corporeal interactions. By displacing moments of physical touch between both people the director does not demote the sinister nature of the older man’s prurient obsession, nor does it soften the intensity of the protagonist’s pathological drive. On the contrary, after the opening credits in which Humbert Humbert is shown painting Lolita’s toenails, there is relatively little physical, sexual contact between them. Rather, as Philip Kuberski has noted of the opening moments of the film: Light does not appear to be cast or channeled but to be released from Lolita’s flesh, as a manifestation of Humbert’s veneration or abjection before the beloved body. (2012, 76)

Thus, feeling and touch are diffused into hues and tones of light and shade that illuminate the scenes of interaction between predator and prey, and create a disturbing possibility around the sinister, unconscious drives

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motivating the central character as he creeps from darker areas of the frame or observes Lolita as she is associated with, positioned in, or surrounded by, brighter spots in the diegetic space. It is precisely the lack of haptic specificity – the tactile indeterminacy – of the medium, and how it channels audio-visual stimuli towards the mind and body of the sensitive spectator that communicates a disturbing sense of the irrepressible and uncontainable libidinal desires of the central character. In several instances films’ diffusion of the haptic or tactile experience onto other sensory properties provides pleasure for the spectator. In this way the cinematic representation can offer its viewer the possibility of an illusory synaesthesia uniquely at the disposal of the artist working with moving images and sound. The tactile coalescing of elements of mise en scène – characters, costumes, and décor – in Sally Potter’s magnificent Orlando (1992), and in James Ivory’s period dramas A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992), and The Remains of the Day (1993) all testify to this sensuality of the audio-visual. Perhaps one of the richest examples of the range of sensory variation at the disposal of the filmmaker is evident in Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). While several moments function to mobilise sensory reactions from the elegant to the abject, for the most part the film works through a manifest displacement of senses; at times transforming the audible into visual silence, converting many tactile instances into acoustic registers, and using variations of music and sound to communicate an array of emotions and corporeal sensations. Campion’s mute protagonist, the pianist Ada (Holly Hunter), has a deeply wrought relationship with the instrument of her self-expression. The opening shot of the film establishes Ada’s point of view as she looks through her fingers, which are warmly shot and translucent. Her voice-over explains: ‘The voice that you hear is not my speaking voice, but my mind’s voice’. This assertion connects the work of the mind and Ada’s various modes of communication with the action of her hands. Furthermore, it broadens their sensory function beyond mere tactility. They will become Ada’s ‘visual’ voice throughout the film, and we are invited to experience her world through senses initiated by touch but displaced across a far wider sensory range. In a way atypical of normal film scenes that depict a character playing at a keyboard, Campion often withholds shots of Ada’s hands as they create music, but provides shots of characters’ hands elsewhere. Even natural elements work without the need for concrete tactility and we hear, as Ada narrates a fairy tale to her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), how a girl is tempted by the wind. Ada tells the young girl: ‘And the wind said: “Remember how we used to play?” The wind took her hand and said “Come, come with me”. But she refused’.

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Several scenes represent the burgeoning sexual relationship between Ada and Baines (Harvey Keitel) and the caressing that she initially denies him. Rather than repress the sensuality of their connection, Campion charges their early interactions with a palpable tenderness by denying tactility and its visualisation. Baines tells her ‘I want to touch you. Why can’t I touch you?’ and her refusal empowers her with affirmative agency and establishes their relationship on terms that go beyond the corporeal and sexual. These physical aspects are reserved for association with her repulsive arranged husband, the crude Alisdair Stewart (Sam Neill). During the rehearsal for the Bluebeard shadow show, the Pastor asks Missy to give him her hand to demonstrate the axe effect: ‘Put out your hand’, he says as he chops dramatically at her wrist with the wooden weapon. This foreshadows the tragic violation when Stewart punishes Ada for her illicit affair with Baines by chopping off her finger. That Baines later fashions a metal surrogate to replace the missing digit is indicative of both characters’ ardent refusal to accept censorship of their relationship, Ada’s talent and communication, or her emotional and intellectual freedom. In another, now literal, manifestation of the removal of the tactile, there is no absence of affirmative stirring of the viewer’s empathy in a film that consistently celebrates a fluidity of sensory cause and effect, and a hybridity of sensual engagements.

Works Referenced Armes, Roy. 1976. The Ambiguous Image: Narrative Style in Modern European Cinema. London: Secker and Warb. Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Bateson, Gregory. 1968. ‘Redundancy and Coding’. In Animal Communication: Techniques of Study and Result of Research, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, 614–626. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Bazin, André. 1967. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beattie, Geoffrey. 2016. Rethinking Body Language: How Hand Movements Reveal Hidden Thoughts. New York: Routledge. Booth, Mark. 1999. ‘Campe-Toi! On the Origins and Definitions of Camp’. In Cleto, 66–79. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. 2004. Film Art: An Introduction. 7th Edition. New York: McGrath Hill.

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Boyers, Robert and Maxine Bernstein. 1975. ‘Women, The Arts and the Politics of Culture: An Interview with Susan Sontag’. Salmagundi 31–32, Fall 1975–Winter 1976, 29–48. Bresson, Robert. 1986. Notes on the Cinematograph. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. New York: New York Review Books. Bullington, Jennifer. 2013. The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective. Stockholm: Springer. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Cleto, Fabio. 1999. ‘Introduction: Queering the Camp’. In Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, edited by Fabio Cleto, 1–42. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Core, Philip. 1999. ‘From Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth’. In Cleto, 80–86. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Creed, Barbara. 1995. ‘Horror and the Carnivalesque: The Body-Monstrous’. In Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology, and Photography, edited by Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman, 127–159. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Csepregi, Gabor. 2006. The Clever Body. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press. Currie, Gregory. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dahlquist, Marina, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson and Valentine Robert (eds.). 2018. Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1872. The Origin of Species. London: Dent. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. London: The Athlone Press. Dyer, Richard. 1999. ‘It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going’. In Cleto, 266–282. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Evans, Gareth. 2018. ‘The Eye and the Hand: Brakhage’s Challenge to Ocularcentrism’. In Lori and Leslie, 63–85. Hertfordshire: John Libbey Publishing. Fossati, Giovanna, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Sarah Street and Joshua Yumbe (eds.). 2018. The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gipponi. Elena. 2018. ‘Fireworks and Carnivals: Applied and Natural Colours in Italian Home Movies’. In Fossati et al., 33–50. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gomery, Douglas. 1991. Movie History: A Survey. Belmond, California: Wadsworth. Graf, Fritz. 1991. ‘Gestures and Conventions: The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators’. In A Cultural History of Gesture, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 36–58. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press.

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Gunning, Tom. 2018. ‘The Impossible Body of Early Film’. In Dahlquist et al., 13–24. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Joyce, Richard. 2000. ‘Rational Fear of Monsters’. In British Journal of Aesthetics 40:2. 209–224. Karim-Cooper, Farah. 2016. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York, London: Bloomsbury. Kuberski, Philip. 2012. Kubrick’s Total Cinema: Philosophical Themes and Formal Qualities. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2008. ‘Digesture: Gesture and Inscription in Experimental Cinema’. In Noland and Ness, 113–131. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Lori, Marco and Esther Leslie (eds.). 2018. Stan Brakhage: The Realm Buster. Hertfordshire: John Libbey Publishing. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2006. Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge Classics. Miller, D.A. 1993. ‘Sontag’s Urbanity’. In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale and David M. Halperin, 212–220. New York & London: Routledge. Mudie, Peter. 2018. ‘It Within Itself: Mimetic Fissures in Brakhage’s Object Collage/ Time Paintings’. In Lori and Leslie, 27–46. Hertfordshire: John Libbey Publishing. Mulvey, Laura. 2013. ‘Cinematic Gesture: The Ghost in the Machine’. Journal for Cultural Research 19 (1): 6–14. Newton, Esther. 1999. ‘Role Models’. In Cleto, 96–109. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Noland, Carrie. 2008. ‘Miming Signing: Henri Michaux and the Writing Body’. In Noland and Ness, 133–183. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Noland, Carrie and Sally Ann Ness (eds.). 2008. Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Perkins, V.F. 2005. ‘Where is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction’. In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16–41. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Petersen, Christina. 2018. ‘“The Best Synonym of Youth”: G. Stanley Hall, Mimetic Play, and Early Cinema’s Embodied Youth Spectator’. In Dahlquist et al., 231–248. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Peterson, Jennifer. 2018. ‘Rough Seas: The Blue Waters of Early Nonfiction Film’. In Fossati et al., 75–92. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Robertson, Pamela. 1999. ‘What Makes the Feminist Camp?’ In Cleto, 266–282. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. Säätelä, Simo. 1994. ‘Fiction, Make-Believe and Quasi Emotions’. In British Journal of Aesthetics 34. 25–34. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Sklar, Deirdre. 2008. ‘Remembering Kinesthesia: An Inquiry into Embodied Cultural Knowledge’. In Noland and Ness, 85–111. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Snoyman, Natalie. 2018. ‘Kodachrome’s Hope: The Making and Promotion of McCall Colour Fashion News’. In Fossati et al., 179–194. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sobchack. Vivian. 1992. Address of the Eye: A Phenomenon of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sontag, Susan. 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics. Stern, Lesley. 2008. ‘Ghosting: The Performance and Migration of Cinematic Gesture, Focusing on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women’. In Noland and Ness, 185–213. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Swift, Jonathan. 2003. Gulliver’s Travels. London: Penguin Classics. Tallis, Raymond. 2003. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Turvey, Malcolm. 1997. ‘Seeing Theory, On Perception and Emotional Response in Current Film Theory’. In Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 431–457. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Väliaho, Pasi. 2010. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Vidal, Gore. 2006. Myra Breckinridge & Myra. London: Abacus.

4. Narration – Hands Doing and Being Abstract This chapter explores the relationship between the active human hand and plot progression. It considers how on-screen hands have played instrumental roles in the development or suspension of the cinematic story. A brief opening section explains the underlying distinction between the operations that hands perform in every cinematic narrative – merely by ‘doing’ and incidentally moving the plot forward – and those films in which the actions of the hands become a marked object of focus. It explores how, in a powerfully protracted way, the active hands of inactive protagonists are tied to examples of ‘slow cinema’ narration, and the section on that stylistic group uses it as a benchmark in assessing how manual activity – or inactivity – might determine narrative progression in films more generally. Key Words: Mainstream and art house f ilm; European cinema; Slow cinema; manual action and narration; inactivity and stillness in plot

Hands as Narrative Actants In this section I want to consider the role played by hands as active or inactive agents in films’ narrative development. In each case what is done with the hands either assists or impedes the objectives or intentions of the character on whom our attention is focused, and in whom our emotional engagement is invested. As actants, hands can be formally positioned in their instrumental relationship with plot progression; something that may implicate them in either the retardation or advancement of activity and action. The variety of their specific capabilities – from touching, grasping, pointing, proprioception, and so on – endows them with a capacity for stalling, slowing, enhancing, complicating, or accelerating plot moments, for the manipulation of objects, or in the constructive and destructive activities that effect narrative development. However, in a way that is particular to the cinema as storytelling medium, their role can be magnified or diminished by a variety of filmic

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_ch04

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devices, making the hand/film relationship if not unique then, at the very least, uniquely capable of revealing important aspects of cinematic narration. Working outwards from prof ilmic conventions to post-production design is perhaps the best way of considering the range of possibilities for discovering and exploring the hand’s narrative use on screen. Most obviously, the close-up shot serves as a mechanism for the direction of the spectator’s attention; magnifying manual gestures and actions, and their consequences, or their relative narrative weight and emotional impact. The lighting and production design, the still or moving camera, the lenses, and focus can all intensify the role or task of the hand for a given moment of plot development. Finally, montage sequences and temporal and spatial transitions can manipulate the causal or ontological position of the limb and, in turn, the overall construction of a character’s aspirations, development, arc of progress, or emotional position. These will be explored below in some of the obvious cases where sequences of temporal ellipsis show a person’s repeated attempts at a given task, the banality or importance of certain forms of labour, and the acquisition of skills within a truncated timeframe or by lingering on the activities represented. These cinematic qualities reside at a mid-way point between the presented hand and the construction of the overall narrative, but this position is not simply one of fixed semantic or syntagmatic communication. Rather, these mechanisms rest on a dynamic dialogue. In other words, meaning is created simultaneously in the space of interpretation between the hand as it appears on screen and the longitudinal progression of the story, as well as in both locations independently. Thus, the hand is a useful property to consider as it resides meaningfully in the mid-way place between bottom-up (cinematic codes, semantics) and top-down (narrational syntagmatic) spaces of film story sense-making. The marriage of the human hand with the technical qualities of the apparatus provides mutually beneficial outcomes. The hand lends itself readily to close-up attention, various possibilities of visual construction (through camera and design), and the final manual labour of the editor. At the same time these cinematic modes and mechanisms are drawn towards the visual and active potential of that body part. (This is not too different from the natural disposition of the director of the CinemaScope Western who is attracted by the natural fit of the spreading landscape into the wider aspect ratio or, as was the case with Sergio Leone, towards extreme close-up shots of a character’s eyes whose spacing fits neatly into the letter box frame.) Volker Pantenburg invokes Jörg Becker’s consideration of the cinematic hand and confirms it ‘has an appeal to reading and interpretation […] as an autonomous narrative element of cinematic and other discourses’ (2015, 228). This notion

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further underlines a logical relationship between the expressive capabilities of the hand and those of film. Pantenburg goes on to offer a classification of the acting hand within the cinematic narrative across a binary that imbues it with opposing degrees of denotative possibility. He equates modes of the hand’s use in film narration with its broader position in human evolution: the development from the concrete (the individual frame) to the abstract (through the linking of several images) correlates with the evolutionary development of the hand, in which the transition can be observed from the deictic gesture, which can only show the individual and concrete, to a mimetic ability to convey more abstract content. (2015, 234)

The distinction implied here by Pantenburg, specifically between deictic and mimetic functions, might be mapped onto variations in cinematic narrational tendencies identified in mainstream and marginal (art house) practices. Ray Carney points to the inclination to simplify and flatten complex psychology of characterisation in the former group in ways that exteriorise and concretise inner states: The Hollywood studio tradition, especially when it is functioning at its most ‘artistic,’ is devoted to using external actions, objects, events, and sounds to figure internal states of feeling or awareness. Objects and events become outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual conditions. (1994, 6)

Making specific reference to Pickpocket, Toni Pipolo proposes that Bresson’s work is typical of how this attribute – here focused on the character’s corporeality – is distinctly detached from the broader dramatic evolution of the narrative: Close-ups are reserved for objects, parts of the body, or actions otherwise difficult to perceive: the physical tasks Fontaine performs in his cell, the thieving maneuvers in Pickpocket. They are almost never used for dramatic effect. (2010, 100)

With affirmation of what a Hollywood cinema has the potential to be, again holding Bresson’s œuvre as paradigmatic of innovative alternatives, Pipolo brings the question of plot hermeneutics to the fore: To examine Bresson’s work closely is to confront the essence of what narrative cinema might be: a seizing of the phenomenologically visible

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and audible world of bodies and faces, actions and spaces, sounds and words, edited in an articulate order to suggest relationships and develop meaning. (2010, 22)

The narrative role performed by the framed hand in relation to the extent of its causal or temporal impact (respectively: the gravity and significance of its activity for plot development, and the speed with which it acts), is explicitly bound to its magnitude in shots. The represented hand can be used as an informative yardstick in respect of how cinematic conventions of framing and scale have evolved historically. We can summarise the tendencies as follows: the close-up focuses on the relationship between the hand and the object that it manipulates; the medium shot creates a spatial matrix between the hand and the face; and the long shot diminishes the role of manual activity as it positions the whole body in a locational context. (We might note that is it by virtue of this final cinematic inclination, and not in contravention of it, that the very opposite might be the case. In many of her films, like Jeanne Dielman, Chantal Akerman uses long or medium shots to draw attention to manual activity without making it visually proximate.) In respect of the three degrees of framed magnitude of the active hand – close, medium, and long – there are innumerable possibilities for reweighting the intensity of concentration, and there are many options for the filmmaker in redirecting, empowering, or confusing the viewer’s focus and interpretation. What we come to expect in mainstream cinema, or at least from film narratives in which action and meaningful psychological motivations propel the plot, is a harmonious, rational coherence between or across series of shots that present these three spatial degrees of proximity to manual activity. Because the spectator is invited to create meanings by forging conceptual connections on, around, or through the integrity of the performing body, our relationship or identification with characters ensures continuity; a contiguity that affirms the coherence of narrative comprehension. This operation is at the heart of all fiction and is identified by Jacques Rancière as central to the cinematic narrative. The medium makes things, situations, characters and events perceptible. Next, it is a practice of linkage which constructs forms of coexistence, succession and causality between events so as to make sense of those connections. (2016, 245)

The agency of the hand is important for how we might understand different cinematic narrational modes in films that centralise its role, and its use has

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something to say about a broader taxonomy of film types. It can be related in its localised way to a categorising of American ‘mainstream’, ‘marginal’ independent, and European ‘art house’ practices. As useful case studies we can focus on three films already explored above that represent the criminal activity of pickpocketing. Taking these in reverse order, representative examples include Robert Bresson’s ‘European/art house’ Pickpocket; Bruce Geller’s ‘marginal’ Harry in Your Pocket; and Samuel Fuller’s ‘classical Hollywood mainstream’ Pickup on South Street. Bresson’s Pickpocket is exemplary of a filmmaking that detaches its representation of the criminal manual activities from the dramatic development of character and plot. Steven Shaviro argues that the French filmmaker’s work avoids external rendering of psychological depth and interiority by reductive shorthand: Hands and feet are not conventionally taken to signify inner states: this is why Bresson gives us close-ups of these appendages’ ‘inward movements,’ in violation of the editing convention that reserves the close-up for the task of emphasizing significant details of plot and action, and (especially) for underlining psychology by presenting an empathetic and expressive vision of the human face. (1993, 243–244)

In short and extended sequences that represent the actions of robbery, Bresson emphasises manual choreography, precision of movement, and the ineffability of touch, over the broader narrative cause-and-effect consequences of the activity. This is not to say that his pickpocketing scenes are devoid of tension and detached from questions of moral significance. On the contrary: the stirring of such emotional and intellectual responses in the viewer are striking because the actions are not subsumed into, or diffused through, a wider purpose of narrative development. Susan Sontag identifies this impact and references another manually-focused Bresson film – Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé – in calling to mind how certain doubling of narrative information (between voice-over provision and diegetic images) intensifies spectatorial engagement: The effect of this ‘superf luous’ narration is to punctuate the scene with intervals. It puts a brake on the spectator’s direct imaginative participation in the action. Whether the order is from comment to scene or from scene to comment, the effect is the same: such doublings of the action both arrest and intensify the ordinary emotional sequence. (2009, 183)

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Bresson’s work is ideally suited to a consideration of the hands in respect of their role in the development of action as they are ostensibly framed and detached from character psychology or plot arcs. However, the model can be applied to subsequent tendencies as identified in European cinema and its directors’ aesthetics. Toni Pipolo discusses some of the creative characteristics within a given historical period when he celebrates Bresson’s influence: Over the past thirty years the work of many filmmakers, mostly European, has assimilated key elements of Bresson’s films: tightness of narrative and editing structure, paucity of dialogue, intensity of focus, minimal acting, and overall sparseness. (2010, 9)

While this exercise is not hermetically contained within that geographical region, it is nonetheless not as evident in the evolution of mainstream conventional cinematic narratives, which have inclined towards representational economy over superfluity, charged objective correlation over a stripped back presentation of things-as-things in-and-of themselves, and maximalist impact over a minimalism of deictic signification. An intermediary category might be represented by a film like Harry in Your Pocket (Bruce Geller, 1973). The narrative is developed along a recognisable three-act structure, but ostensibly reaches towards an art-house status with its innovative deviation from standard plot-driven characterisation, and in its intertextual referencing of Bresson’s 1959 film. The film’s aberrations from conventional mainstream patterns are notable in its pickpocketing sequences which at first serve to represent the training of the new recruits to the established gang of thieves and later display the rookies’ growing proficiency in their art. Designed like a musical song-and-dance routine, the set pieces of light-fingered stealing provide some plot information – just as the performance of the romantic duo shows some development of their relationship in the musical – but are nonetheless protracted so that the performed manual choreography takes a position of primacy. Therefore, when Harry, Ray (Michael Sarrazin) and Sandy (Trish Van Devere) undertake their criminal spree, hitting their oblivious marks, shots of the stage-managed transfer of loot and purses are presented with fluid camera movements and a lyrical composition of gestures like those in Pickpocket (Fig. 4.1). The possibility of playful, harmonious orchestration of the interaction of corporeal motion, manual dexterity, and the nimble handling of objects may not achieve the same performative parody and spirit as the ‘You’ve

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Figure 4.1: The skilled hand in action in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959)

Got To Pick a Pocket or Two’ routine in Carol Reed’s Oliver! (1968), but the sequences are constructed to elicit the same pleasure for spectators. Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street serves as a useful case study from the mainstream category. The opening scene is set in a train and uses a series of cuts depicting Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) stealing from the handbag of Cindy (Jean Peters). For two reasons this sequence functions differently from Bresson’s equivalent. Firstly, in Fuller’s construction of the moment, plot takes precedence over characterisation. Unlike our relationship with Bresson’s Michel, here we empathise with neither of Fuller’s characters. The plot is established as the overarching device that provides narrative seamlessness as we cognitively unify the temporally and spatially disjointed shots representing the action. In the Bresson film, character’s goals are held to the fore in our desire to ‘root for’ or engage with Michel’s objectives. Furthermore, Bresson’s sequences are precisely about detachment: of character from character (one touches but the other cannot feel anything); and of the action that is represented in a series of fragmented moments. Secondly, in Pickup on South Street the events of the opening scene emphatically initiate the action of the whole film. Once this motivational segue into the story has been provided for the viewer and the circumstance of the plot has been established, it is jettisoned so that the story proper can get underway. Contrarily to the comparable scene in Bresson’s film, in which the picking of pockets is the whole – moral, ethical, philosophical, and active – point of the fabula, in Fuller’s narrative it is a device to get the syuzhet underway.

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Slow Hands and Slow Cinema Within the European/art house cinema jurisdiction various historical clusters of activity have been noted that stand as divergent from their mainstream narrative counterparts. One such movement, which might be helpfully informed by consideration of the hand/diegesis relationship, came to critical attention early in the new millennium. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge credit the film critic Michel Ciment with identifying and naming a category of films that would be subsequently classified as ‘slow cinema’. A public address by Ciment in 2003 at the 46th San Francisco International Film Festival drew attention to a set of films by directors who had consistently produced work with a quality of ‘slowness’. The categorisation was formalised theoretically five years later by Matthew Flanagan in his article ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema’ (referenced in Luce and Jorge 2016, 1). In that piece the author offers a list of cinematic characteristics common to films in the taxonomy and elucidates the reasons for its emergence. In time, the identified qualities of the movement have been debated, nuanced, and complemented by additional features, but Ciment and Flanagan’s foundational elements remain. De Luca and Jorge refer to a blog posted by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson who discerned an on-going trend in contrasting mainstream/art house film narrative practices into the second decade of the twenty-first century. There was certain validity, they noted, in arguing for the continuation of ‘a polarized film culture: fast, aggressive cinema for the mass market and slow, more austere cinema for the festivals and arthouses’ (quoted in Luce and Jorge 2016, 2). Applications of specif ic narrative structures provided early cinema with a hermeneutic stability that fixed its temporal indeterminacy into a coherent, comprehensive whole. These structuring devices of plot managed the new art form’s ‘unregulated time’ in order, as de Luca and Jorge argue, ‘to make duration tolerable’ (ibidem, 5). More than a century later, as if in a recalcitrant reaction against the extremes of narrative velocity, elliptical economy, and unambiguous deterministic cause-and-affect efficiency, several filmmakers have embraced a style of cinema that tends towards opposite qualities. Ira Jaffe has offered a list of recurring aesthetic devices that bear on the temporality of slow cinema’s narration and suggests how these are put to the service of broader thematic questions. Having identified tendencies towards a stillness or minimalistic movement of camera, limited pro-filmic movement, infrequent cutting with a preference for long takes over rapid editing, and long shots over close-ups, Jaffe ties the conventions to the filmmaker’s desire for exploring universal, existential concerns:

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The physical stillness, emptiness and silence in slow movies may instigate, for instance, pensiveness about the non-existence that precedes and follows life, or about a metaphysical emptiness in the human soul, a void at the root of human consciousness. (2014, 4)

When Asbjørn Grønstad reflects on certain tonal registers of the slow film he points to several characteristics that are traceable to 1950s modernist cinema (2016, 273–284). Narrative explorations of human alienation, spiritual malaise, social isolation, aimlessness, and failed communication were themes that haunted earlier post-War films across Europe. This gave rise to criticism of the celebration of the ‘new’ school by commentators who either questioned its novelty or cast doubts upon its capacity for political transformation. Notable among these were Nick James (2010) and Steven Shaviro (2010), both of whom were unconvinced of any radical possibility inherent in the slow films and found in them only invitations to the numbing and ineffectual passage of dead time. For Shaviro, so much of what the contemporary variants offer had already been accomplished, and more effectively rendered in filmmakers whom he names: There seems to be something lacking to me in nearly all the recent exercises in contemplative (or slow) cinema, when you compare them with such older ‘contemplative’ works as Antonioni’s films of the 1960s, Chantal Akerman’s early films from the 1970s, Miklós Jancsó’s films of the 1960s and early 1970s, and Tarkovsky’s films before he left Russia. (2010)

No part of any rebuttal from the side supporting the validity, innovation, and potency of the movement seeks to deny the apparent similarities between earlier modernist schools and the contemporary slow canon. In fact, ubiquitous referencing of the work of Gilles Deleuze in many of the interventions into the subject – notably his pointing in Cinema 2: The Time-Image to the rise of time as the principal subject in post-War cinema – acknowledges the centrality of narrative and stylistic continuities between past and present practices. Once again in the slow film set, as with a host of early European films, characters are positioned as observers rather than active agents, and as spectators take cognisance of this relative shift from ‘doer’ to ‘seer’, a different mechanism of identification takes place (Deleuze, 1994). Detractors have been addressed by Karl Schoonover in his chapter ‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, the Political Spectator and the Queer’ (2016, 153–168). As the title suggests, Schoonover’s argument proposes a certain novelty to the aesthetic and narrative construction of

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films of the slow school by centralising the corporeal form as a focal point of their temporal effect. The represented human bodies of slow cinema are caught in a paralytic state of inertia as they carry out diurnal tasks in the passing of time or in a primal attempt to survive and as they confront the inevitable void of apocalyptic annihilation. Time, therefore, becomes them as they become its physical manifestation. Because, for Schoonover, this quality is discernible through their activities, labour, and resistance to circumstances of their inhospitable environments, the films silently propose significant questions about their characters’ ontological, political, and economic positions by imposing stillness, futility, and oppression on their agency. It is the innovation of this narrative quality, infused with an existential and absurd Beckettian haunting of the corporeal being, that Schoonover celebrates in the slow cinema canon. Furthermore, the attribute is rich with political potential as the films invite interrogation of the meaning and value of contemporary labour and activity: The art film’s attempt to make empty or non-productive time visible through the presence of these on-screen bodies reverberates with a late twentiethcentury anxiety about how to quantify human labour and the more general concern about the value of human life in late modernity. (2016, 157)

Schoonover makes the subversive potency of these corporeal entities explicit when he describes how they become objects of a physically recalcitrant opposition to market forces of commodification. Of the filmmakers, he proposes: Their films are populated with obstinately unproductive counterproductive bodies. The body becomes a site to resist labour, refusing to appear belaboured, or spoofing the very notion of production and reproduction. (2016, 161)

It is useful to consider the triangulated relationship established in the formal composition of these films between characters’ hands, their labour of resistance and refusal, and their narratives. In standard mainstream cases the construction of hand shots – from close-up, to medium, to long – works to integrate manual actions into a coherent linear development of plot progress. This relationship is broken in slow cinema. In other words, much of the quality identified as temporal distension and rhythmic deceleration are often generated by severing the activity of characters’ hands from the meaningful, logical, or ineluctable progression of the film’s plots. In a reformulation of

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the relationship between what Ira Jaffe has called ‘chronological time and external reality’ (2014, 6) meaning as it is ordinarily produced across shots is displaced. As slow films exhibit characters’ emotional paucity through an absence or failure of communication, their narrative induces a sense of time passing unoccupied by ‘things taking place’. This results in a near-complete obliteration of actions that are connected to how the narratives unfold. The films of Robert Bresson intensify the focus on the busy activities of character’s hands, with a quality that is absent in the slow movie set. In that group we experience the extension of diegetic space and an excavation of narrative meaning. This characteristic invites a different form of engagement with the story world – the emphasis shifts from the story of the world to the world of the story – in an alternative construction of the relationship between the temporality of the film’s representation and the alignment of characters and spectators’ experience of time being lived, spent, or endured. Lúcia Nagib has identified this quality in much of the work of Yasujirô Ozu and cites the director’s ‘pillow’ and ‘curtain’ shots to explain how the visual and semantic dissociation of moment and narrative meanings in his long takes create an alternative space for characters and film viewers. These perform a ‘crucial narrative role which often includes self-commentary and reflexivity’ (2016, 35). Ozu’s insistence on the contemplation of situation demands that the spectator and analyst understand slow cinema’s deviation from narrative norms, and a reappraisal of what narrative is, how it works, and what it can be. The hands of characters are not idle and motionless, but their activity is subsumed into a general corporeal inactivity and stillness. This comes from a refusal of a standard meaning-based construction of shots and, consequently, any teleological plot progression. Labour is carried out, tasks are accomplished, and routines are endured but they are framed in narrative isolation: they are done rather than shown. This tendency of slow cinema allows Cecília Mello to reassess the critical focus on the canon by giving emphasis to what she identifies (interestingly counterintuitively) as its manifest inclination from an emphasis on the temporal to the spatial: The idea here is to avoid measuring slowness in terms of the length of shots or the rhythm of bodies and camera movements, and to shift the focus from time to space, from slowness towards stillness. (2016, 139–140)

This interpretative turn invites consideration of the relationship between the profilmic event and how it is presented. It is accomplished through an alternative representation of coherence; one not constructed across shots, but in the reduction or complete elimination of edited transitions, or in the

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resistance of meaningful narrative development across visual actions from thesis, to antithesis, to synthesis. Restraint in the regular representational modes of narrative progression, in this instance specifically focused on the labour and activity of a character’s hands, are numerous in the films of Jim Jarmusch, Aleksandr Sokurov, Abbas Kiarostami, Cristi Puiu, and Béla Tarr. The cause-and-effect relationships of manual actions are narratively dismantled, with the result of temporal prolongation of specific scenes. To take examples from almost three decades of those filmmakers’ work, obvious instances might be found in (respectively): Stranger Than Paradise (1984); The Second Circle (1990); Taste of Cherry (1997); The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005); and The Turin Horse (2011). It is worth considering scenes from two films that exhibit a slow cinema quality but may not be thought of as part of that identified movement per se. Both scenes involve the diurnal chore of preparing a meal and thus contain the narrative possibility of a temporal progression that may be loosely associated with the structural form of thesis (setting up ingredients), antithesis (making the meal), and synthesis (consuming the food). While standard narrative moments develop along temporal lines of cause and effect; here it has less oppositional logic than the thesis/antithesis/synthesis Hegelian model as proposed by the Russian montage formalists. In these instances, we see fragmentation of the three stages from the formal construction of shots with which we have become familiar in our comprehension of cinematic narrative moments. The f irst case comes from a recurring scene in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) that shows the protagonist getting utensils and ingredients ready for a dinner that she will prepare and consume. Jeanne’s actions are represented in a medium/long shot and with a long take, uninterrupted by inserted shots of details. The scene invites the possibility of the spectator’s immersion and engagement because of open-ended and undirected processes of selection from the presented information. The viewer is empowered with the ability to decide which of the represented elements are important for obtaining meaning from the whole. While the process works in a way that accords with André Bazin’s celebrated ‘ontological wholeness’, what is more important for its inclusion as an example of the slow cinema style is how the spectator is challenged to reconfigure her contemplative relationship with the character. Questions relating to the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘who’ and ‘why’ of the action – those so deeply embedded in, and required for, establishing our epistemological connection to any story – are relegated or rejected. Instead, we engage with the represented goings-on in isolation; detached from the clothesline pegs ordinarily used to guide us narratively. Thus estranged

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from the conventional short-hand mechanisms of standard cinematic narration, the spectator is responsible for reconfiguring and reconstructing the meaning of the scene, and her position within its temporal framework. In an innovative turn, which creates a unique possibility for identification with the character, time is experienced by the viewer not in looking at (watching) the protagonist, but in looking with (being alongside) Jeanne. A second useful example comes from a film by Irish director Lenny Abrahamson. Like Ackerman’s film, Garage (2007) cannot be neatly placed within the slow cinema canon. However, it is constructed around several scenes that bear characteristics of that school and because of the way the central character’s manual activities relate to the plot structure it is a useful case in point for the current discussion. The film tells the story of Josie, a socially marginalised individual who works at a traditional Irish rural petrol station. He spends much of his time engaged in a series of banal chores in the premises of his work where he also lives. A scene that shows a tragic epiphany dawning on Josie represents his important moment of enlightenment as he sits eating his supper. The diegetic context of the instance is not provided by conventional setting up of the dining preparations, nor is it followed by a post-anagnorisis reflection as the man tidies up after the meal. Unlike many of the other scenes in the film, in which Josie’s manual operations and activities are wrought in proximate detail as a means of marking their (plot cause-and-effect) redundancy, in this case Abrahamson does not provide close-up shots of the character’s hands as he realises the gravity of his situation. Instead, the scene is captured in a medium shot from behind the dining man, and the spectator can see the moment at which he raises his hand to cover his mouth as he recognises the awful truth of his circumstances. The manual gesture is slight, but its significance is intensified because of the otherwise general stillness of the framed event. In a film where we find the central character largely outside of, or inactively trailing behind, the action of the plot, which always slowly advances and remains out of his reach, this scene epitomises the alternative temporality in which Josie exists, beyond the environmental conditions of the film’s diegetic world. For a character who is slow to adjust to the pace of circumstantial events and to comprehend their impact on his life, this scene is significant because it allows Josie to experience a fuller awareness of his condition. I have argued elsewhere for the critical importance of this scene, with passing reference to the character’s raised and then stilled hand as Josie places it over his mouth: This moment is doubly charged for Josie as the character catches up with his own narrative. What have been presented as meaningless, impractical

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or superficial gestures and activities until this scene have been eradicated by the still moment at which Josie’s body and hands freeze, as his reflection and requirement to act are realigned. (Monahan 2018, 103)

These cinematic cases are not simply legible as examples of the slow cinema aesthetic of narrative temporal protraction because they represent simple action, with little movement of character and camera, in unedited medium-to-long shots. Rather, it is because the magnitude of the importance of their actions – whether reduced in the Akerman film or intensified in Abrahamson’s – is riven by a separation of the meanings of the manual gesture from narrative cause-and-effect, and both are rendered without recourse to standard conventions of the framing and recording of profilmic actions. The presence and activities of the characters’ hands in each scene are instrumental in marking that same separation, as those limbs and their gestures would, and perhaps should, ordinarily invite viewer’s attention.

Acting Hands and Set Pieces The stylistic innovation evident in the narratives of slow cinema, European, and art house films can be better appreciated when their causal and logical imbrications of hand and plot are compared with mainstream counterparts. There are three groups to consider in which plot developments and narrative objectives are driven by the accomplishments or actions of the hand. These are, respectively: those in which the whole narrative unfolds around manual activities; those that contain extended sequences entailing working or training hands; and those that have significant plot moments representing hand-related deeds. The first of these occurs commonly in the marginal cinema categories already discussed, and we have seen examples in the work of Robert Bresson – most notably Pickpocket, Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé, and his later film L’Argent (from 1983) – as well as Jane Campion’s The Piano and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. In Hollywood mainstream movies, whether classical or contemporary, cases in which manual activities drive the whole plot are less frequent, although they do occur. Rodman Flender’s comedy Idle Hands is entirely structured around plot set pieces and gags that focus on the miscreant limbs of its protagonists. A range of horror or science-fiction narratives exists in which the severed or possessed hand drives the plot, or around which the principal action is

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Figure 4.2: The pervasive threatening hand in Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965)

set. The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), The Crawling Hand (1963), Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965), The Hand (Henry Cass, 1960) and the similarly titled 1981 film by Oliver Stone, reveal the centrality of the limb for the story in their titles. These are usually based on the protagonist’s loss or pursuit of a hand that has become anthropomorphised and controlled by a villainous agent or spirit (Fig. 4.2). The Hugo Haas film Strange Fascination (1952) represents an interesting alternative to the supernatural cases, as it tells a rags-to-riches tale in which the central character has achieved celebrity and success by virtue of manual skill. While the position of the characters’ hands in films like Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) and Joel & Ethan Coen’s 2007 No Country for Old Men are not central to the overall structure of the plots, they appear regularly at intervals of significant action, where their dexterity and skills are the focus of attention in the achievement of some manual task. Such sequences usually involve the manipulation of materials or objects for purposes whose design is not immediately evident to the viewer, but which we follow out of interest and in certain fascination at the capability and labour of the characters’ intentions. It is often the case that the work represented is done under time pressure and so manual fidgeting and finer movements of the fiddling fingers are framed closely to create tension. The narrative set pieces of handcuff lock undoing (The Silence of the Lambs [Jonathan Demme, 1991]; Speed [Jan de Bont, 1994]), door lock cracking (Ocean’s Eleven [Steven Soderbergh, 2001]; Misery [Rob Reiner, 1990]), and bomb defusing (Blown Away [Stephen Hopkins, 1994]; The Hurt Locker [Kathryn Bigelow, 2008]), are all good examples of this device.

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The acquisition or development of manual skill is frequently embedded into popular narratives as extended set pieces, during which elliptical montage sequences show the apprentice protagonist being trained in some form of hand-related expertise. Aside from the pickpocketing films already discussed, many revenge or competition stories show the learning curve and evolving manual dexterity of the ingenue whose art is being overseen by a mentor, coach, or master. Self-preservation is the motivation for the protagonists of Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander (1986), The Karate Kid (John G. Avildsen, 1984), as well as their sequels, and revenge drives the plots of Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005) and Kill Bill, Volumes I and II (Quentin Tarantino, 2003/2004). As a final sub-section here are competition films (which might overlap with those mentioned) and include Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) and its sequels, Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004), and The Fighter (David Russell, 2010). By far the most frequently occurring cinematic moments in which there is an intensified focus on the actions of a character’s hands for plot development takes place around the perpetration of violence or destruction. While Alfred Hitchcock’s murder sequences involve direct, close contact between his attacking and victim characters – guns, projectiles, and long-distance weapons play a negligible role in the director’s work – his preference for extended focus on the assailant’s hands is not as regular as one might first imagine. The gloved hands of stranglers Brandon and Phillip in Rope and Norman Bates’ knife strikes in Psycho are framed with a sophisticated aesthetic proximity that borders on a disturbing abstraction of the violence rather than a more lyrical choreography of gesture. Where the manual mechanics of the assault are given prominence, Hitchcock represents the action in a conventional, prolonged way in medium shots that allow him to extend the suspense of the scuffle between victim and attacker. This expansion of the diegetic information – from the murderer’s identifying and moving in on the target, to the attack and struggle, through to the concluding stillness of death – becomes a fundamental aspect of the dramatic tension. When they are the object of his focus, Hitchcock’s medium or close-up framing of the threatening hands is important for the tonal construction of scenes and for narrative development. The planned strangulation attack on Margot Wendice (Grace Kelly) by Charles Swann (Anthony Dawson) in Dial M for Murder (1955) is temporally extended precisely because of the struggle between the characters, which ends in a reversal of the assassin and victim roles. Therefore, it is apt that Hitchcock centralises the actions on the hands in the brawl, up to the point of his close focus on Margot’s as she grabs the pair of scissors to stab her assailant in the back. Such is

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the dramatic importance of the manual movements during the attempted murder that stills from the sequence, in which Margot’s fingers are spread as she grasps for the phone receiver or some other defensive tool, have been used in many of the film’s publicity materials and posters. With a different motivation, in his 1972 film Frenzy, Hitchcock prolongs the attacks on female victims by the London-based serial killer Robert Rusk (Barry Foster). The killings are, once again, by strangulation and the director extends each of the murderous assaults to underline their psycho-sexual nature; each one acting as a surrogate for the frustrated psychopathic attempt at intercourse with his targets. This trope, with the same attention given to the hands of the characters, is a recurring one during cinematic moments of extended struggles between aggressor and victim and, as a typical example of a climactic set piece, Adrian Lyne’s 1987 film Fatal Attraction stands as a useful case for how the concentration on manual actions serves the potency of the narrative moment. In many films the hand serves the important function of concealing the identity of the attacker, without diminishing the emotional effect of the violence or withholding its corporeal viciousness. Unlike the narrative moments described in the films above, the advantage of providing tight shots of the perpetrator’s hands may serve the creation of suspense. The plot can therefore advance by withholding information on the personality of the character, a quality that may usefully serve the purpose of a later reveal. In such cases, the films tend towards the generic category of horror (as opposed to thriller or psychological thriller) as we have already seen. Many films like Invisible Ghost (Joseph H. Lewis, 1941), The Devil’s Hand, The Crawling Hand, and Hands of the Ripper have set pieces and violent moments of plot development that employ this device. Although not unique in this respect, Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer (1979) intensifies its horrific moments by including the hands of the victim in the choreography of the murderous attacks perpetrated by Reno Miller (played by Ferrara); in one instance giving prominence to the gruesome drilling of a stigmata-like hole through the hands of one of his targets. Horrifying slaughter is not always the point of the narrative episode or plot point when the hand is the focal point of attention, but in many cases violent action is depicted. The severing of the protagonist’s hand provides the key initiating narrative moment in Oliver Stone’s The Hand (1981) when it is detached from graphic novelist Jonathan Lansdale (Michael Caine). In Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) a climactic light-sabre fight between Darth Vader (David Prowse et al.) and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) becomes a critical instant of plot anagnorisis. As Adam Roberts

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has described: ‘Vader chops off Luke’s right hand at exactly the moment he reveals that he is his father’ (2009, 62). In Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige (2006), following the loss of his fingers from a gunshot wound, the illusionist Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) is forced to remove the fingers of his twin brother with a chisel for the purpose of a subterfuge that becomes another identity-revealing plot point. Both scenes make logical associations between personal identity and characters’ hands and, like numerous others, these are set at points of ‘reversal’ or ‘recognition’ – to use Aristotelean terms (2013) – as important moments of narrative revelation. Instances of dramatic intensity occur in scenes that are instrumental to the development of the plots of Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) and Richard Shepard’s The Perfection (2018). The significant moment comes in the former when Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) is brought to the pond where her murdered father has been dumped. The narrative has been motivated by the fact that she, her siblings, and her mentally ill mother will lose their home and land if her father does not turn up to a court case to pay a bail debt. When she goes to the lake and discovers his corpse, she must cut off his hands to provide the local sheriff with evidence that he is dead. The Perfection tells the story of two students who have been trained by masters at a music school for protégés. As the jealousy grows between the rival cellists – Charlotte (Allison Williams) and Lizzy (Logan Browning) – the plot takes a psychotic and sinister turn when Charlotte sets out to punish Lizzy for having replaced her in the affection and respect of those running the school. As a part of the retribution by the ousted and outraged player, Charlotte brings Lizzy on a day trip. When alone in a remote rural location outside of Shanghai the vengeful cellist drugs the ingénue, convincing her that there are bugs beneath her skin and that she can only save herself by cutting off her right hand. In a hallucinatory state, Lizzy amputates her own limb and so ends her musical career. The scene initiates a peripatetic turn in the narrative which, having to that point been chronologically linear, unfolds after the amputation with a series of complex plot misdirections and dramatic twists. Films as diverse as Hitchcock’s original The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Alan Parker’s Midnight Express (1978) both linger on the hands of central characters in their opening sequences. As crime films that operate by creating tension at significant moments, early in the story the directors’ concentration on the fidgeting and busy manual activity usefully underscores both the importance of the actions framed and the agency of which the same characters will be presently deprived. The Jack Arnold picture Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) opens with the ominous discovery by archaeologists of the unidentifiable severed hand-like limb of an unrecognisable Amazonian

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creature. The unusual find by the scientists, and their reactions to its oddity, are enough to impress its importance as an initiating plot point to open the story. Equally, but conversely, hand-related revelations and disclosed information can facilitate narrative resolution. In Sinister Hands (Armand Schaefer, 1932), for example, the identity of the murderer is announced by the investigating detective on the grounds of the perpetrator’s being left-handed. Darian Leader has rhetorically asked: ‘Why is it that in almost every adventure film ever made there is a scene in which one person holds another dangling by the hand?’ (2016, 28) and mentions ‘books and films where someone hangs on to a rope, a raft, a tree trunk in order to escape some peril’ (ibidem, 29). The characters caught in the former cases might be in situations that offer the possibility of symbolic interpretations, in which there is a deeper meaning behind their requirement to release their grip or to remain attached. However, as the latter cases attest – where the ‘clinging to’ or ‘letting go’ does not involve the hands of a second participant – the dramatic intensity of these set pieces is foregrounded for the creation of narrative tension, and so their location within the action/adventure genre is fitting. Although not of that generic category, Hitchcock’s Vertigo begins with a chase sequence that explains the pathological mental condition suffered by its protagonist, John Ferguson (James Stewart). The opening scene starts with a close-up shot of the hands of a man trying to escape from the police as he climbs over the top of a fire escape ladder on a roof. In pursuit, Ferguson slides down the roof tiles and grips the surface as he watches a colleague fall past him to his death. The consequences of this event for Ferguson’s character are subsequently worked through in the film but the first line of dialogue marks his literal and psychological loss of control. As a second cop reaches towards him, to prevent his fatal falling, the man calls out: ‘Give me your hand!’ Opening sequences that are designed to establish character’s circumstances and motivations are inherently bound to the standard mainstream action-driven three-act narrative, and Cliffhanger (1993), by Renny Harlin is a typical example that involves the protagonist’s losing grip and dropping a partner. Insert shots of character’s hands at points of letting go and falling are common in all the superhero and Marvel Comic Strip films, but the set pieces are turned to affirmative ends as is the case in Richard Donner’s Superman (1978) when the extraordinary abilities of the eponymous character are shown in one scene when he drops Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) but immediately descends in rapid flight to catch her seconds later. Notable concluding sequences of letting go and falling are so fundamental to the resolution of narratives or character arcs, that merely mentioning

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some of the better-known films in which they occur is adequate to bring the moments to mind. Prominence is given to the precise moment at which manual contact is lost or broken and, typically, they are intensified by an extreme shift in perspective, with a rapid edited transition from a wide shot that encompasses the perspectival depth and breadth of the action-filled landscape, into an extreme close-up of characters’ hands. This can represent the reaching for a significant object, as is the case when Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) stretches his fingers forward to grasp the Holy Grail in the climactic sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989). The possibilities afforded the film storyteller range from the fatal fall of Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) the villain in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988); the climactic separation of the doomed lovers Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose Bukater (Kate Winslet) in Titanic (James Cameron, 1997); or the concluding moments of final farewell of father Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) and daughter Grace (Liv Tyler) in the 1998 Michael Bay disaster film Armageddon. In the latter, the characters’ letting go has Oedipal significance because the patriarch sacrifices himself to save the planet, simultaneously affirming his consent for Grace to marry her lover A.J. (Ben Affleck). Because the manual separation has taken on this connotative depth, and because the characters are physically separated, their connection is mediated by a display of screens through which they communicate their final melodramatic words of parting. Before contact is lost, and the characters have expressed their mutual love, Grace raises her hand to the screen on which her father’s face is framed. This is held momentarily in silhouette, backlit by the blue hues of the paternal image, until the monitors flicker and blur to static. Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses (1989) offers a satirical take on sexual politics that plays with the vicissitudes of its central dysfunctional relationship much like a Howard Hawks’ screwball comedy. The final sequence represents a literal fall of the bitterly feuding couple Oliver and Barbara Rose (Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner), as the chandelier to which they are clinging crashes to the floor beneath them. In line with numerous plot twists throughout the film and with another reversal that toys with viewers’ expectations, the pair’s landing is not fatal, and DeVito frames the collapsed lighting fixture from directly above with the estranged spouses lying on the tiles. After a few moments, Oliver stirs and reaches his hand towards Barbara, offering a gesture of reconciliation which, because we find them likely in their dying minutes, we expect her to accept. Instead, she takes his hand tenderly in hers and then thrusts it away. One of the significant uses of hands at instrumental moments of the initiation or resolution of plot is in their provision of confirmation that a

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character has come to life or passed away. The former falls frequently into the category of the science fiction genre and from sound cinema cases as early as James Whale’s 1931 version of Frankenstein to a range of classical B-movies through to contemporary examples like the 2017 film The Bye Bye Man directed by Stacy Title, the shorthand synecdoche of the twitching fingers on the waking limb works as an indication of the point at which the supernatural threat is born. Dramatic tension is frequently created by the absence of the protagonist or supporting characters at the instance of dawning life, and their anagnorisis provides further suspense when, as is the case with The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks, 1951), a character subsequently confirms that: ‘At twelve ten AM the hand became alive!’ Representations of the corporeal demise or death of a character through close-up framing of the stilling hand is often set as narrative counterpoints in a way that concludes a climactic sequence and resolves the plot, reflecting the opening shots during which the threat was initiated. This device is extended by James Cameron in The Terminator (1984) when the director includes a scene in which the detached crawling hand of the eponymous android continues to attack Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). After a violent struggle, Connor kills the machine by crushing it. In confirmation that the machine is finally dead, its hand and arm stick out menacingly in front of her face and then become inanimate. Images of the dying hand occur throughout The Driller Killer, and similar scenes are often protracted in melodramas where the emotional exaggeration is framed around the manual tactile contact between the dying character and those gathered around her. Jean Cocteau choreographs the concluding scene of Les parents terribles (1948) in this way when the director extends the moment at which the Oedipally oppressed Michel (Jean Marais) is required to let go of his dying mother, Yvonne (Yvonne de Bray). The grief-stricken maternal character has taken an overdose of her medication, so her demise is prolonged and, as the characters present take her hand, the sentimentality of the scene is intensified until the moment when her arm falls lifelessly onto the bed beside her.

Works Referenced Carney, Ray. 1994. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies. Cambridge [England]; New York [USA]: Cambridge University Press. De Luca, Tiago and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds.). 2016. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. Grønstad, Asbjørn. 2016. ‘Slow Cinema and the Ethics of Duration’. In De Luca and Barradas Jorge, 273–284. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Jaffe, Ira. 2014. Slow Movies: Countering the Cinema of Action. London & New York: Wallflower Press. James, Nick. 2010. ‘Passive-Aggressive’. Sight & Sound, 20: 4. 5. Leader, Darian. 2016. Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why. United Kingdom: Penguin, Random House. Mello, Cecília. 2016. ‘If There Walls Could Speak: From Slowness to Stillness in the Cinema of Jia Zhangke’. In De Luca and Barradas Jorge, 137–149. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Monahan, Barry. 2018. The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: A Filmmaking of Philosophy. New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi & Sydney: Bloomsbury. Nagib, Lúcia. 2016. ‘The Politics of Slowness and the Traps of Modernity’. In De Luca and Barradas Jorge, 25–46. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pantenburg, Volker. 2015. Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Pipolo, Toni. 2010. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2016. ‘Béla Tarr: The Poetics and Politics of Fiction’. In De Luca and Barradas Jorge, 245–260. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schoonover, Karl. 2016. ‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Labouring Body, the Political Spectator and the Queer’. In De Luca and Barradas Jorge, 153–168. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shaviro, Steven. 2010. ‘Slow Cinema Vs Fast Films’. In The Pinocchio Theory [online]; http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=891 [Accessed April 7, 2021]. Sontag, Susan. 2009. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics.

5.

Characterisation – Hands and Identity Abstract This chapter catalogues examples of the use of the hand in providing information for the development of character and it considers what film personalities do with their hands and how their hands reveal psychological interiority and complexity. The section reads hands as mechanisms that expose unconscious motives, desires, and pathologies, and it scrutinises their role in character formation and revelation: as actants, or as determinants of an existential condition. Key Words: Character revelation; depth of characterisation; performed personality and pathology; the star system

Cultural Contexts for Creative and Destructive Personalities The ubiquity of performing hands on screen is a challenge when it comes to considering characterisation theoretically. Stage and screen actors have been known to complain about the same problem from a practical angle. When not put to the service of some action or gesturing, the dangling limbs can be an obsessive distraction. The literary artist draws attention to manual presence and activity by verbal invocation, working on the assumption that unless stated they are not absent to the character. As a result, when hands emerge in words from diegetic silence to mimetic denotation an intentional labour is required. This summoning imbues them with certain potency. Poignant examples from literature typically mark the dramatic intensity of given moments and some of these have found their way into screen adaptations of their sources. On-going references to the hands of characters who interact with the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary include the old lady’s ‘large hands with knotty joints’ (2001, 127); Rodolph’s move to kiss Emma’s hand following their ride in the country (ibidem, 136); or Charles’ hands as he performs surgeon’s duties (ibidem, 148). When a ‘poor little seamstress’ has been condemned to the guillotine in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities,

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_ch05

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she movingly asks that Sydney Carton, who is heroically suffering the same fate, to hold her hand to alleviate her terror as she is carried with him on the tumbril to their execution (1993, 398–421). Marcel, the young protagonist of Proust’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower – the second novel of the writer’s In Search of Lost Time – plays a romantically charged game of ‘ring on a string’ with his teenaged female friends (2003, 495–499). He uses the interaction to connect with Albertine and tells us: ‘the mere touch of her hands would have been a delight to me’ (ibidem, 495). This cursory sample from myriad examples indicates the effectiveness in literary summoning of the otherwise invisibly ubiquitous limbs as they are drawn forth in words for emotional and psychological moments of characterisation. The unrepresented omnipresence of the hands is equally important for the creation of cinematic character. The medium is uniquely placed to offer a two-fold representation of absence: the absent-presence of the on-screen images and sounds (Christian Metz’s ‘imaginary signifier’ [1977]), and the contingent ontological presence of the object beyond the frame. In this respect, film’s ability to foreground a character’s hand at any moment – by using some or all the conventional devices at the disposal of the director – aligns it with that of the author of the literary or theatrical work. In all cases, unless it is otherwise stated, the presumption is that a character possesses two functioning hands and that they are always available for deployment for dramatic purposes. In cinema the hand occupies the offscreen space in a unique way. This is determined by the artificiality of the frame, the arbitrary or spontaneous movements of the camera or performer, or direct reference made to it. Hands thus remain indelibly attached to, or associable and ready for inclusion with, what is shown on the screen and become another complementary detail informing character construction. In both the literary and cinematic operations, concrete, deliberate, and intentional intervention by the author draws the unseen or unidentified hand into a textually signifying present tense. The assumption by the film spectator of their beyond-the-frame existence allows directors to select from a range of stylistic methods of representation that articulate their importance when the absent-presence becomes re-presented entity. This grants the limb an intensified meaning-bearing capacity, which requires of the auteur (or bestows upon her) the opportunity for finely tuned connotative and denotative expression. These qualities facilitate the range of framed possibilities already considered here, and they contribute to the creation of characterisation in a variety of interesting ways. In his 1945 film Les enfants du paradis Marcel Carné personifies four historical characters as romantic suitors for his beautiful carnival performer

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Figure 5.1: Lacenaire presents his criminal and creative hands in Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945)

Garance (Arletty). Set in the Parisian theatrical world of the 1820s and 1830s, the tale of each attempt at seducing the belle allows Carné to explore different themes. These ideas are bound to the men’s psychological dispositions and world views. The only character whose name is maintained from his historical counterpart, is Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand). He is depicted as a common criminal with a cynical anti-social philosophy who scorns the base egocentrism of mankind. Lacenaire is intent on transgressing the moral and legal codes of the time, which he holds to be corrupt and demeaning (Fig. 5.1). His criminal activities begin as petty theft but become more severe and culminate in his murder of the Count de Montray (Louis Salou), another of the men pursuing Garance. Convinced that this assassination will result in the fulfilment of his own inevitable – foreseen and desired – execution, Lacenaire puts up no resistance to arrest by the authorities when they come for him. Carné’s screen version of the Frenchman is a charismatic type who is less repugnant than his real-life counterpart. The historical Lacenaire is represented more faithfully by Daniel Auteuil in Francis Girod’s 1990 film Lacenaire (Conchon 1990). However, Carné presents him with a softer touch that allows the viewer to believe that Garance is plausibly fascinated by

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the man while still repelled by his philosophy. The historical man was an infamous character: an individual who, from an early age, felt a personal sense of embitterment with his family life and a profound disconnection from society. In his sceptical rejection of what he believed to be the bourgeois and hypocritical world in which he grew up, Lacenaire practiced criminal activities that led him – quite readily and consentingly – to his execution by the guillotine on January 9, 1836. Convicted of collaborating in two murders and attempting another, as well as minor charges of fraud, theft, and counterfeiting, he proudly proclaimed that his manual activities were the combined work of an artist and criminal whose labour amalgamated creative and destructive human impulses. His hastily written Mémoires, the manuscript produced during his final months in prison awaiting his punishment, testify to the predetermined path he believed he was divinely destined to follow and to the artistry of his endeavours; both legally transgressive and legitimately poetic (Lacenaire, 1952). The notoriety of this ‘poète-assassin’ – as he would be called later by many commentators (Bijaoui, 2011) – was widely published in newspapers of the time and provoked international reactions as far as Russia. Fyodor Dostoevsky, himself the near-victim of a capital punishment sentence, referred to the Lacenaire case in his 1869 novel The Idiot when Yevgeny Pavlovich and Myshkin discuss another character’s having shot himself for attention: ‘Be on guard with these home-bred Lasseners [sic] of ours. I repeat, crime is too often the refuge of these mediocre, impatient and greedy nonentities’ (1996, 381). The case is compelling but not abnormal for its time in juxtaposing notions of artistry and criminality. Albert Camus wrote more than once about the visceral effect on spectators of the theatrical routine of guillotine executions. The protagonist of L’étranger remembers his mother describe her husband’s reaction to an execution he has witnessed (1998, 167–168), and Camus begins his 1957 polemic against the death penalty, Reflections on the Guillotine, with a similar passage about his own father. In his chapter ‘The Spectacle of the Scaffold’ Michel Foucault has detailed the penchant in early nineteenth-century France for the public display of criminals and their punishment (1986, 32–69), and later he references the case of Lacenaire (1986, 283–285). Of the latter, despite casting doubt on the extent of his criminal range and profanity, Foucault still concedes that the executed man’s celebrity has been ‘assured for ever in the paradise of the aesthetics of crime’ (ibidem, 283). Whatever the local or international public reaction to the Lacenaire persona, events, and ambition for self-publicity, the criminal’s notoriety was not out of step with an early-nineteenth century zeitgeist that accepted a comorbidity of criminal pathology and the creative endeavour. Evidence of rising fascination in a connection between art and evil might

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be indicated by Thomas De Quincey’s 1827 satirical composition On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in February of that year. Once actions of cultural productivity and criminal destruction were considered coterminous, commentators often focused on the role of the perpetrator’s hands. In an ironic dénouement to the Lacenaire case, the hands of the criminal poet were amputated and stolen postmortem. The author Théophile Gautier records having seen one of the severed limbs embalmed at the home of his colleague, writer Maxime du Camp. Gautier’s 1852 collection of poetry Émaux et Camées contains a poem titled ‘Lacenaire’ (translated as ‘Lacenaire’s Hand’) in the section Études de mains (Gautier 1981). While improbable, it is not impossible that Gautier’s experience inspired Guy de Maupassant’s supernatural short story ‘La Main’, from his 1885 collection Les Contes du jour et de la nuit. In the tale his protagonist describes a similar discovery when he visits the home of Sir John Rowell: Je m’approchai: c’était une main, une main d’homme. Non pas une main de squelette, blanche et propre, mais une main noire desséchée, avec les ongles jaunes, les muscles à nu et des traces de sang ancient, de sang pareil à une crasse, sur les os coupés net, comme d’un coup de hache, vers le milieu de l’avant-bras. (2001, 113) I approached: it was a hand, the hand of a man. Not a skeletal hand, white and clean, but a dehydrated black hand, with yellow fingernails, exposed muscles and traces of ancient blood, blood like dirt, on cleanly cut bones, as if with a strike of an axe, to the middle of the forearm. [Author’s translation.]

Because these manual associations are made with the acknowledgement that hands are empowered agents in the realisation of personal intentions, those limbs are read as capable of revealing otherwise inaccessible attributes of personality and character. Farah Karim-Cooper describes the hand as ‘an appropriate site for an exploration of identity since early modern culture was preoccupied with corporeal fragments as representative of broader concepts’ (2016, 5) and, in doing so, confirms the potential for its use in the construction and performance of character. Neil Potts equates the connotative potential of manual activities with those of expression and proposes that they often give nuance to characterisation: Performance, down to the level of the slightest facial or physical gesture, has a crucial role in characterisation. Not all movements, gestures or

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actions of a character have direct effects on narrative development as it is often defined, but all have something to say about their inner life […] about their interiority, and in turn come to a greater understanding of their function within the film’s world. (2005, 95)

That hands have played an instrumental role in the cinematic development of characters accords with a real-world association made between manual qualities and those of identity and selfhood. Tamara Plakins Thornton offers a useful study of the connections between individuality, personality, and handwriting; one of such dependability that the signature has traditionally carried definitive legal authority. She summarises justification of the practice in historical terms: If print was the impersonal product of a machine, the script became the creation of the hand, physically – and conceptually – linked to the human being who produces it. (1997, 7)

As Jean-Luc Godard explores existential questions of identity and selfhood in Vivre Sa Vie (1962), his protagonist Nana (Anna Karina) is occupied with the same ontological concerns. It is fitting, therefore, that in one scene the director lingers with a high-angle shot on the aesthetic quality of her handwriting as Nana pens a letter. It is also significant that the missive is drafted to contain a description of herself including both physical and personality details. Handwriting and fingerprints are recurring motifs for character identity and identification in numerous films but are used with heightened potency in the creation of suspense and tension in crime and detective films. Alfred Hitchcock populates his 1956 thriller The Wrong Man – a film entirely based on a confusion of identity – with images and the framed activities of hands, handwriting, and fingerprinting. Using the meticulous attention to detail for which he is known, the director sets out the scenes in which Manny (Henry Fonda), who has been unjustly charged with armed robbery, is arrested, has his writing examined, is fingerprinted, and prosecuted. The scenes are constructed with deliberate and thorough framing of Manny’s hands, variously in motion and immobile, with Hitchcock’s editorial pacing and sequential shot lengths in keeping with the rhythm of Fonda’s personification of the accused character. As Manny confesses innocence and confusion about the accusation, Fonda’s measured, silent, and hesitant performance is paralleled with Hitchcock’s stylistic construction of scenes around shots of the character’s hands as they symbolise both the possibility of confirming the mistake by legal authorities and the unlikelihood of redemption for Manny.

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The limb can serve the complication of characterisations and personality types split along axes of malevolent and creative intent. The moral crisis faced by such individuals is deepened by their association with an identified creative manual vocation and, like the novel and cinematic versions of The Hands of Orlac, one of Hitchcock’s scheming antagonists in Rope is an amateur pianist. Robert Florey’s 1946 film The Beast with Five Fingers tells the story of an Italian pianist Francis Ingram (Victor Francen) who is murdered under unusual circumstances. Ingram is paralysed on his right side, so his playing is accomplished by his left hand alone. As a supernatural psychological thriller, it is fitting that Peter Lorre plays Ingram’s assistant Hilary, a mentally volatile student of Astrology, dementedly in search of an ancient alchemical secret. In unreliable point of view distortions following the killing of the wealthy Italian, the man’s severed left hand goes on an avenging postmortem spree of murder, roaming the house and assassinating innocent associates. Lorre’s performance is designed with his trademark manual contortions, with twitching and fidgeting fingers, so that his increasing dementia is captured and expressed through the movements of his hands. His master, the piano-playing Ingram, may be the actual murderer and this possibility is kept open by suggestions that some supernatural reanimating force has possessed his detached hand. The once benign and musically talented limb seems to have transgressed a moral boundary between art and evil. This characterisation increases the mystery around whether Hilary is the actual assassin, and it invites consideration of the relationship between the human proclivities or capacities for creative and destructive actions. In several shots the film juxtaposes elements of art, creativity, and decoration with sinister actions, absurd instances, and macabre images. Romantic and violent tones clash in the character of Ingram when he is informed by Hilary that his lover is intending to leave him. Ingram’s piano playing hand begins to strangle Hilary in a frenzied refusal to accept the report. Following Ingram’s murder, and that of his legal representative Duprex (David Hoffman), the pianist’s lover Julie (Andrea King) is interrogated by the police commissioner. Her defensive reply once again binds creativity and crime. Assuming a capacity for the transfer of manual cultural production to unethical destruction she says: ‘I could scarcely strangle a man, and I don’t play the piano’, and lifts her open palms to the detective. Throughout the film, piano playing precedes attempts at murder or fatal strangulations, and the violent sequences are intercut with shots of a crawling or contorted hand. Much of the film’s tension is created around ambiguity over the owner of the strange limb, and the possibility that it may be a figure of Hilary’s deranged imagine. Fingerprints, Ingram’s large ring, and his handwriting

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are variously used as narrative MacGuffins so that Hilary’s conviction of his master’s murderous intentions are undermined by his pathological mental unravelling. The film positions supernatural explanations over rational psychological accounts of the events, implying that a morally virtuous and cultured man cannot be capable of the horrendous acts of violence. By the conclusion of the story the machinations behind the murdering limb are explained rationally by the detective. Some of its appearances and actions involved complex mechanisms of strings, and others were imagined by the psychotic secretary Hilary. Reassurance is ultimately given that the cantankerous and volatile musician was not responsible for the grisly acts and the spheres of art and evil remain apart. The credit sequence of The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971) establishes the film’s horrific supernatural tone with disturbing manual pictures. Images filtered through red and blue hues present abstract shots of a candle overlaid with moving stretched hands, fingers, and a devil-worshipping star. Strange dramatic music underscores what appears to be a Satanic ritual overlaid with images of body parts. These are interspersed with multipleexposure shots of hands in motion. Wendkos’ film tells the story of a Satanic cult governed by Duncan Ely (Curd Jürgens), a Lucifer-like character who summons and mediates the evil of hell and maintains obedience over his cult members as a classical pianist. Early on we learn that his time as leader is coming to an end and that he is in search of a replacement; one who Satan can inhabit and who must have exceptional musical talent and piano skills to facilitate the corporeal possession. Ely finds a suitable successor in music critic and former concert pianist Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) having invited him to his home to give the journalist an interview. Clarkson’s character is presented as somewhat compromised as he has reneged on a vocation of musical performance in favour of the less worthy work of criticism. This decision is one set to undermine his ethical core and, as we will discover, his moral strength. The night before the arranged meeting, portentous occurrences indicate that some malevolent otherworldly force has already selected Clarkson as an apposite vessel to receive the hellish spirit. Myles and his wife Paula (Jacqueline Bisset) are woken by the horrific sound of an animal’s screaming. Wendkos cuts to their daughter Abby (Pamelyn Ferdin) who is drawing a bat in another room of the house. Abruptly she answers the phone to someone who seems to be asking for Myles. The caller is revealed to be Duncan Ely when the girl ominously writes his name on her drawing. During their first encounter later that morning Ely assesses Clarkson’s suitability as his replacement. He focuses on the hands of the critic and insert point of view shots testify to how Wendkos constructs and explores

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the character of the younger man. The scene of their introduction begins with Ely’s hands framed on the keyboard of a grand piano as he plays one of the four Franz Liszt ‘Mephisto Waltz’ compositions. When Myles enters, telling Ely’s maid that he has an appointment with the maestro, he is shown to the room for the interview. Ely is visibly taken when Myles sets his tape recorder on the tabletop, and an insert close-up shot of the writer’s hand indicates the cause of Ely’s curiosity: Mr. Clarkson, may I see your hand? [Myles holds it up] Turn it over. [Myles does so] Now the other one… Stretch your fingers. [Ely places his left hand over Myles’ right] Have you ever played the piano?

When Ely summons his daughter, he proclaims the journalist’s suitability to become his next Satanic vessel: ‘Roxanne, he has great hands… Rachmaninov hands!’ The cult leader continues: I happen to be the greatest pianist alive and I tell you this Mr. Myles Clarkson: hands like yours are one in a thousand… don’t you agree, Roxanne?’

As Ely’s health declines, Roxanne tells her father: ‘Your hands! They’re ice cold… should I get your medicine?’ On the evening of the leader’s death, Roxanne prepares Myles for the process of Satanic reincarnation by drugging him. After Myles wakes in a stupor, the spiritual transfer is confirmed when he goes downstairs and, as piano music plays on a tape recorder, he raises both hands to Roxanne with an ominous gesture. Myles recognises that he is now inhabited by Ely. Paula is concerned by Myles’ subsequent change in personality and comments that his playing has changed. Following Ely’s burial, a series of bizarre events culminates in the abduction and murder of the couple’s daughter, and Paula’s murder by Myles. The detectives who find her lifeless body drowned in the bath assume the tragedy to have been suicide. The final scene shows Myles, now faithfully executing the work of the devil, confirming to Roxanne that all is going well with their plans. The association between artistic and evil actions, and their haunted pianists, are drawn differently in The Beast with Five Fingers and The Mephisto Waltz, although in both films the characters are under suspicion of malicious intent. By the conclusion of the earlier horror, scientific rationalism excuses the musician and what was perceived as his murderous transformation from cultured gentleman. Therefore, the integrity and moral superiority of the artistic personality are preserved. In the later film, the antagonists are not

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only haunted by a Satanic spirit, but their capacity for, and susceptibility to, the malign supernatural haunting that overwhelms their personalities, are connected to their musical talent. It is their manual expertise, demonstrated in their keyboard skills, that makes them ideal channels for the incarnation and manifestation of otherworldly wickedness. In the 1978 James Toback film Fingers Harvey Keitel plays aspiring pianist Jimmy Fingers whose main ambition is to succeed in an audition to perform at Carnegie Hall. The character’s underlying but indistinct pathology is suggested in several scenes when Jimmy is shown playing his grand piano, and in exchanges with his parents. His father Ben (Michael V. Gazzo) is involved in mafia-connected crime and his mother Ruth (Marian Seldes) is a former concert pianist who is a patient in a psychiatric institution. Jimmy is caught in an unresolved Oedipal personality crisis that presents him the option of following in the footsteps of either parent: on the one hand as a culturally accomplished musician, on the other as a criminal. As he struggles with his split identity and incentives, he is shown either playing complex piano pieces or viciously assaulting enemies of his father. These acts are interspersed with a series of sexual encounters, most notably with Carol (Tisa Farrow) a pretty sculptor. These meetings modulate between the lyrical and the destructive. His hands become a central point of focus in his characterisation as Jimmy vacillates between composed, harmonious self-disciplined piano player and impulsive, frenzied attacker. Carol is represented as a creative individual and displays similar tendencies as both her sexuality and sexual relationships conceal and reveal darker proclivities in her interactions with Jimmy and with her domineering associate, and probable pimp, Dreems (Jim Brown). With stylistic innovation Toback omits any extra-diegetic soundtrack by showing Jimmy carrying a tape player in most of the exterior scenes. This feature ensures provision of continuous music accompanying Jimmy’s actions and interactions with other characters. Once established, the convention is used to create doubt in one significant scene about the extent of Jimmy’s keyboard skills. As he sits at his piano, we hear Jimmy practising for his audition recital. However, just before the piece comes to an end and as the camera tracks slowly towards him, Jimmy raises his hands above the keyboard. The instance confirms that – in this case at least – he has not been playing but has a tape-recording rolling in the background. For a moment we are invited to question whether he has ever actually been playing the instrument and if the whole performance has been a ruse or part of his psychotic (unreliable narrator) personality. A visit to his proctologist suggests a degree of sexual impotence despite his frequent moments of passionate intercourse with random females.

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Although it is ultimately a failure, his concert audition confirms some degree of talent, but in a later conversation with his schizophrenic mother his violent sexual and passive musical attempts at personal expression are connected. Informing Ruth that his audition was unsuccessful, he says: I’m sorry, it’s just too late. I can play anything when I’m alone, but then when there are people around, I just… I can’t seem to relax: my, my, my hands just don’t work right. And my mind starts interfering. Can you understand that, Ma?

The film ends with Jimmy’s discovery of his assassinated father’s body in the old man’s home. With his mother confined to the mental hospital and clinging to her son with an Oedipal possessiveness that connects his musical talent with his sexual violence, there is no evident resolution proposed for the wayward pianist. As Jimmy’s character is caught between the pianist’s creativity and the criminal’s viciousness, his hands are positioned as significant features of the divided personality. Violent manual actions and activities are brought together with the musician’s skills in Richard Shepard’s The Perfection (2018), in which competing cellists Charlotte (Alison Williams) and Lizzie (Logan Browning) resort to self-inflicted hand amputations in an obsessive drive to win the attention and appraisal of the dons of a privileged, high-class music academy. The musical protegees rebel against the sexual and cultural oppression of their masters and inflict brutal physical vengeance on them; once again, with their manual talents turning towards destructive ends. Finer lines are drawn between the entertainment and violence of the knife-throwing performer Bill ‘The Butcher’ Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis) in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), and what might be called the ‘soft crime’ of grifting facilitates important moments of character definition through manual skills in George Roy Hill’s 1973 film The Sting. Telling the story of conmen Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman) and Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) who set out to scam professional thief Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw), Hill judiciously establishes empathy for the underdog heroes against the tyrannical and corrupt shark characterising their criminal activity as motivated by their modest means and social disadvantage, and linked to a well-practiced and honourable skillset. Hill uses specific moments to demonstrate Gondorff’s talent in card shuffling and dealing, and Redford’s performance unfolds with concentration on his adroitness, or on his quirks of manual gesturing and movement. In a noteworthy distinction from these, the antagonist Lonnegan is granted no agility of motion – he is even inflicted with a lame leg – and

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the inference is that he acquired his wealth with brawn-over-brain illegality and corruption, rather than hard-won, manual aptitude and dexterity. Three cinematic examples of vocational hands that do not involve artistic or performative skillsets appear in the 1988 film Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017), and Miguel Ángel Vivas’ Your Son (2018). In each case, the professional manual expertise of a surgeon is put to destructive or self-destructive use when the psychological well-being of the gifted medical protagonist is compromised. On three occasions in The Killing of a Sacred Deer Lanthimos makes explicit reference to the hands of his protagonist, the cardiologist surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), and these are identified by different characters as ‘beautiful’. In the most significant, his wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) chastises him for his apathetic disposition and general lethargy towards life and, when he reveals to her that the son of a patient died because of his negligence during an operation, she says: You have beautiful hands. I never noticed before… Everyone’s been telling me lately what beautiful hands you have and now I can see for myself. Nice and clean. But so what if they’re beautiful: they’re lifeless.

As with the surgeon in Your Son, Steven has been confronted by the requirement to turn his healing manual skills to murderous purposes. His deceased patient’s vengeful bereft son Martin (Barry Keoghan) has put a mysterious spell on the surgeon’s family who will die one after the other in deteriorating stages of health unless Steven sacrifice one of them. The implication is that he must wake from his existential (bad faith) inertia and take action; a test of his commitment to definitive purpose that he seems otherwise to have avoided in his life. Martin’s challenge requires that Steven’s hands are transformed from things of passive beauty to active agents of horrific, tragic ugliness. It is fitting that all the moments of sexual congress between characters are concentrated solely on manual activity: restricted and repressed points of contact that deny complete tactile sensuous intercourse. It is worth pointing to an interesting case in which the relationship between creative and criminal hands is displaced from the agents possessing those manual attributes onto a third character who is invited to choose between the two. In Night and the City (1950) Jules Dassin implies two possible romantic routes for his heroine Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney) and represents these through the male characters with whom she associates: risk-taking conman Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) and struggling artist and sculptor Adam Dunn (Hugh Marlowe). As with the moment of decision-making crisis

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of classical Greek theatre, and for the development of a more dramatic plot, at first Mary opts for association with the grifter and initiates a narrative journey that will ultimately result in his downfall and, we can infer, her return to the alternative character.

The Psychopathic Hand The traditional associations between the virtue of the right hand and the darker capacities of the left are traceable to the etymology of the Latin words ‘dexter’ and ‘sinister’. Originally connoting the right and left sides of the body, the evolution of their meanings provides contemporary connections between the actions of both the dexterous (or virtuous) right and the sinister (or malevolent) left. Cross-cultural references echo the polarity – bearing etymological roots – and these often testify to personality types as individuals are deemed to be left- or right-handed, or ambidextrous. The socially awkward or unsophisticated gauche disposition has a linguistic parallel in the French ‘gauche’, and the notional clumsy ‘mal-à-droit’ is manifestly contrasted with its counterpoint, the manually competent right. Many social standards of etiquette and moral behaviour are divided along what one is expected to do with different hands: again, the left is reserved for menial or undignified tasks while the right carries out loftier and honourable functions. Interestingly, film sometimes overturns or challenges the assumed, established link between a healthy mind and proficient hand functioning. The manual competency of the typical mainstream protagonist is always just about sufficient, and from regular character to action film hero the qualities of handiness are always just enough to accomplish the task presented, whether making breakfast or defusing a bomb. In fact, the action narrative often positions the involuntary, reluctant hero in situations that combine a challenge to his ingenuity with a testing of his bare-hand capacities, both of which are used to appeal to viewers’ sympathy and identification. Films like Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), are typical ‘hard body’ films of the 1980s in which excessively gendered corporeal strength and muscularity are established as reliable agents in driving the plot (see Jeffords 1993; Cohan and Hark 1996). While fetishised violence and sadomasochism pruriently exhibit a body inflicted with, and tested by, pain and injury, the integrity of the male physique is maintained in face of threat. Established conventions offer resolute assurance to the spectator that the sanctity of the masculine figure will not be overwhelmed, so that

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the pleasure generated for audiences is based on a voyeurism of inflicted wounds and suffering, not on any tension created around possibilities of ultimate success or failure. Rather, moments of suspense occur when the hero is required to accomplish a minor manual task, usually with which he struggles (and often with wry self-deprecating comments on his lack of refined dexterity). The hero’s broader muscular abilities are contrasted with his localised manual inabilities in a gendering of the character where the former attributes are masculinised as naturally inherited, and the latter are feminised as culturally acquired. In its darker characterisations film frequently inverts the dexterous/ sinister dichotomy and ascribes to its most violent psychopathic personalities qualities of manual proficiency, fine motor skills, and deftness of the fingers and hands. The naming of television’s antihero Dexter in that series (2006–) mischievously points to this tendency. An interesting supplementary feature in the construction of the cinematic psychopath is that, as well as exhibiting significant manual skill, the character is excessively attentive to, aware of, or careful about, protecting or cleaning his hands. Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) is one of several useful illustrations of this. In the light of the director’s withholding the characters’ identities at the beginning of the film by focusing on their shoes for nearly three minutes, Hitchcock’s alteration to frame their handshake when introducing his principals emphasises the action. The awkward, peculiar manual interaction between Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) further attests to a sinister undercurrent in one or other personality, and Hitchcock will create suspense around the revelation of who that is. In a subsequent scene when Haines is talking to his mistress (Ruth Roman) on the phone as a train passes, he says of his wife ‘I say I could strangle her’. Hitchcock inserts a cross-fade transition to Antony’s hands with a marked shift in scene that intimates his psychopathological nature. In a close-up shot, Antony stretches and flexes his fingers into a strangling-like gesture. An older woman, who is revealed to be his mother (Marion Lorne), takes hold of his hands and comments: ‘I do wish you’d keep your hands quiet: you’re so restless lately’. The following exchange combines inferences of the man’s clandestine psychopathology as well as suggestions of his latent homosexuality and problematic Oedipal relationship with his mother. These are all played out through the director’s focus on the character’s hands: antony: I like them to look just right. mrs antony : Did I file them too short? antony : Oh no, Ma, they’re just fine, thanks.

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Shortly before Antony strangles Haines’ estranged wife Miriam (Kasey Rogers), he strikes a bell-weight game at a fun fair. When he does so, he looks at his wide-open hands and Hitchcock holds the moment in a medium shot for three seconds, an inordinately prolonged insertion that includes a shot during which he looks at Miriam across the fairground. In the wake of his murder, Antony playfully and tauntingly explains the ideal assassination to some older ladies at a social event. Once again, he holds his hands into the shot and with arrogant disregard for his disclosure he declares: I have the best way, and the best tools. Simple, silent, and quick. The silent part being the most important. Let me show you what I mean. You don’t mind if I borrow your neck for a moment, do you?

He reaches forward putting his hands around the neck of one of his aged female interlocutors. Mid-performance, he catches sight of Miriam’s sister, Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock) who reminds him of Miriam. In a trance he begins to strangle the older woman. His actions alarm onlookers who alert him and, as he recognises his involuntary aberration, he passes out. Strangers on a Train is not unique in the Hitchcock canon in respect of its visual concentration on the hands of his murdering antagonists. However, while many of the corporeally proximate assaults and modes of killing represented by the director are conducive to manual attention, it is rarely the case that their function serves characterisation to the extent that it does in this f ilm. One notable exception occurs in the closing moments of Psycho (1960) when, after an excessively detailed explanation of Norman Bates’ (Anthony Perkins) pathology by a psychiatrist, Hitchcock cuts to a medium shot of the convict in a prison cell. As a fly lands on the murderer’s hand, his narration (in his mother’s voice) explains: They’ll put him away now, as I should have years ago. He was always bad, and in the end he intended to tell them I killed those girls and that man as if I could do anything except sit and stare like one of his stuffed birds. They know I can’t even move a finger, and I won’t. I’ll sit here and be quiet, just in case they do suspect me. They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of person I am. [Close-up insert of a fly crawling on Bates’ hand] I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They’ll see. They’ll see, and they’ll know, and they’ll say: ‘Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly’.

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The depiction of the character’s expressing manual restraint in the wake of his murders is doubly haunting because the female voice-over is juxtaposed with the images of the male criminal. Nonetheless, the ironic representation of the psychopath’s obsession with, or control over, what his hands do is a recurring characteristic in the cinematic construction of the personality. Both of Jonathan Demme’s serial killers in The Silence of the Lambs manifest qualities of disturbing manual dexterity. Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) is an accomplished artist and surgeon, and his manual skills ultimately enable his escape. Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), the psychosexual killer being hunted by the FBI, also exercises precision of surgical expertise in the skinning of his female victims to construct a suit of women’s flesh. Demme’s close-up shots of Gumb’s hands as they stich patches of skin together reveal tattoos that attest to the character’s attention to that detail of his physical appearance. It’s perhaps no coincidence that in order to lure prospective victims into his abduction van, Gumb wears a plaster cast on his arm, the way Ted Bundy infamously did. The ostentatious performance of his manual disability obliquely dampens down his psychopathic threat as his refined capacities for dexterity are reduced. Focus on the obsessive manipulative activities of the criminally disturbed mind recur in both the original version of Cape Fear (1962) by director J. Lee Thompson, and in the characterisation of Max Cady (Robert De Niro) in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 remake. Scorsese notably designs the famous ‘Are you talkin’ to me’ scene from Taxi Driver (1976) by presenting Travis Bickle’s (De Niro, again) ungainly handling of his concealed firearm to denote his descent into insanity. A similar manual marking of burgeoning post-traumatic psychopathology haunts David Stephens in Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994) when, in the aftermath of his colluding in the dismemberment and disposal of a corpse, he turns his attention to protective measures that require construction and concealment as he takes refuge in the attic where he hides their stash of money. The manual proficiency of John Doe (Kevin Spacey) in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) is established in the credit sequence when the antagonist is seen constructing his diaries with meticulous details of stitching, splicing, cropping, and collage, and a profusion of hand-written notes in minuscule, painstaking font. As each of the seven deadly sins is used by Doe as a punishment to reprimand the perpetrator of the same depravity, his constructions of the scenes of castigation and the mechanisms of the slaughter display fastidious attention to detail. His obsessive long-term preparation and scheming indicates considerable manual labour in their execution. An important aspect of the motivating rationale behind John Doe’s logic of retribution – as he says, ‘turning each sin against the sinner’

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– is in how most of the self-administered sentences require manual implementation to set Doe’s systems of penalty into operation. The psychopath’s biblical prognostications and sermonising set up his retribution against the perpetrators with a fundamental attack on their hypocrisy, and he seeks his perverse moral justice by ensuring that the left hand comes to know what the right hand is doing. Mary Harron’s 2000 screen version of the Bret Easton Ellis novel American Psycho adheres to the core themes of its source material and fittingly establishes the physical (human) and institutional (financial) incorporations as metaphors for the psychopathic ‘personality’ of capitalism. The shallow and obnoxious cohorts of corporate ‘suits’ are mocked for their fetishistic interest in cosmetic details of etiquette, appearance, and professional performance, but the eponymous antagonist of the story Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) stands out because of his compulsive attention to self-presentation and physical preservation. We are immersed in his dubious point of view and world outlook by Harron, who presents Bateman’s self-adoration and obsession in his voice-over description of body, skin, and facial care, and of the various products required for their maintenance. All the while, the director’s revelation of Bateman’s psychopathic disposition is played out with lingering attention to his hands. The tormented maternal figure (Tilda Swinton) in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) is haunted by saturated blood-coloured symbolism that marks and splatters the décor of the film in several scenes, often staining her hands. Her attempts at washing them, to clean them of red food and paint, or to remove other crimson stains, are reminiscent of much of the imagery of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Ramsay presents the dangerous psychological demeanour of her psychopathic son (Ezra Miller) through the boy’s bizarre manual interaction with food. When Eva first visits Kevin in prison, Ramsay inserts a close-up shot of the teenager’s hand as he bites his fingernails and lines up the trimmings on the table. In other scenes, the focus on his hands relates to his playing with food – rolling bread into balls, making a sandwich with excessive jam spread onto it, crushing cereal pops – all of which connect the character with an inappropriate, abject displacement of food. Rather than being a nutritious healthy thing, it is represented as something to be played with – as is the case with the tomato fight at the beginning of the film – or excessively consumed. The repositioning of food from its conventional use, so that it becomes waste, disgusting, and abject, suggests a disruption of a wider natural order, and this is often metaphorically linked to the hands of the mentally disturbed young antagonist.

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Vocational Hands Affirmative representations of manual skills, talents, and the career of the protagonist often inform the construction of the personality type. The piano playing character is universal, and we have already seen cases in several films as generically wide-ranging as William Dieterle’s romantic thriller September Affair (1950), Bob Rafelson’s social-realist commentary Five Easy Pieces (1970), and Jane Campion’s costume drama The Piano (1993). An interesting European case with a tragic conclusion, which celebrates manual expertise, is Cold War (2018) by Polish film director Paweł Pawlikowski. The post-Second World War setting provides the context for the romantic interactions of classical singer Zula (Joanna Kulig) and musician Witkor (Tomasz Kot). As an accomplished pianist and conductor, the poignancy of Witkor’s arrest on grounds of espionage is exacerbated because during his years of imprisonment he is subjected to torture that permanently destroys his hands, leaving him incapable of producing and playing music. The irreparable damage is tantamount to a censorship of his method of intimate self-expression, and it is tragically revealed as a devastating blow that seals the demise – in the context of other events – of the couple’s relationship. Numerous instances of non-musical manual occupations define characters in general ways, but specific attention may fall on qualities of labour or career progression that add to the psychological complexity of protagonists. In Brian De Palma’s Scarface, the rise and fall of the protagonist is connoted at different moments as Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a Cuban immigrant to America, progresses through the crime world from dishwasher in a street food kiosk to competent machine-gun toting gang leader. Phantom Thread (2017) tells the story of Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day Lewis), a 1950s English fashion designer who director Paul Thomas Anderson draws with psychological complexity that is often sublimated into the couturier’s work. Especially noteworthy is Woodcock’s neurotic attention to the details in the manufacture of his designs as he meticulously scrutinises the minutiae of their finish. That he reifies his assistants, appreciating them as mere manual labourers, testifies to his inclination to see both his models and seamstresses only as objectified functionaries in his artistic endeavour. In one irritated outburst he abusively compels them to return to work shouting: ‘It’s no good just standing there: I need your hands!’ James Ivory’s 1993 filmed version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day tells the story of the ‘downstairs’ society of the servants of a wealthy estate owner as they interact with each other and the ‘upstairs’ aristocrats whom they attend. The Head Butler, Stevens (Anthony Hopkins) becomes

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romantically stirred by the newly arrived Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson) who has been hired as Chief Maid of the house. Stevens’ feelings for Kenton are repressed and timidly silent and, in the development of both principal characters, Ivory allows their relationship to evolve with gentle, nuanced, and unvoiced subtlety. The passivity of the male lead, which dramatically intensifies the poignancy of his inability to express his burgeoning feelings for Kenton, is often sublimated into his finicky attention to detail in his diurnal chores and vocational devotion. Stevens’ inarticulacy means his emotional worries are vented in silent gestures and manual activities or worked through the deportment of his hands. In one key scene, we discover the Head Butler alone in his room perusing a book. Kenton enters his private space, comments on the poor lighting, and asks what he is reading. With reserved, boy-like timidity, Stevens answers her question with elusive equivocation. His interlocutor presses him, intrigued to discover whether the literature he’s apparently trying to conceal is raunchy. Stevens shows fidelity to his master by asking rhetorically: ‘Do you think racy books are to be found in his Lordship’s shelves?’ He backs into a corner, awkwardly holding the book to his chest in one hand, with his other raised to his forehead, as Kenton encroaches playfully into his tight space teasing him and trying to prize the paperback from his fingers. Ivory cuts to a mid-close-up shot of the two characters and positions the camera at an intentionally deceptive angle from which it appears that Stevens’ raised hand is within centimetres of delicately touching Kenton’s face. The masterful placement of his camera allows Ivory to compress the complexity of the servant’s repression, his desperate desire to reach out to Kenton – physically, verbally, and emotionally – into one intensively held moment that is focused on the character’s hand. Another silent form of manual expression occurs in the cases of characters using sign language. Examples are not abundant, but many have appeared in important cinematic supporting roles. One such example is David (David Bower), the deaf and mute brother of principal character Charles (Hugh Grant) in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). While limited to side-line contributions for most of the film, David’s silence becomes a significant detail in the climactic sequence when Charles must vocalise his brother’s advice not to get married to his current betrothed. David’s warning provides a critical point of plot reversal as it is delivered to a congregation gathered for Charles’ wedding to the unsuitable fiancée Henrietta (Anna Chancellor). Ada, the voiceless protagonist of The Piano (1993), uses sign language to express herself. The lyrical choreography of her manual gestures complements her gifted piano playing which, in turn, supplements her silent communications with evocative emotional musical arrangements.

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Figures 5.2: Identification intensified with the silent characters in Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together (1956)

Figures 5.3: Characterisation through manual communication in Lorenza Mazzetti’s Together (1956)

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Campion innovatively creates a seamless continuity between the soundless and ‘voiced’ ways in which the character uses her hands to connect with other characters, and both Ada’s gesticulations and tunes encompass a range of emotional variations that encapsulate the character’s spirit and psychological disposition. This stylistic form of muted characterisation is central to Lorenza Mazzetti’s short film Together (1956), an experimental production that tells the story of the relationship between two deaf and dumb London-based dockers. As the characters interact in silent communication during several exchanges, Mazzetti judiciously positions her camera so that the viewer is placed in a position that frames the choreography of their manual communication (Figs 5.2 and 5.3). As with Campion’s drawing of Ada, the characters are revealed through nuances of manual gesture to which we are not always given subtitled access, requiring that we engage by interpretation of their purely visual performances. Mazzetti inverts standard expectations, where the absence of spoken words might be deemed a barrier to comprehension and offers the men’s vocal silence as an immediate and less restrictive mode of access to their innermost emotions and thoughts. Characterisation is enrichened and not disadvantaged by virtue of the director’s focus on their quiet animated manual gestures and expressions. Involuntary manual action has been instrumental in certain on-screen characterisations when associations are made between personalities’ brain injury, psychopathology, or compromised agency. The damage is frequently rendered through hands’ actions or immobility. In line with established cultural norms, characters who suffer from mental illness, breakdown, or injury, such as those in catatonic, obsessive, or schizophrenic states, are generally shown as dispossessed of manual aptitude or unable to coordinate their muscle or hand movements. Extreme forms of insanity and sexual pathology are evident in Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), Fritz Lang’s murdering paedophile in M (1931). The maniacal impulses of Peter Sellers’ eponymous crazed Nazi scientist in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) are comically exhibited by the involuntary gesturing of his wayward limb. Institutional representations of the insane characters who populate asylums in films as varied as Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967), Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975), Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984), 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), and Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999) are succinctly drawn by the contortions and postures of their hands and, early in his 1945 film Spellbound, Alfred Hitchcock plays with minor character revelation assuming the viewers’ understanding of the convention. When the director introduces Mary Carmichael (Rhonda

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Fleming) in the psychiatric institute we assume that she’s a nurse until she scratches the hand of the orderly in a crazed fit of pique. We immediately understand that Carmichael is a patient. Throughout the film Hitchcock references manual disorders to invoke characters’ pathological nature. One significant instance of this occurs in a night-time scene when John Ballantyne (Gregory Peck) goes to the study of Dr. Alexander Brulov (Michael Chekhov) with dangerous intentions. Hitchcock follows Ballantyne’s hand holding an open razor as he steps down the stairs to where Brulov is sitting. Later, Ballantyne’s post-traumatic psychotic condition is explained in relation to a hand injury and an accident in which he was severely burnt. Trauma-aggravated psychosis haunts the principal in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), in which Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is struggling with her childhood sexual abuse. Working as a manicurist, she is attempting vicariously to cure the memories of the horrific manual violence perpetrated against her. A return of the repressed images of that victimisation eventually overwhelms her with a literal and figurative invasion of her home. First, they occur with the appearance of gradually worsening cracks in the walls of her apartment and then in a climactic sequence when rows of horrific, repulsive hands and arms violently penetrate the corridor of her domestic space.

Characters and Labour The fascination by early film directors with corporeal flexibilities and frequent concentration on manual dexterity and elasticity, is no less prevalent in more contemporary cases. Even at those burgeoning stages of the new medium, characterisation was informed by recourse to hand activity and actions in humorous and playful ways. Referencing two interesting cases by Georges Méliès – Dislocation Mystérieuse (1901) and L’Impressioniste fin de sièce (1899) – Pasi Väliaho notes a recurring predilection for special effects involving manual performance. This quality of characterisation has something profound to say about the wider sociological conditions and contexts of the films’ production: While these films display agile and highly skilful technical gestures, they also present figures that are displaced, distorted and animated, under the influence of unknown forces. What characterizes these early films is a particular kind of indetermination concerning out-of-control bodies that have lost their definition and also a world that has lost its coordinates. (2010, 26)

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The fact that characters manifest corporeal detachment or dispossession of their manual agency is something that comments on their situation as reified, disenfranchised agents in a modern or modernised world (see Keil and McKenna 2018). Alienation from one’s environment – and even one’s personal situation – takes a profound ontological turn for characters who are presented as silently or submissively acquiescing in their existential condition. Persistent inaction, immobility, or the banal repetition of menial tasks can inform characterisation in fascinating examples where directors use the stillness or slightness of gesture, or the doing of tedious chores, to shift the viewer’s concentration towards their characters’ deeper introspection. Ohlsdorfer (János Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bók) in Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011) are typical of a slow cinema characterisation in which individuals’ agency has atrophied in a universal condition of inevitable demise. Tarr’s attention to the most banal of diurnal chores heightens the importance of insignificant actions for survival. A similar complexity of characterisation is central to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and Lenny Abrahamson’s 2007 f ilm Garage. As we have already seen, in both cases a visual distancing from their protagonists’ manual labour facilitates a temporal distention, with the rhythmic deceleration creating new spaces for the viewer’s engagement with the characters and their self-reflection. The drawing out of time given to the protagonists’ introspection, in the case of Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig) and Josie (Pat Shortt), amplif ies their existential condition and their ontological separation from their environments. Neither Jeanne nor Josie – despite the triviality of their manual accomplishments – is rendered disempowered or without agency. After prolonged scenes of minimal manual activity this quality becomes instrumental as the narratives unfold towards their climactic moments when what Jeanne and Josie f inally do takes on enormous significance. Thus, their relative stillness for the greater part of the narratives does not diminish the characters’ integrity or suggest that they might be acting in ‘bad faith’. That dishonourable quality is attributed by Jean-Paul Sartre to individuals who purposefully avoid acting where better knowledge informs them that they have a responsibility to take a decision and pursue its implementation. Interestingly, in his explanation of how a person might disregard the complete freedom offered by life’s existential condition, Sartre explains denial of the moral imperative towards putting decision into action and uses the hand as the site of deferral. Offering an example of a woman who has agreed to meet a date at a bar, he describes the key moment when the male counterpart moves to express romantic desire:

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But then suppose he takes her hand. This act of her companion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave her hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next; the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it. (1984, 55–56)

Concluding his section from Being and Nothingness on the irresponsibility of deferring the deterministic right and duty to act in good faith, Sartre returns to the immobile, voluntarily disempowered hand of the individual: And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion – neither consenting nor resisting – a thing. (1984, 56)

While the manual activities of the central characters of Jeanne Dielman and Garage are detached from cause-and-effect linear plot progression, and the cinematic attention on the banality of their hands’ daily routines and chores serves to magnify their triviality rather than their meaning, the diurnal procedures are aligned with the characterisation in both films. Jeanne and Josie unfold as quiet and complex personalities, at odds with their respective environments, and tragically aware of their social alienation and status as pariahs. The inconsequentiality of their activities, over which the directors’ cameras linger with respectful distance, serves to intensify the critical actions that each eventually carries out. Retrospectively, there is no question of either one’s having acted in bad faith as the relative refinement and restraint of their earlier handiwork is seen to be the means of profound introspection, personal meditation, and contemplation of the broader circumstances in which they find themselves. The indolent characters of the teen comedy Idle Hands are established in direct contrast to this. Their manual inactivity is indicative of a general sloth and lethargy, and their bad faith and Sartrian immorality is suitably punished. Momentary boredom and idleness mark the condition in which we discover Vittoria (Monica Vitti) at the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1962). In the opening sequence, her ennui is displayed through the meaningless, haphazard engagements of her hands as they interact with random objects in her apartment. Antonioni lets his camera linger on these as she moves an ashtray and an ornament around aimlessly. In contrast to

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Figure 5.4: The lovers’ manual interactions in L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)

Vittoria’s lethargy, a later scene reveals the activities of the stock exchange energised by a frenetic waving of raised arms and hands. The optimism that we might infer from the spirited interactions of the lovers when Vittoria spends time with Piero (Alain Delon) is presented by Antonioni in the playful sensuality of their hand games (Fig. 5.4). The director frames the lovers’ antics emphasising their manual interactions – grabbing, touching, feeling, and letting go – but the scenes of the capitalist marketplace, to which Piero is ideologically connected, foreshadow their ultimate incompatibility and the demise of their relationship.

Manual Details: Emotions and Eccentricities As we have seen, literary moments of poignancy in character development or revelation are not uncommon and, in several instances, these are translated directly to the screen in adaptations of the original works. Jack Conway’s 1935 version of A Tale of Two Cities preserves the reference to the terrified ‘poor little seamstress’ (Isabel Jewell) who asks that the heroic Sydney Carton (Ronald Colman) hold her hand on the way to her execution: ‘When we go to the guillotine, will you let me take your hand? It will give me courage too’. George Seaton’s remake of the Clifford Odets play The Country Girl retains an important manual reference. When Frank Elgin (Bing Crosby) – a former star performer, but now an alcoholic – describes the difficulties of celebrity, he uses the metaphor with tragic emphasis on his self-inflicted decline:

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You don’t know what it’s like to stand out there on that stage all alone, with the whole show on your shoulders. If I’m no good, the show’s no good. I’ve got the future of one hundred people in my hand… This hand. This hand!

Occasionally characters’ sexual impulses or restraint are played out by reference to their hands; sometimes by showing their withholding temptation, or through a comment by another about their inability to control carnal urges. In the filmed adaptation of A.I. Bezzerides’ novel They Drive by Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940), the Fabrini brothers Joe (George Raft) and Paul (Humphrey Bogart) are truck drivers, the latter of whom loses his right arm in an accident. Commenting on overly zealous romantic advances of Barney (George Lloyd), Cassie Hartley (Ann Sheridan) tells Joe: cassie: Barney had about twelve hands, and I didn’t like any of ‘em. joe: Oh, Barney’s all right. cassie : Yeah? You didn’t have to pass him a hundred times a day. It was like tangling with an octopus.

In Mike Nichols’ 1966 version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George (Richard Burton) chastises Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) for the attention that she’s showing to Nick (George Segal). As the irritated husband slaps ‘her moving hand with vehemence’, his reproach nods towards Martha’s feline flirtatiousness: ‘Don’t you touch me. You keep your paws clean for the undergraduates’. William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights reproduces the Brontë scene in which Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier) hits Cathy (Merle Oberon) and says the following: ‘That’s all I’ve become to you – a pair of dirty hands. Well, have them then. Have them where they belong. It doesn’t hurt to strike you’. Similar sexual tension occurs in Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964) when Alexis Zorba (Anthony Quinn) urges Basil (Alan Bates) to make amorous advances on Widow (Irene Papas): ‘Boss, why did God give you hands? To grab. Well, grab!’ For physical sublimation of desire Darian Leader points to an early scene in Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973). As a film that addresses themes of manually designed deception, through the trickery of the conjuror’s hands and the counterfeiting of artistic masterpieces, Welles’ construction of the scene may be apposite. A group of male onlookers is shown ogling a pretty Croatian actress who steps past them along an Italian street. At the end of the scene, the director inserts a montage sequence of their gesturing hands. Leader explains how Welles has formulated the segment:

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we first see the visual reactions of several Italian men to Oja Kodar’s provocative stride down a busy street in Rome and then a close-up of their hands: nervous, jittery and contorted. (2016, 21)

For a complex consideration of characterisation, V.F. Perkins has provided a useful analysis of a key scene from Douglas Sirk’s 1953 melodrama All I Desire, in which Naomi Murdoch (Barbara Stanwyck) returns unexpected to her forsaken home and family, and seeks to gain access by reaching for a key once hidden outside the front door. Perkins considers Sirk’s positioning of the camera and its movements as instrumental aesthetic devices in revealing the troubled condition of the character. As Naomi dangles the key ‘at a distance from herself’ marking her hesitation over executing her plan to return, the complexity of the connotations inscribed in the image encapsulates her psychological state: The momentary oddity of the gesture gives way to an understanding grounded in our knowledge of what privacy, security and routine are, and what memories may be. The arc of our comprehension is different from the shape of Naomi’s expression but it enables the moment’s particular mix of observation and feeling. (2005, 30–31)

As the camera tilts to keep the essential information within the frame, Perkins notes that embedded in its movement is a hesitation; one carefully designed by the director in keeping with Naomi’s tentative action: The initial set-up was chosen so as either to allow the hand to go out of shot or to demand the reframing. Sirk made a rhetorical choice that gives a precisely graded emphasis to Naomi’s reaching. (ibidem)

Many moments of characterisation involve interaction between the individual’s hands and significant objects. Items may be charged with meaning in a dialogical way because of the hand/object or object/hand interface. Emil Jannings’ performance in The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930) economically externalises the repressed state of Professor Immanuel Rath by the neurotic and fastidious ritualistic handling of his handkerchief. In Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson’s original Scarface from 1932, Guino Rinaldo (George Raft) is seen repeatedly flipping a coin. Known for his attention to manual details in their contribution to characterisation, Hawks encouraged Raft’s hand gestures as a matter of course, but the detail connotes the volatility of the gangster’s lifestyle. Like the coin toss game played by

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the psychopathic Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007), the taunting irreverence by the killer towards the inviolability of human life is reduced to a mere game of chance, over which one has no control. Fate, destiny, and fortune are condensed into the bright red apple that Dave the Dude (Glenn Ford) throws and catches in his hand in Frank Capra’s Pocketful of Miracles (1961). As she gives him the fruit early in the film, Apple Annie (Bette Davis) anoints the objet fetiche with her benevolent blessing: ‘Here’s luck for you!’ The rugged macho exterior of failed boxed Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), is betrayed by his concealed softer side that comes to the fore in scenes where he interacts with his love interest Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint). This latent quality becomes manifest with a delicacy that communicates a profound struggle faced by the character – between legitimate dock worker and mob gang member – when in one scene he picks up a white glove that Edie has inadvertently dropped while walking and talking with him. As their dialogue continues, he takes the item gently handling it before he stretches it onto his own hand, making a fist. Darker and disturbing features of character revelation occur in fleeting moments that may contribute to psychological deepening. In his film Touch of Evil (1958), Orson Welles’ bulky and threatening Hank Quinlan takes a delicate bird’s egg from a windowsill nest and, when peeved by a comment by his interlocutor Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston), the frustrated Police Captain squashes it between his chubby fingers. Henry Hathaway’s 1969 version of True Grit adheres to the honourable old western code of not shooting an unarmed man. In order to take a shot at the weaponless antagonist Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall), bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) orders him to get his gun ready for a showdown. Angered by Pepper’s refusal to come into custody on a charge of murder, Cogburn commands: ‘Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!’ A common attribute in the director’s construction and the viewer’s recognition of the neurotically perverse personality can be presented by an association established with a somewhat unusual object (or a recognisable one used weirdly) that is fingered with eccentric manual movements. The idiosyncrasy may work towards a plot revelation or reversal and, as a textbook example, Alfred Hitchcock develops his murdering psycho-sexual deviant Robert Rusk (Barry Foster) in Frenzy (1972) with this trait. The director frames Rusk occasionally picking his teeth with his lapel pin, before his psychopathology is manifest. During one of his sexually motivated attacks, Rusk’s victim manages to pull the small badge from his jacket so that it remains wedged between her fingers, frozen by rigor mortis. Carol Brightman contemplates the importance

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of gesturing hands – in the instances here, as they interact with small objects – as essential facets that give nuance to an on-screen personality: A character in this case doesn’t interact; he does not develop in time – but in space. His being expands, gesture by gesture, until by the end he has revealed himself within the configuration of objects (including the human) into which he is thrown. (1975, 241)

Gabor Csepregi borrows the term ‘intelligent handling’ from Paul Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature (1966) when he proposes: The structure of our movements is variable according to the characteristics of the circumstances, especially when we handle familiar objects such as a hammer or a lighter. Unlike some devices that call for rigid, stereotyped gestures, the objects occupying our living quarters may suggest new ways of using them; they demand ‘intelligent handling’. (2006, 123)

This manual aptitude can only be evaluated and represented by interface between the character and the external item. At the point of tactile connection, the hand becomes energised by the abundance of knowledge detail on the touched or felt object. For Lesley Stern this process induces an intellectual response akin to Sigmund Freud’s charged and information-compressed Cathexis. Stern explains how the term refers to the investment of energy in some kind of material. Most commonly in a Freudian model, it is perceptions and memory traces that get charged with a certain quality of mental energy. (2008, 198)

Complexities of characterisation and of individuals’ interactions with elements of the story world occur when their hands bear distinct qualities. In The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky narrates the backstory of servant Grigory whose wife gives birth to a six-fingered infant that dies within weeks of its birth. The manual abnormality introduces a haunting element to the tale; however, the deformity is offered not as a threatening quality, but one connected with benignity and innocent. The scene is not reproduced in Richard Brooks’ 1958 screen adaptation, but the association informs the psychology of the aged Grigory (Edgar Stehli). With a few exceptions – one notable case is the antagonist of The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993) – characters who are missing arms and hands tend to be benevolent and unthreatening. The degree to which the details of the dismemberment are

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represented on screen as a part of the diegesis has noteworthy significance for the subsequent construction of the bereft character. A tragic truck accident in They Drive by Night results in Paul Fabrini’s arm amputation. While director Alfredo Zacarías presents his victimised dead without left hands in Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1980), a Satanic curse, and not the amputees, is shown to be the actual malign force. The amicable street trader’s assistant, Lucien (Jamel Debbouze), is the one-armed ally of the female protagonist of Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001), who occasionally provides a morally sympathetic point of view. The violent representation of manual injuries and deformities may provide moments of plot tension or visceral horror (Oliver Stone’s amputation scene in The Hand is a good example of the latter), but they are often used for the revelation and conf irmation of a character’s identity or some other latent personality quality. A key moment in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden (1955) involves Kate’s (Jo Van Fleet) arthritic hands providing a clue of her identity to Carl Trask (James Dean). Steven Spielberg firstly uses the hand injury sustained by Nazi commander Toht (Ronald Lacey) in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) as a moment of cartoonish retribution and, subsequently, when he holds up his scarred palm, as confirmation of who he is. Rob Reiner uses the same narrative device for character identif ication in The Princess Bride (1987) when the evil Count Rugen (Christopher Guest) is shown to have six fingers on one hand and, in one of the more dramatic character revelations in cinema, in a succinct and subtle alteration in his posture and the positioning of his fingers, Roger ‘Verbal’ Kint (Kevin Spacey) confirms the unreliability of his first-person narration in the closing seconds of Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995). That a villainous pathology is associated with manual abnormalities is in keeping with long-established traditions, which Farah Karim-Cooper has traced to supernatural phenomena and the notion of therapeutic capacities attributed to hands: Ugliness and deformity were associated with humankind’s fallen state in Christian doctrine. Witchcraft treatises demonstrate a fear of hands time and again. John Cotta’s The Triall of Witchcraft [sic] tries to dispel the myth that witches had healing powers in their touch, arguing that only God, not the devil, can heal through human hands. (2016, 63)

To confirm the character’s artificiality in James Cameron’s Terminator 2 (1991), the director includes a signif icant moment at which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg demonstrates

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to a couple of disbelieving humans that he is indeed a monstrous future machine and not what he appears to be, a muscular human, […] by taking a knife and cutting the skin from his right hand, revealing the metallic robot-skeleton beneath. (Roberts 2009, 65)

The logical association between the physique of a character and his or her hands is given visual emphasis at key moments in several films when the filmmaker wants to attribute significance to that quality. The manual strength of the principal characters – usually those who are in a position of servitude or have upwardly mobile aspirations – is often demonstrated in scenes where the male holds the face or hands of a female counterpart, with the position of his hands accentuating their size and power. Instances of this occur in films as diverse as The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy, 1933), Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960), A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), and the ‘angry young men’ films Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), and This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963). Occasionally, the visual framing of hands is underlined by a conversational reference to the same, and the comment adds depth to a character’s psychology. In a drunken and jealous rage Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) violently threatens Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) in Victor Fleming’s Gone With the Wind (1939), menacingly warning her: Observe my hands, my dear. I could tear you to pieces with them, and I’d do it if it would take Ashley out of your mind forever. But it wouldn’t, so I’ll remove him from your mind forever this way. I’ll put my hands so – one on each side of your head – and I’ll smash your skull between them like a walnut.

Contrastingly, at another point in Fleming’s film, Suellen O’Hara (Evelyn Keyes) mournfully bemoans her lot in life: ‘Look at my hands. Mother always said you could always tell a lady by her hands’. In John Cromwell’s 1934 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, artist Philip Carey (Leslie Howard) is urged: ‘Take your courage in both your hands and make something of your life’, and later as he completes a drawing of Mildred (Bette Davis), a patron in the restaurant in which she’s serving is heard to say, as he takes her hand in his: ‘That is a nice little hand’. Manual dimensions are invoked lyrically in Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975) when Marlowe (Robert Mitchum) describes the size of the huge hand of his large client Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran), a former convict who has employed him to find his night-club dancer girlfriend. With the resonance

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of typical film noir dialogue, Marlowe pithily explains: ‘A hand I could have sat in took hold of my shoulder’. Most of the concentration on the hands of Vernon Paris (James Noah) in Newton Arnold’s 1962 remake of The Hands of Orlac – titled Hands of a Stranger – relates to the character’s talent as a pianist. In the aftermath of his accident and the surgical amputation and replacement of his damaged limbs with those of a murderer, emphasis is given to the extraordinary size of his prostheses. In one scene, Vernon listens to the boy Skeet Wilder (Barry Gordon) practicing. Following a brief recital, the youth encourages him to play: First you gotta take your gloves off! [Vernon does so reluctantly] Gee mister, you got strong hands!

Vernon hammers the keyboard awkwardly with large, spread fingers and Skeet tells him that he evidently can’t play. Furious at the youngster’s candid criticism Vernon grabs Skeet’s hands and squashes them. The quality of manual strength is not ordinarily attributed to superheroes and Efi Giannopoulou has explained: actions that we can only do through our hands, they can do without using their hands. For example, they can move objects by their minds and without touching them. However, when they need more power their hands indicate the object and outline its direction. They move it without touching it but the hand is responsible for the movement. (2021, 2)

Magical manual powers and agency are granted to personalities of a modest disposition and, whether benevolent or malevolent, the supernatural capacity usually informs the characterisation of witches and wizards, with an occasional mortal endowed with the mystical skill. Stanley Kubrick’s Danny (Danny Lloyd) in The Shining (1980) mediates his portentous talent for imagining past and future events by conversing with ‘Tony’, the ‘little boy’ who speaks through his finger; and Elsa in Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee’s animated feature film Frozen (2013) is a Princess who possesses a Midas-like touch that allows her to manipulate ice and snow.

Concealing and Revealing Characters Leo Braudy’s claim that ‘films are obsessed by the human face’ (1976, 187) finds its most fetishistic expression, if not uniquely, then at least ardently, in

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Roland Barthes’ 1972 essay ‘The Face of Garbo’ (2000, 56–57). This enthrallment by, or even obsession with, the human visage on screen is exaggerated when it comes to the star performer. The fine-tuned industry of celebrity is at the heart of much of mainstream cinema’s consumerism and, among other commentators, Richard Dyer has explained how propaganda around f ilm marketing and commodif ication rests on the management of the transcendental identity of certain personalities. Central to the promotion of the film experience is the modulation of audience gratification. Whether such desire is motivated by epistemophilia or a prurient voyeurism (see Stam et al., 1999, 124–128), within the scopic regime of the cinema it is inherently bound to the postponement or withholding of information provision. When this mechanism is connected to forms of ‘conspicuous consumption’ or the ‘idols of consumption’ that Richard Dyer has identified at the heart of the mainstream star system (2002, 38–42), it is easy to explain the rationale behind delaying the first narrative appearance of the celebrity. Deferral of the on-screen arrival of the star actor, when charged by intertextual referencing of the celebrity persona, becomes a standard way of intensifying pleasure for audiences. The delaying of gratification can be intensified by the repeated mentioning of the character’s name; something done to increase the mystery around bar owner Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). However, immediately before the moment at which the protagonist is revealed, the director can tantalisingly stall the introduction by lingering on the hand or hands of the star. This technique can add useful information about the character and, in the case of the Casablanca hero, a shot of Rick signing a cheque is followed by one in which we see him playing chess. With visual compression Curtiz succinctly communicates the identity of whom we are about to see. At the same time the game in which he is engaged resonates with the Second World War conflict providing the backdrop of the film’s action, and it marks Rick as a capable strategist; an important personality trait for the story. That this particular use of the hand was a common feature of Classical Hollywood cinema is illustrated in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, itself an homage to the cliff-hanger, action-adventure films of that period. Before Indiana Jones is revealed, and Harrison Ford steps from the shade into a stream of light on a musical cue underscoring his importance, Spielberg displays the hero’s manual dexterity with his bullwhip. The director repeats the practice the following year in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), albeit for different reasons. With the intention of creating suspense around the identity and appearance of the alien, Spielberg focuses on the hands and arms of the extra-terrestrial visitors

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in the opening sequence of the film as they peacefully collect specimens of earthly vegetation. Just enough backlighting on their arms and hands allows us to discern the silhouette of the creatures and confirms the extent of their otherworldliness and gentle disposition. Lewis Milestone uses the device ingeniously in his 1932 film Rain, when he presents Joan Crawford’s character, prostitute Sadie Thompson, for the first time. Having introduced Mrs. Macphail (Kendall Lee) and Mrs. Davidson (Beulah Bondi) by close-up framing of their gloved hands as they remove passports and visa cards for a custom official, the propriety of their puritanical characters establishes and heightens the contrast with Thompson. Moments after the introduction of the staid ladies and their husbands, four brief insert shots dramatise Thompson’s diegetic entrance: the first of her right hand, the second of her left, and the final two of her right and left feet. Each of the extremities is placed against the door frame in which she makes her appearance, so that even without the presentation of her whole body the director tersely connotes the posture of the call girl; implying that her limbs are stretched to the border of the entrance. In contrast to the covered hands of the society women already shown, Thompson’s are bare and adorned with extravagant jewellery, with an ornamented excess befitting her vocation. The editing and rhythm of the sequence are fast so that when Thompson appears, cigarette dangling from her darkly coloured lips, her visual introduction is manifestly indicative of her potency and disruptive agency within the narrative. Even when the postponement of a character’s entrance is not related to the celebrity ‘revelation’, a delay in the on-screen arrival of the individual can serve important purposes in disclosing elements of psychology. Iranian director Mania Akbari uses the device effectively in her 2011 film One 2 One. Setting up the significant sequence with a measured pacing that contrasts dramatically with Milestone’s introduction of Crawford in Rain, Akbari withholds the visual appearance of her protagonist Ava (Neda Amiri), an Iranian woman who has been tragically facially disfigured. In keeping with the story’s exploration of how concepts and expectations around female beauty become oppressive societal forces, Akbari uses a prolonged establishing medium shot of characters on a bench, but for much of the scene we only see Ava’s hand occasionally entering from the left side before she finally comes into the framed mise en scène. In her representation of Ava’s face, at different moments Akbari uses camera angles, lighting, and a bandage as veiling devices. These allow the director to interrogate conventional attitudes towards feminine appearance as something that must be liberated from narrow-minded understandings and values. The director’s use of Ava’s

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hand – even as she engages other individuals in conversation – defers her full appearance, and the camera avoids complicity in the conventional regimes of scopic empowerment which objectify and demean its female participants for a predominantly masculine ‘visual pleasure’ (Mulvey, 1975). In concluding it is worth mentioning instances in which the detached, independently animated hand functions as a complete character. In most cases, the plot provides information in relation to the owner of the limb, from whom it has been separated in a terrible accident. Tonally these films are haunted by supernatural forces that possess the severed extremity and send it on a vengeful or murderous rampage. Generic horrors already discussed like Herbert Strock’s 1963 picture The Crawling Hand, the B-movie Demonoid: Messenger of Death, and The Hand fall into this category. Comedic exceptions exist, however, and as we have seen in both The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991) and Idle Hands, the autonomous creature provides appropriate antics in light-hearted playful interactions with other individuals. Personification of the hand in this way introduces interesting questions around the ways in which characterisation is discussed and constructed, as normal definitional attributes of psychological depth, interiority, rounded development, physicality, and identification must be suspended. The comedy of the two latter instances testifies to the requirement to re-evaluate the typical processes for assessing characterisation. Nevertheless, the same comedic quality goes some way to indicating how these ‘identities’ work on screen. Rather than establish the self-governing, animated hands as three-dimensional replicants of normative, complex personality types, much of the humour of their performances is generated because of the gap between their resemblance to regular personalities and their ostensible difference from them. As they invoke recognition and acceptance through their anthropomorphic mimicry, the hands’ relative failure in this endeavour ultimately provides comedic responses. Christopher Hart is the hand actor in both The Addams Family (as ‘Thing’) and Idle Hands, and his performances are designed so that facial reactions, gestures of the arms, and movements of the legs are compressed onto the palm and five fingers. Emotions of elation, surprise, fear, suspicion, and sorrow are rendered by postures and positions of the splayed or gathered fingers and thumb, and these are accentuated by musical cues and Foley effects that accompany its actions in the same way they would underscore the reactions and activities of regular characters. Jérémy Clapin’s 2019 animated feature-length film I Lost My Body is an interesting, and perhaps unique, counterpoint to the cases above in that the story uses the protagonist’s detached hand for neither horrific nor comedic purposes, but allows the autonomous limb fully developed psychological

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interiority. The viewer’s incredulity is kept at bay, despite representations of such complexity in the hand’s characterisation as possessing a full range of feelings, motivations, regrets, and moral purpose. This is due in some degree to the traditional cartoon aesthetics of the film. As the limb comes to life and embarks on a perilous journey across Paris in search of its former owner, its struggles and triumphs are played out in detail and deferentially as one of two interwoven plots. The tale of the detached and solitary hand as it aspires to reconnect with its lost proprietor Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Farris) mirrors Naoufel’s personal struggle to connect romantically with Gabrielle (voiced by Victoire Du Bois), a young woman who has become the object of his attention. The emotional sympathies invoked by the human venture are transferred onto those of Naoufel’s detached hand with subtle and complex intercutting, and a paralleling of both characters’ desire for (re) connection with another. When David McNeill offers a lucid and nuanced study of the intricacy of hand gesturing in the broader contexts of social communication and interrelations, he might have been writing about the construction of Clapin’s character: The gesture is a symbol in that it represents something other than itself – the hand is not a hand but a character, the movement is not a hand in motion but the character in motion, the space is not the physical space of the narrator but a narrative space, the wiggling fingers are not fingers but running feet. The gesture is thus a symbol, but the symbol is of a fundamentally different type from the symbols of speech. (1992, 20)

Clapin modulates the performed features of his two-dimensional hand so that meaning is deferred and decentred from the limb in this way. If a spectator is devoted to the character’s emotional or physical challenges, it is because of a vicarious empathy in which recognition of the felt suffering or the bodily ordeal, rather than identification with the hand, facilitates and invites investment. Debates and questions around the paradox of fiction are predicated upon this distinction as they ask: why do audiences respond to ostensibly fictional people and events as if they were real, and are there any grounds for supposing that the emotional reactions by viewers are themselves fictitious? The complexity of the ‘paradox of fiction’ discussion will ensure its endurance as it has informed spirited and erudite contributions in the past (from the final decade of the last century alone see Carroll 1990; Currie 1990; Säätelä 1994; Turvey 1997; and Joyce 2000). However, it may be useful for one of its proponents or detractors to substitute, at some point in the future, a human being with a characterised hand in order to

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evaluate the provenance, authenticity, coherence, and degree of emotional responses by consumers of fictions.

Works Referenced Barthes, Roland. 2000. Mythologies. London: Vintage, Random House. Bijaoui, Rémy. 2011. Lacenaire, poète assassin. Paris: Imago. Braudy, Leo. 1976. The World in a Frame. New York: Anchor Press; Doubleday. Camus, Albert. 1998. L’étranger. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. Camus, Albert. 2020. Reflections on the Guillotine. Translated by Arthur Koestler. London: Penguin Books, Random House. Cohan, Steven and Ina Rae Hark (eds.). 1996. Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Conchon, Georges. 1990. Lacenaire: un film de Francis Girod. Éditions du Seuil. Csepregi, Gabor. 2006. The Clever Body. Calgary: The University of Calgary Press. De Maupassant, Guy. 2001. Les Conte du jour et de la nuit. Paris: Maxi-Livres. De Quincey, Thomas. 2015. On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. London: Penguin Classics. Dickens, Charles. 1993. A Tale of Two Cities. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1996. The Idiot. Translated by Constance Garnett. London: Wordsworth Classics. Dyer, Richard. 2002. Stars. London: BFI Publishing. Flaubert, Gustave. 2001. Madame Bovary. Translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (1886). London: Wordsworth Classics. Foucault, Michel. 1986. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Middlesex: Penguin Books. Gautier, Théophile. 1981. Émaux et Camées. Paris: Poésie/Gallimard. Gibbs, John and Douglas Pye (eds.). 2005. Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Jeffords, Susan. 1993. Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Karim-Cooper, Farah. 2016. The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. New York, London: Bloomsbury. Kiel, Charlie and Denise McKenna. 2018. ‘Risky Business: The Early Film Actor and Discourses of Danger’. In Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form, edited by Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson and Valentine Robert, 119–133. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Lacenaire, Pierre François. 1952. Mémoires de Lacenaire. Translated by Philip John Stead. London: Staples Press.

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Leader, Darian. 2016. Hands: What We Do with Them – and Why. United Kingdom: Penguin, Random House. McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Metz, Christian. 1977. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Translated by Celie Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Screen 16(3) (Autumn), 6–18. Perkins, V.F. 2005. ‘Where is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction’. In Gibbs and Pye, 16–41. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Plakins Thornton, Tamara. 1997. ‘Handwriting as an Act of Self-Definition’. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, August. Potts, Neill. 2005. ‘Character Interiority: Space, Point of View and Performance in Hitchcock’s Vertigo’. In Gibbs and Pye, 85–97. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Proust, Marcel. 2003. In Search of Lost Time: Volume 2, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Translated by James Grieve. London: Penguin Books. Ricoeur, Paul. 1966. Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. Translated by Erazim V. Kohák. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Roberts, Adam. 2009. ‘Is SF Handwritten?’ In James Holden (guest editor) Writing Technologies, 55–69. Vol. 2.2. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1984. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen & Co. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. 1999. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge. Stern, Lesley. 2008. ‘Ghosting: The Performance and Migration of Cinematic Gesture, Focusing on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women’. In Migrations of Gesture, edited by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness, 185–213. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Väliaho, Pasi. 2010. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema Circa 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.



Concluding Case Study – Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) Abstract This chapter uses Steven Spielberg’s 1975 feature film blockbuster Jaws as a case study to consider f ive categorical ways (theme, symbolism, style, narration, and characterisation) to approach the hand on screen. By analysing it from those different perspectives the section shows how an application of hand-centric evaluations can shed light on cinematic elements that might otherwise remain hidden. At the same time, this closing piece should expose the problematic tautological nature of any taxonomy of hands: discrete examples of how the hand is working in a single film justify categorical distinctions, however the overlapping of elements of theme, symbolism, style, narration, and characterisation testifies to the dialectical interconnectedness of manual imagery, framing, referencing, and use for a range of cinematic objectives. Key Words: Manual themes; hands and symbolism; aesthetics of hands; hands and narration; characterisation and hands

Having drawn the categorical lines between the various uses of the screened hand, I hope it might be helpful to offer a brief analytical example of how these can be applied to a single film. This concluding approach should reveal two methodological qualities at the heart of the whole project. Firstly, the method can be tested in its usefulness for exploring how cinematic texts are working – thematically, with specific symbolic references, stylistically, and in the construction of narrative and character – and concentration on the hand should ideally expose elements of these facets that might otherwise have been less apparent. Secondly – and perhaps in contravention of any proposal that might suggest a neat and hermetically clear-cut taxonomy – consideration of the five strands within one film should reveal areas of conceptual overlapping, blurring, and dialogical interfacing. In this respect

Monahan, B., Hands on Film: Actants, Aesthetics, Affects. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2022 doi: 10.5117/9789463727716_conc

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Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws is a useful model. At different instances in the film, hands are visually and/or aurally framed, in images and/or dialogue, as important components of the construction of meaning, affect, and pleasure for the spectator. I will take each of these in the order in which I set out the preceding chapters. Of the core themes apparent in the film those that come to mind directly include: man’s fight with, and subjugation of, nature; the social position of masculinity as identified and performed; the conflict between human welfare and the profit motivations of capitalism; and the relative benefits of formal (academic) learning over lived experience (and vice versa). Another important core theme is not as immediately evident in the film as those listed here, but it comes to the fore quite readily when approached from the perspective of framed hands. In a key scene before the protagonists embark on their hunt for the shark, the marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Long Island Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) visit the hardboiled seafarer Quint (Robert Shaw). Personified as a typical chip-on-his-shoulder ‘tough guy’, the older fisherman Quint flagrantly displays an aversion towards Hooper, the younger, ambitious, and formally trained expert. Testing Hooper’s knowledge and seeking to intimidate him, Quint aggressively throws him a length of rope, challenging Hooper to tie a sheep shank knot. Despite criticism from the hardened skipper, which explicitly seeks to undermine Hooper’s middle-class position, theoretical education, and apparent lack of real-life experience, the young academic proficiently produces the knot, claiming ‘You didn’t say how short you wanted it’, before he flings the rope back to Quint. Peeved by Hooper’s haughtiness and his success in accomplishing the task, Quint approaches him confrontationally: quint: Gimme your hands. Dog f ish? When you got a f ivethousand-dollar net, you got two thousand dollars’ worth of fish in it, and along comes mister whitey, by the time he’s finished with that net it looks like a kiddies’ scissor class has cut it up for a paper doll. You got city hands, Mr. Hooper. You’ve been countin’ money all your life. hooper: All right, all right. Hey. I don’t need this. I don’t need this working-class hero crap.

During a lighter instance of exchange later in the film, a related thematic strand is taken up when characters’ hands become momentary symbolic tools in their comical undermining of Quint’s performance of rugged, hardbitten masculinity. Chief Brody complains as he shovels malodorous fish bait

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into the water, as Quint is imposingly seated behind a rod drinking from a can of beer. Characteristically performing his aggressive, hard masculinity, he narrates tales of bravado all the while mocking the inexperience of his fellow shark-hunters. Having downed the contents of his can, he stares at Hooper and crushes it menacingly. In silent mockery of the old skipper’s machismo, Hooper swigs from the contents of a plastic cup and squeezes it in the same way with an ironic gesture towards Quint. Here the hands of both men become the symbolic points of acting out their respective masculinities; one bluntly trying to impress and intimidate by inferring his strength and hardiness, and the other by ludicrously undermining the performance. The moment mirrors the thematic questions of class consciousness and gendered play that have already been introduced, but here attention on the manual gestures is fronted as connotative of male stamina, resilience, and hard living and the comical ridiculing of the same qualities. From a stylistic point of view, Jaws is replete with injured, damaged, and severed hands that contribute to a general aesthetics of horror and abject revulsion that permeate the whole film. One noteworthy case that works somewhat differently tonally to the others occurs when Spielberg introduces the hardy seaman Quint. A gathering of residents and business folk has been convened to address Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), Chief Brody, and some other officials, and to seek clarification on whether they are intending to suspend tourist activities on Amity Island in the wake of the first shark attack. As the officers equivocate on the point, the crowd becomes noisily agitated in protest and their clamour grows in volume even as Vaughn tries to appease them. Their commotion is suddenly interrupted by the high-pitched scratching of fingernails on a blackboard at the back of the room. Spielberg inserts a close-up shot of the perpetrating hand and follows its fingers as they scrape the surface of the board, on which we see a crudely chalk-drawn shark. Following a series of reaction shots from the locals, covering their ears in discomfort at the sound, the director returns to the source of the annoyance. Quint sits with a conceited pose, chewing a cracker, before he offers his warning about their ignorance on the magnitude of the threat facing them. With stylistic economy, Spielberg introduces the film’s anti-hero, and marks him distinctly from the throng with a disturbing aesthetic gesture that interrupts the proceedings in the same way that the character will intervene into the film’s story. Manual deftness and dexterity inform much of the development of the narrative as the three principal characters are tested by the resilience of the shark both before and after their hunt for it. One important scene demonstrates the requirement for their collaboration in the endeavour as

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personal hostilities must be put aside for more harmonious teamwork. Brody stands on the deck of the boat on the lookout, while Quint is balancing on an outboard plank preparing to aim a spear gun at the shark. When the huge fish appears, Quint shouts at Hooper to tie the spear line to the rope that’s connected to a barrel which they hope will slow down the creature. As the shark approaches the vessel and then passes the bow, Hooper fumbles with the cords. Spielberg creates tension as he concentrates on the younger man’s manual effort and Quint’s orders become louder and more threatening. With a split second to spare, Hooper completes the knot and releases the rope. Quint pulls the trigger and hits the Great White. The coordinated combination of the old mariner’s pressure and the exertion of the marine biologist is perfectly intensified by the director’s tight focus on the hands of the latter and, for several seconds, narrative progression is postponed in exaggerated dramatic suspense. As a final intervention into the role of hands, one scene is significant in its provision of a rounding of Chief Brody’s characterisation, and stands out from the rest of the film tonally. A tired and beleaguered Brody sits one evening at the table beside his younger son Sean (Jay Mello). The stressed father is resting his face in his hands and looks up to find that the boy is mirroring his manual posture and gestures. Brody starts to change the position of his hands playfully waiting for the youngster to mimic him. The game, which lasts less than a minute, is observed by Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary) who comes to the door of the room, smiling as she watches the interaction. A softer, affectionate quality is revealed in the paternal character who, despite the crisis confronting him, must suppress his own anxiety and fatigue – to keep the professional turmoil out of the domestic, familial space – for the welfare of the boy. This strength of character, paradoxically displayed by a manual tenderness, is a quality that reassures the viewer of his competence as community leader and protagonist. These revelations of finer, or less evident, details of the film’s construction and meaning making (around theme, symbolism, aesthetics, narrative, and character) are facilitated by analytical consideration of how hands are framed in Jaws. Thus, I propose, the human limb is a valuable element in the provision of interpretative segues into understandings of how we might evaluate films and how, in turn, films have something to contribute to discussions about the way we evaluate our manually interpolated relationship with the world.

Filmography Films have been listed in English, followed by original language or alternative titles in parenthesis. In cases where the original title is commonly used, these have not been translated. 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) 2001: A space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) A Blonde in Love (Lásky jedné plavovlásky, Miloš Forman, 1984) A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985) A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935) About Adam (Gerard Stembridge, 2000) Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967) All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) All I Desire (Douglas Sirk, 1953) All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984) Amélie (Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) And Now the Screaming Starts! (Roy Ward Baker, 1973) Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972) Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005) Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010) Blow-up (Michelangelo Antonioni 1966) Blown Away (Stephen Hopkins, 1994) Bride of Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna, 1990) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992) Bullets Over Broadway (Woody Allen, 1994) Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

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Celebrity (Woody Allen, 1998) Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) Chinese Series (Stan Brakhage, 2003) Cliffhanger (Renny Harlin, 1993) Cold War (Zimna wojna, Paweł Pawlikowski, 2018) Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000) In My Skin (Dans ma peau, Marina de Van, 2002) Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978) Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985) Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946) Dekalog, jeden (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988) Demonoid: Messenger of Death (Alfredo Zacarías, 1980) Desistfilm (Stan Brakhage, 1954) Dexter (TV series, created by James Manos Jr., 2006–) Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) Dislocation mystérieuse (Georges Méliès, 1901) Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955) Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996) Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987) Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975) Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) Fear and Desire (Stanley Kubrick, 1953) Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974) Fingers (James Toback, 1978) Fingersmith (Aisling Walsh, 2005) Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955) Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013) Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)

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Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002) Garage (Lenny Abrahamson, 2007) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999) Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986) Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939) Gulliver’s Travels (Peter R. Hunt, 1977) Gulliver’s Travels (Rob Letterman, 2010) Hands of a Stranger (Newton Arnold, 1962) Hands of the Ripper (Peter Sasdy, 1971) Harry in Your Pocket (Bruce Geller, 1973) Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986) Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) Howards End (James Ivory, 1992) Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps, Jérémy Clapin, 2019) Idle Hands (Rodman Flender, 1999) Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989) Invisible Ghost (Joseph H. Lewis, 1941) It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949) Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) Kill Bill, Volume I (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) Kill Bill, Volume II (Quentin Tarantino, 2004) King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976) King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005) L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983) L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) La Belle et la bête (Jean Cocteau, 1947) La doppia ora (The Double Hour, Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009)

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La nuit américaine (Day for Night, François Truffaut, 1973) La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) Lacenaire (Francis Girod, 1990) Le lit (The Bed, Marion Hänsel, 1982) Le rêve des marmitons (Scullion’s Dream, Segundo de Chomón, 1908) Le sang des bêtes (Blood of Beasts, Georges Franju, 1949) Leprechaun (Mark Jones, 1993) Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945) Les femmes du 6e étage (The Women on the Sixth Floor, Philippe Le Guay, 2010) Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) Les parents terribles (Jean Cocteau, 1948) Les vacances de M Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati, 1953) L’Impressionniste fin de siècle (A Turn of the Century Illusionist, Georges Méliès, 1899) Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952) Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962) M (Fritz Lang, 1931) Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971) Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Manos: The Hands of Fate (Harold P. Warren, 1966) Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) Michael Inside (Frank Berry, 2017) Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978) Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011) Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004) Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990) Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002) My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970) Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950) Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957) No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1956) Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001) Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934)

Filmogr aphy

Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968) On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) One 2 One (Yek. Do. Yek, Mania Akbari, 2011) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975) Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992) Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944) Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) Philadelphia, Here I Come! (John Quested, 1977) Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959) Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972) Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961) Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard, 1938) Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932) Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020) Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) Rocky (John G. Avildsen, 1976) Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) Scarface (Howard Hawks & Richard Rosson, 1932) Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983) Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947) September Affair (William Dieterle, 1950) Se7en (David Fincher, 1995) Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994) Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006) Sinister Hands (Armand Schaefer, 1932) Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982) Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) Squandered Sunday (Zabitá nedele, Drahomíra Vihanová, 1969) Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) Strange Fascination (Hugo Haas, 1952) Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984)

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Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) Suicide Squadron (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1941) Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass, Abbas Kiarostami, 1997) Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991) The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994) The Arch (Dong fu ren, Shu Shuen Tong [Cecil Tang], 1968) The Bat (Crane Wilbur, 1959) The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946) The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète, Jean Cocteau, 1930) The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930) The Brothers Karamazov (Richard Brooks, 1958) The Bye Bye Man (Stacy Title, 2017) The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920) The Circus (Charles Chaplin, 1928) The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) The Country Girl (George Seaton, 1954) The Crawling Hand (Herbert Strock, 1963) The Cremator (Spalovac mrtvol, Juraj Herz, 1969) The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu, Cristi Puiu, 2005) The Devil’s Hand (William J. Hole Jr., 1961) The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979) The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy, 1933) The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, Luis Buñuel, 1962) The Fighter (David Russell, 2010) The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931) The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993) The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley, 1943) The Gate (Tibor Takács, 1987) The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925) The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940) The Hand (Henry Cass, 1960) The Hand (Oliver Stone, 1981) The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, Robert Wiene, 1924) The Hands of Orlac (Edmund T. Gréville, 1960) The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, Chan-wook Park, 2016)

Filmogr aphy

The House Is Black (Khaneh siah ast, Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963) The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957) The Karate Kid (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982) The Last Man on Earth (Sidney Salkow, 1964) The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002) The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934) The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971) The Mirror (Zerkalo, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) The Perfection (Richard Shepard, 2018) The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945) The Possession (Ole Bornedal, 2012) The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) The Second Circle (Krug vtoroy, Aleksandr Sokurov, 1990) The Seventh Veil (Compton Bennett, 1945) The Science of Sleep (La science des rêves, Michel Gondry, 2006) The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, Pedro Almodóvar, 2011) The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) The Thieving Hand (J. Stuart Blackton, 1908) The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby & Howard Hawks, 1951) The Turin Horse (A torinói ló, Béla Tarr, 2011) The Uncanny (Denis Héroux, 1977) The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989) The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) They Drive by Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940) This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966) This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player, François Truffaut, 1960)

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Hands on Film

Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967) Together (Lorenza Mazzetti, 1956) Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969) Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí, 1929) Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson, 1956) Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divu, Jaromil Jires, 1970) Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966) Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939) Your Son (Tu hijo, Miguel Ángel Vivas, 2018) Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964)

Index 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) 162, 231 2001: A space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) 22, 62 A Blonde in Love (Lásky jedné plavovlásky, Miloš Forman, 1984) 123 A Christmas Carol (1843 novella by Charles Dickens) 116 A Clockwork Orange (1962 novel by Anthony Burgess) 62 A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971) 62 A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985) 184 A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951) 241 A Tale of Two Cities (1859 novel by Charles Dickens) 211–212 A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935) 235 About Adam (Gerry Stembridge, 2000) 105 Abrahamson, Lenny 201–202, 233 Accident (Joseph Losey, 1967) 108 Action/adventure film 16, 207, 223, 243 Aesthetics 18, 19, 102, 104, 117, 118, 120, 122, 214, 246, 249, 251, 252, 135–185 see also style Agility 38, 73, 83, 137 absence of 221 Akbari, Mania 244–245 Akerman, Chantal 79–82, 192, 197, 200–202, 233 Albinus, Cloduis 25 Alda, Alan 162, 218 All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) 121 All I Desire (Douglas Sirk, 1953) 237 All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) 171–172 Allen, Woody 162 Almodóvar, Pedro 124 Amadeus (1979 novel by Peter Shaffer) 44 Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984) 44–45, 162, 231 Amélie (Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) 82–84, 83, 84, 240 American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999) 129–130 American Psycho (1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis) 227 American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) 227 Anaxagoras (Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher) 23–25 And Now the Screaming Starts! (Roy Ward Baker, 1973) 27, 29, 152 Anderson, Lindsay 99, 124–125, 241 Anderson, Paul Thomas 228 Ángel Vivas, Miguel 119, 222 Anthropomorphism 19, 22, 135, 141, 148, 167–168, 179, 180, 203, 245

Antonioni, Michelangelo 34, 47, 197, 234–235 Argento, Dario 152 Aristotle 23–25, 48, 174 see also De Anima Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998) 208 Arnold, Jack 122–123, 206–207 Arnold, Martin 160 Arnold, Newton 143–144, 242 Art Nouveau 167 Asquith, Anthony 96 Astruc, Alexandre 141 Asylum (Roy Ward Baker, 1972) 231 Au hasard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) 110–111, 146–147 Autographs 115 Avant garde 137–138, 161 Avildson, John G. 144, 204 Bad faith 117, 222, 233–234 see also existentialism Balázs, Béla 160 Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975) 61–62 Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005) 204 Bay, Michael 208 Becon, Thomas 85, 95 Being and Nothingness (1943 philosophical work by Jean-Paul Sartre) 117, 234 Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) 82, 150–151 Bell, Charles 24 Benjamin, Walter 65 Bennett, Compton 131 Bergman, Ingmar 116, 117 Bergson, Henri 32, 73 Berkeley, Busby 171 Berry, Michael 120 Bigelow, Kathryn 203 Biutiful (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2010) 102, 150–151, 158 Blackton, J. Stuart 136 Blown Away (Stephen Hopkins, 1994) 203 Blow-up (Michelangelo Antonioni 1966) 34, 47 Body on film 50, 62, 66, 67, 73–74, 77–78, 82, 100, 103, 109, 110, 117, 118–119, 123–124, 129, 140, 143, 145, 148, 150, 153–154, 156–157, 159–161, 171–185, 191, 192, 198, 202, 218, 219, 221, 227, 244 ‘hard body’ films 223–224 see also representations, disembodied Bornedal, Ole 158 Boyle, Danny 154, 226 Brian, mind 14, 30–31, 32, 34, 39–40, 46, 51–52, 149–150, 153, 157, 221–222 brainwashing 62 damage, injury of 42–43, 231

262  Brakhage, Stan 137–138 Branagh, Kenneth 162 Brandel, Marc 45 see also The Lizard’s Tail (novel) Bresson, Robert 57–58, 61, 63, 80–81, 101, 110–111, 128, 139–141, 146–147, 159–160, 182–183, 191–192, 193–195, 199, 202 Bride of Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna, 1990) 157–158 Brooks, Richard 239 Buck, Chris 242 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992) 172 Bullets Over Broadway (Woody Allen, 1994) 162 Bundy, Ted 226 Buñuel, Luis 43, 149 Burgess, Anthony 62 see also The Clockwork Orange (film and novel) Cacoyannis, Michael 236 Caméra-stylo 141 Cameron, James 21, 22, 208, 209, 240, Camp 18, 19, 135, 163–172 Campion, Jane 79, 146, 184–185, 202, 228, 230–231 Camus, Albert 214 Cannibalism 118 Capabilities/skills, manual 28, 52, 57 see also creativity; touch; feeling; strength; violence; agility; self-expression; picking pockets Cape Fear (J. Lee Thompson, 1962) 226 Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) 226 Capotondi, Giuseppe 95 Capra, Frank 116, 238 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 106 see also The Incredulity of Saint Thomas Carné, Marcel 212–213 Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) 102–103 Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) 243 Cass, Henry 53, 203 Catholic Church 121 Celebrity (stardom) 82, 115, 150, 203, 214, 235, 243–244 Celebrity (Woody Allen, 1998) 162 Chan-wook Park 82, 85, 86–87 Chaplin, Charles 67, 72–75, 78, 96, 98, 142, 162 Characterisation 18, 19, 40, 55, 64, 68, 79, 81–82, 95–96, 100, 145, 158–159, 191, 194, 195, 211–247, 249, 252 Characteristics, manual see injuries; deformities; tattoos; nail varnish Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974) 47 Chinese Series (Stan Brakhage, 2003) 138 Clapin, Jérémy 82, 142–143, 245, 246 Cliffhanger (Renny Harlin, 1993) 207 Cocteau, Jean 39, 43, 167–171, 209

Hands on Film

Coen, Ethan 203, 238 Coen, Joel 203, 238 Cold War (Zimna wojna, Paweł Pawilkowski, 2018) 228 Connection (manual, tactile) 26–27, 64, 86, 101, 104–105, 130, 150, 158, 177, 182, 239 Conway, Jack 235 Cooper, Merian C. 156 Costume drama 228 Creativity 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 32, 63, 64, 70, 76, 81, 92, 139, 140, 149, 181, 194 behind the scenes 135–138 nature and origins of 36–50 Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) 206–207 Crime film 120, 206, 216 Cromwell, John 241 Cronenberg, David 222 Crooke, Helkiah (court physician to King James I) 25 Cukor, George 96 Curtiz, Michael 243 Cusack, John 82, 150, 162 Da Vinci, Leonardo 140 see also The Last Supper Dalí, Salvador 43, 149 Dancer in the Dark (Lars von Trier, 2000) 80 Darwin, Charles 29–30, 33, 57, 159 Dasein 32, 177–178, 181 see also phenomenology Dassin, Jules 222 Davis, Andrew 239 Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978) 94 Day of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1985) 94–95, 151 De Anima (Aristotle) 174 De Bont, Jan 203 De Chomón, Segundo 136, 142 De Palma, Brian 97, 228 De Saussure, Ferdinand 112 De Van, Marina 118, 119 Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988) 222 Death 102, 157, 204, 207, 209 murder 28, 29, 47 personified 83–84 suicide 104 Death penalty 56, 214 Deception (Irving Rapper, 1946) 127 Deformities 49, 239, 240 Deixis 112 Dekalog, jeden (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1988) 35–36, 93–94, 127 Deleuze, Gilles 15–16, 160–161, 197 Demme, Jonathan 203, 226 Demonoid: Messenger of Death (Alfredo Zacarías, 1980) 27, 28–29, 240, 245 Demy, Jacques 80 Descartes, René 31, 32, 50, 102

Index

Desistfilm (Stan Brakhage, 1954) 138 Desmond Hurst, Brian 59–60, 79 Destruction (manual) 34, 36, 60, 153–154, 189, 204 of self 86–87, 118–119 Detached hand 19, 27, 36, 45, 136, 138, 142, 143, 151, 153, 205, 209, 217, 245–246 and forearm 53, 118, 136 see also severed hand Determinism see free will and determinism DeVito, Danny 208 Dexter (television series, created by James Manos Jr., 2006–) 224 Dexterity 30, 32–33, 39–40, 71, 73, 74–75, 80, 82, 122, 137, 146, 150, 156, 182, 194, 203–204, 222, 223–224, 226, 232, 243, 251 Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955) 204–205 Dick, Philip K. 33 Dickens, Charles 63–64, 99, 116, 211–212 see also ‘The Hands’ (characters); A Christmas Carol (novella); A Tale of Two Cities (film and novel); Hard Times (novel) Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) 208, 223 Diegetic 21, 27, 34, 43, 46, 48, 95, 116, 121, 139, 145, 147, 151, 154, 163, 193, 201, 204, 211, 244 space 142, 148, 184, 199 Dieterle, William 228 Dislocation mystérieuse (Georges Méliès, 1901) 232 Donner, Richard 207 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 214, 239 see also The Brothers Karamazov (film and novel); The Idiot (novel) Double exposure 142, 143, 144 Dr. Frankenstein (character) 21, 156–157 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian, 1931) 121, 122 Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) 33, 62, 167, 231 Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (Freddie Francis, 1965) 55, 151–152, 152, 203, 203 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 139 Dyspraxia 131 East of Eden (1952 novel by John Steinbeck) 124 East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955) 124, 240 Easton Ellis, Bret 227 see also American Psycho (film and novel) Eastwood, Clint 204 Elliott, Stephen 172 Embodiment 61, 100–101, 127, 138, 145, 147, 177–180 Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen, 1996) 162 Evil Dead II (Sam Raimi, 1987) 151 Existentialism 216, 222

263 condition 18, 80, 113–114, 198, 211, 233 Exposition Universelle, Paris 137 Expressionist style 45, 55, 139, 145 Extra-diegetic 21, 34, 48, 70, 102, 121, 139, 145, 220 Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) 62 F for Fake (Orson Welles, 1973) 236–237 Fabula 148, 195 Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975) 241–242 Farocki, Harun 14, 24, 142 Farrokhzad, Forugh 48–49, 146–147 Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987) 205 Fear and Desire (Stanley Kubrick, 1953) 114 Feeling (tactile) 93, 101–102, 110–111, 235 haptic 172–185 Fellini, Federico 76–77 Female hands 28, 49, 75, 76–87, 95–96, 106, 117, 122, 123, 128–129, 147 Female Trouble (John Waters, 1974) 172 Ferrara, Abel 205 Fetish, objet fétiche 75, 109, 123, 155, 223, 227, 238 face as 242–243 Fincher, David 154, 226 Fingers 25, 28, 30, 48, 117, 245 Fingers (James Toback, 1978) 220–221 Fingersmith (2002 novel by Sarah Waters) 82, 87 Fingersmith (Aisling Walsh, 2005) 82, 84–87 Five Easy Pieces (Bob Rafelson, 1970) 125–126, 125, 228 Fleischer, Dave 143 Fleming, Victor 171, 241 Flender, Rodman 27, 34, 202 Florey, Robert 217 Foley effects 245 Forman, Miloš 43–44, 123, 162, 231 Francis, Freddie 55, 151, 152, 203 Franju, Georges 48 Frankenstein (1818 novel by Mary Shelly) 21, 156 Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) 22, 40, 156–157, 209 Free will and determinism 16, 17, 19, 21, 50–63, 117 Free will see free will and determinism French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955) 80 Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972) 205, 238–239 Freud, Sigmund 46, 63, 239 Freund, Karl 42, 50, 144–145, 154 Friedan, Betty 87 Friel, Brian 130 see also Philadelphia, Here I Come! (film and play) Frozen (Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee, 2013) 242 Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987) 61–62, 70–71, 114 Fuller, Samuel 115, 145–146, 182, 193, 195

264 

Hands on Film

Galileo, di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei 31 Gangs of New York (Martin Scorsese, 2002) ​221 Gans, Christophe 151 Garage (Lenny Abrahamson, 2007) 201–202, 233–234 Geller, Bruce 182, 193, 194 Genre films 16, 18, 39, 45, 50, 79, 80, 151, 153–154, 156, 158, 207, 209 see also horror; romantic comedy; musical; action/adventure film; crime film; costume drama; semantic; syntactic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) 161, 171–172 German Expressionism 46, 50, 55, 139, 142 see also expressionist style Gestures, gesturing 14, 17–18, 26–27, 32–33, 36, 38–39, 43, 47, 55, 68, 74–75, 76–79, 85, 91, 92–98, 104, 106, 108, 110–113, 119, 123–124, 127–128, 137, 139–143, 146–148, 150, 154, 157, 159–163, 172, 178, 190–191, 194, 201–202, 204, 208, 211, 215–216, 219, 221, 224, 229, 231–233, 236–237, 238–239, 245–246, 251, 252 Gilliam, Terry 162, 231 Gilson, Etienne 40–41, 42 Girl, Interrupted (James Mangold, 1999) 162, 231 Girod, Francis 213 Gloves 43, 57, 62, 84, 85, 98, 123–127, 152, 170, 204, 238, 242, 244 as fetishised 123–124 Godard, Jean-Luc 14, 24, 116, 117, 142, 216 Golden Eighties (Chantal Akerman, 1986) 80 Gondry, Michel 149 Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) 241 González Iñárritu, Alejandro 102, 150–151, 158 Granik, Debra; 206 Gréville, Edmund T. 42, 50 Guillermin, John 156 Guillotine 211–212, 214, 235 Gulliver’s Travels (1726 novel by Jonathan Swift) 143 Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939) 143 Gulliver’s Travels (Peter R. Hunt, 1977) 143 Gulliver’s Travels (Rob Letterman, 2010) 143

Hands of the Ripper (Peter Sasdy, 1971) 54–55, 103–104, 205 Handwriting 117, 216, 217 see also signatures; autographs Hanna-Barbara (Productions) 143 Hänsel, Marion 104–106 Haptic 18, 19, 135, 172–185 Hard Times (1854 novel by Charles Dickens) 63 Harlin, Renny 207 Harron, Mary 227 Harry in Your Pocket (Bruce Geller, 1973) 182, 193, 194–195 Hart, Christopher (hand actor) 148, 245 Harvey, Herk 102, 103 Hathaway, Henry 238 Hawks, Howard 56, 161, 171–172, 208, 209, 237–238 Hecht, Ben 56 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 200 see also thesis; antithesis; synthesis Heidegger, Martin 24, 31–32, 41–42, 64–65, 70, 113–114, 162, 176–177 Héroux, Denis 127 Herz, Jural 145, 155 Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1986) 144, 204 Hillcoat, John 130 Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) 128–129, 129, 181–182 His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940) 56 Hitchcock, Alfred 47, 57–58, 127, 204–205, 206, 207, 216, 217, 224–225, 231–232, 238 Hitchens, Christopher 23–24 Homosexuality 164, 166, 224 Hole, Willian J. 52–53 Hopkins, Stephen 203 Horror (genre) 16, 27–29, 33, 39–40, 45, 47–48, 50, 52, 55, 80, 103–104, 114, 115, 118, 137, 147–148, 151–158, 202–203, 205, 219, 240, 245 Howard, Leslie 96, 241 Howards End (James Ivory, 1992) 184 Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) 100–101 Hunt, Peter R. 143 Huston, John 123

Haas, Hugo 203 Hall, Stanley 74, 92, 174 Hand colouring and tinting 137 Hand cranking 135 Handcuffs 120, 203 Handkerchiefs 115, 123, 146, 237 Hands as symbols 17, 19, 25, 31, 32, 43, 50, 53, 54, 60, 61, 63, 74, 77, 84–85, 150, 151, 153, 163–172, 207, 216, 227, 246, 249, 250, 252 see also metonymy; metaphor Hands, gendered 16, 75, 76–87, 96, 99, 100, 124–125, 224 see also female hands; male hands Hands of a Stranger (Newton Arnold, 1962) 143–144, 155–156, 242

I Lost my Body (J’ai perdu mon corps, Jérémy Clapin, 2019) 142–143, 245–246 Iconography 22–23, 26, 45, 120, 151, 156, 162 Identification with/of character 19, 81, 142, 192, 201, 216, 223, 230, 240, 245, 246 Idle Hands (Rodman Flender, 1999) 27, 33–34, 202–203, 234, 245 Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959) 171–172 In My Skin (Dans ma peau, Marina de Van, 2002) 118–119 In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927, novel by Marcel Proust): Part II – In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower 212 In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993) 130

Index

Indexicality 67, 141–142, 163 Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981) 243 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989) 208 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Steven Spielberg, 1984) 75 Industrial Revolution 63 Industry, industrialisation 63, 64–65, 70–73, 74–75, 76, 78, 81, 87, 99–100, 171 see also Industrial Revolution Injuries 42–43, 99, 100–101, 104, 115, 117, 118, 120, 127, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 223, 231–232, 240, 251 Insanity 44–46, 162, 226, 231 see also psychopathology and psychosis Invisible Ghost (Joseph H. Lewis, 1941) 205 It’s A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946) 116 Ivory, James 184, 228–229 Jackson, Peter 156 James I, king of England 25, 29 Jarmusch, Jim 200 Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) 18, 76, 249–252 Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975) 79–82, 192, 200–201, 202, 233–234 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre 82, 83, 84, 240 Jires, Jaromil 122 Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954) 171 Jones, Mark 152 Jonze, Spike 82, 150 Jordan, Neil 115, 122, 156 Jour de Fête (Jacques Tati, 1949) 68–70 Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) 57, 59, 61, 153 Kant, Immanuel 156 see also sublime Kazan, Elia 124, 126, 238, 240, 241 Keaton, Buster 67, 72–73 Kiarostami, Abbas 200 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 35, 36, 127 Kill Bill, Volume I & II (Quentin Tarantino, 2003) 144, 204 King Kong (John Guillermin, 1976) 156, 165 King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) 156, 165 King Kong (Peter Jackson, 2005) 156, 165 Kino-eye 141 Koran (Qur’an) 48 Kotcheff, Ted 203, 223 Kubrick, Stanley 22, 33, 61–63, 70–72, 78, 108–109, 114, 167, 183, 231, 241, 242 Kurosawa, Akira 34 L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983) 146–147, 202 L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) 234–235, 235

265 L’Impressionniste fin de siècle (A Turn of the Century Illusionist, Georges Méliès, 1899) 232 La Belle et la bête (Jean Cocteau, 1947) 167– 172, 169 La doppia ora (The Double Hour, Giuseppe Capotondi, 2009) 95–96 La nuit américaine (Day for Night, François Truffaut, 1973) 115–116 La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954) 76–77 Labour 17, 18, 21, 34, 35, 44, 63–75, 76, 78–81, 84–85, 87, 95–100, 125–126, 136, 137, 145, 149, 158–159, 170, 190, 198–200, 203, 214, 226–228 Lacan, Jacques 37 Lacenaire (Francis Girod, 1990) 213 Lacenaire, Pierre François 213–215 Lang, Fritz 55, 127, 231 Lanthimos, Yorgos 222 Laurel and Hardy 73 Le Guay, Philippe 95 Le lit (The Bed, Marion Hänsel, 1982) 104–106, 105 Le rêve des marmitons (Scullion’s Dream, Segundo de Chomón, 1908) 136, 142 Le sang des bêtes (Blood of Beasts, Georges Franju, 1949) 48 Lee Thompson, J. 226 Lee, Jennifer 242 Leprechaun (Mark Jones, 1993) 152 Les enfants du paradis (Marcel Carné, 1945) 212–213, 213 Les femmes du 6e étage (The Women on the Sixth Floor, Philippe Le Guay, 2010) 95 Les parapluies de Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964) 80 Les parents terribles (Jean Cocteau, 1948) 209 Les vacances de M Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati, 1953) 68 Letterman, Rob 143 Lewin, Albert 43 Lewis, Joseph H. 205 Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952) 142 Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962) 62, 63, 108–110, 114, 183–184 Liszt, Franz 219 see also Mephisto Waltzes Lloyd, Harold 67, 72–73 Losey, Joseph 108 Lucas, George 205 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 65–66, 140 Lyne, Adrian 205 M (Fritz Lang, 1931) 55–56, 231 Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971) 53, 118, 127 Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) 42–43, 50, 144, 154 Male hands 95, 96–97, 117, 223–226, 236, 241–242, 249–252 in contrast with female hands 76–87

266  Malkovich, John 82, 150 Mamoulian, Rouben 121 Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) 76 Mangold, James 162, 231 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 121 Manos: The Hands of Fate (Harold P. Warren, 1966) 155, 155 Marx Brothers 73 Marxism 17, 21, 70 Masina, Giulietta 76–78 Maze Prison 100 Mazzetti, Lorenza 230, 231 McCarthy, Cormack 130 McQueen, Steve 100, 101 McTiernan, John 208, 223 Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973) 25–26 Méliès, Georges 65–66, 140, 142, 323 Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) 147, 148 Memory 12, 61, 75, 127–132, 239 loss of 148 Mendes, Sam 129 Mephisto Waltzes (1859–1862 compositions by Franz Liszt) 219 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 31–32, 37, 41, 70, 174–180 Metaphor 14, 18, 24, 33, 43, 59, 64, 91, 111–132, 163, 177, 180, 227, 235 Metonymy 18, 91–111, 127–132, 163 Metz, Christian 94, 212 Michael Inside (Frank Berry, 2017) 120 Midnight Express (Alan Parker, 1978) 206 Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011) 162 Milestone, Lewis 56, 244 Million Dollar Baby (Clint Eastwood, 2004) 204 Mise en abyme 150, 167 Mise en scène 80, 106, 108, 124, 138–139, 142–143, 153–156, 172, 184, 244 Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990) 203 Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936) 74–75, 78 Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati, 1958) 67–68 Monroe, Marilyn 123, 161–162 Montage sequences 83, 84, 114, 116, 137, 144–146, 182, 190, 201, 236–237 Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002) 106 Movement-image 15–16 see also Gilles Deleuze Mulcahy, Russell 144, 204 Mullan, Peter 121 Murphy, Dudley 97, 241 Musical (genre) 80, 171–172, 194 career 60, 125, 206, 228 instruments 140, 146 performances 41 talent, genius 44–45, 102, 217–218, 220–221 My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964) 96

Hands on Film

Myra Breckinridge (Michael Sarne, 1970) 166–167, 172 Myra Breckinridge (1968 novel by Gore Vidal) 166–167 Nail varnish 147 Narration 18, 19, 48, 79, 81–82, 116, 130, 163, 168, 189–209, 240 first person 249 Narrative see narration; narrator; fabula; syuzhet; semantic; syntactic Narrator 109, 246 unreliable 34, 48, 220 Newton, Isaac 25 Nichols, Mike 236 Nietzsche, Friedrich 57 Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950) 222–223 Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) 94 Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957) 76–77 No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) 203, 237–238 Nolan, Christopher 147, 148, 204, 206 Non-diegetic see extra-diegetic North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) 47 Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1956) 48 Nyby, Christian 209 Objective correlative 32, 50, 91, 94, 123 Ocean’s Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001) ​ 203 Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934) 241 Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968) 194–195 On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) 126, 238 One 2 One (Yek. Do. Yek, Mania Akbari, 2011) 244–245 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Miloš Forman, 1975) 162, 231 Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992) 184 Ozu, Yasujirô 199 Pakula, Alan J. 43–44 Paradox of fiction 19, 173, 181, 246 Parker, Alan 206 Pathé (Film Company) 136 Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957) 61–62 Pawlikowski, Paweƚ 228 Personality 22, 39, 40, 48, 53, 54, 81, 82, 87, 99, 100, 115, 117, 159, 168 characterisation 211–247 disorder of 44, 158, 162 gendered 96, 99–100 see also creative personality; destructive personality Personality, creative 13, 211–223

Index

Personality, destructive 43–44, 45, 103, 211–213 Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944) 154, 162 Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) 228 Phenomenology 154, 162 haptic theories, use of 174, 176–181 Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964 play by Brian Friel) 130 Philadelphia, Here I Come! (John Quested, 1977) 130 Pianist see piano playing Piano playing 39, 41, 44, 125, 217, 220, 228, 229 Picking pockets 58–59, 86, 115, 145–146, 182, 183, 192–194, 204 Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959) 57, 58, 61, 146, 147, 159, 182–183, 191, 193, 194–195, 195, 202 Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953) 115, 145–146, 182, 193, 195 Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972) 172 Pocketful of Miracles (Frank Capra, 1961) 238 Polanski, Roman 47, 53, 118, 127, 147–148, 151, 182, 232 Pollack, Sydney 130 Possession (haunting) 27, 33–34, 40, 52–53, 94–95, 98, 103, 158, 218 Potter, Sally 184 Predator (John McTiernan, 1987) 223 Proprioception 189 Props see wedding rings; handkerchiefs; gloves Proust, Marcel 111, 212 see also In Search of Lost Time (novel) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) 47, 204, 225–226 Psychological complexity and interiority 18, 19, 32, 40, 50, 87, 101, 103, 108, 129, 143, 173, 174, 191–194, 211–213, 218, 222, 238, 239, 241, 244, 245–246 Psychopathology and psychosis 45, 46, 54, 55–56, 62–63, 103–104, 118, 129, 131, 148, 151, 153, 154–155, 161, 162, 181, 205–207, 220, 223–227, 231–232, 237–238 Puiu, Cristi 200 Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard, 1938) 96 Queer cinema and style 164, 166, 197 Quested, John 130 Qur’an see Koran Rafelson, Bob 125, 228 Raimi, Sam 39, 151 Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932) 244–245 Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982) 203, 223 Ramsay, Lynne 106, 227 Rapper, Irving 127 Rashômon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) 34

267 Ray, Nicholas 171 Rebecca (Ben Wheatley, 2020) 126 Reed, Carol 194–195 Reiner, Rob 203, 240 Reisz, Karel 99, 241 Renard, Maurice 42 see also The Hands of Orlac (film and novel) Renoir, Jean 80 Representations, disembodied 32, 154 Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965) 147, 151, 181–182, 232 Resnais, Alain 48, 128–129, 182 Richards, Dick 241 Rocky (John G. Avildson, 1976) 204 Romantic comedy 16, 149–150 Romero, George A. 94–95, 151, 152 Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948) 57–58, 61, 127, 204, 217 Rosson, Richard 237 Roy Hill, George 221 Rubel Kuzui, Fran 172 Russell, David 204 Salkow, Sidney 152 Sands, Bobby 100 Sartre, Jean-Paul 117, 233–234 see also Being and Nothingness (philosophical work); bad faith Sasdy, Peter 54–55, 103 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960) 99, 241 Scarface (Brian De Palma, 1983) 97–98, 228 Scarface (Howard Hawks & Richard Rosson, 1932) 237 Schaefer, Armand 207 Schoedsack, Ernest B. 156 Scorsese, Martin 25–26, 34, 76, 115, 221, 226 Se7en (David Fincher, 1995) 154–155, 226–227 Seaton, George 235 Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947) 127 Self-expression 45, 137, 184, 228 Semantic (of genre and narrative) 112–113, 190, 199 Sennett, Mack 73 September Affair (William Dieterle, 1950) 228 Severed hand 19, 27, 28, 29, 40, 42, 46–47, 52, 54, 82, 115, 136, 142–143, 148, 151, 152, 153–155, 202–203, 206–207, 215–217, 245, 251 see also detached hand Sexual awakening 122 Shaffer, Peter 43–44 see also Amadeus (film and play) Shakespeare, William 14, 24, 25, 85, 118, 227 Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994) 154, 226 Sharman, Jim 172 Shelly, Mary 21, 22 see also Frankenstein (films and novel) Shepard, Richard 206, 221 Sheridan, Jim 130

268  Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010) 34 Sign language 17–18, 91, 229–231 Signatures 216 Signifier, signified 93, 112, 113, 114, 127, 141, 161, 193, 194, 212 sliding signification 93 Silent Hill (Christophe Gans, 2006) 151 Simpson, O.J. 126–127 Singer, Bryan 34, 127 Sinister Hands (Armand Schaefer, 1932) 207 Siodmak, Robert 154, 162 Sirk, Douglas 171–172, 237 Sistine Chapel 48 Slapstick 67, 73–75, 76, 77–78 Slow cinema 18, 79, 189, 196–202, 233 Social mobility, upward 96 Soderbergh, Steven 203 Sokurov, Aleksandr 200 Solondz, Todd 172 Sonnenfeld, Barry 148–149, 245 Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982) 43–45 Sound effects 36, 44, 48, 67, 68, 106, 148–149, 191–192, 218 see also Foley effects Soviet montage 114, 200 see also montage sequences Spaltung 37, 119 see also Jacques Lacan Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) 61–62, 241 Special effects 28–29, 136–137, 156, 232 see also sound effects; double exposure Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) 203 Spielberg, Steven 208, 240, 243–244, 249–252 Squandered Sunday (Zabitá nedele, Drahomíra Vihanová, 1969) 129 Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) 205–206 Stembridge, Gerard 105 Steinbeck, John 124 see also East of Eden (film and novel) Stone, Oliver 39, 45–48, 203, 205, 240 Stop-motion photography 143, 145 Strange Fascination (Hugo Haas, 1952) 203 Stranger Than Paradise (Jim Jarmusch, 1984) ​ 200 Strangers on a Train (Alfred Hitchcock, 1951) ​ 224–245 Strength 97, 99, 223, 241–242, 251 Strock, Herbert 153, 245 Stuart, Mel 170 Style 19, 61, 68, 80, 82, 135–185, 196, 200, 249 acting 6, 7, 74, 76–77, 138–139, 154, 156, 158, 161–162, 164–166, 172, 215–217, 221, 226, 227, 231, 232, 237, 245, 250 expressionism 45, 55, 139, 145 musical performance 41, 60, 218–220 Sublime (Immanuel Kant) 156 Suicide Squadron (Brian Desmond Hurst, 1941) ​ 59–60

Hands on Film

Superman (Richard Donner, 1978) 207 Supernatural 21–36, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55, 94, 102, 103, 114, 115, 142, 151, 153, 156, 158, 203, 209, 215, 217–218, 219–220, 240, 242 powers 39, 50, 245 Supplement, supplementarity 91, 92, 93, 94, 113, 137, 161 Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977) 152 Swift, Jonathan 143 see also Gulliver’s Travels (films and novel) Symbolism, manual see hands as symbols Synecdoche 110, 124, 129, 142, 167–168, 209 Syntactic (of genre and narrative) 92, 152–153 Syntagmatic (of genre and narrative) 93, 112, 190 Syuzhet 82–83, 148, 195 Tactility 19, 35–37, 64–65, 99, 100, 101–102, 103–106, 111, 117, 127–128, 150–151, 152, 158, 172–185, 209, 222, 239 Takács, Tibor 152 Tang, Cecil 79, 106–107 Tarantino, Quentin 76, 113, 144, 204 Tarkovsky, Andrei 131, 197 Tarr, Béla 200, 233 Taste of Cherry (Ta’m e guilass, Abbas Kiarostami, 1997) 200 Tati, Jacques 66–70 Tattoos 97, 147, 148, 226 Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) 226 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, 1991) 22, 240–241 The Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991) 148–149, 245 The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994) 172 The Arch (Dong fu ren, Shu Shuen Tong [Cecil Tang], 1968) 106–107, 107 The Arnolfini Wedding (1434 painting by Jan van Eyck) 104 The Bat (Crane Wilbur, 1959) 152 The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946) 153, 203, 217, 219 The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934) 108 The Blood of a Poet (Le sang d’un poète, Jean Cocteau, 1930) 39, 43 The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930) 237 The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880, novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky) 239 The Brothers Karamazov (Richard Brooks, 1958) 239 The Bye Bye Man (Stacy Title, 2017) 209 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene, 1920) 139, 139 The Circus (Charles Chaplin, 1928) 162 The Company of Wolves (Neil Jordan, 1984) 115, 122, 156

Index

The Country Girl (George Seaton, 1954) 235 The Crawling Hand (Herbert Strock, 1963) 153, 202–203, 205, 245 The Cremator (Spalovac mrtvol, Jural Herz, 1969) 145, 155 The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Moartea domnului Lãzãrescu, Cristi Puiu, 2005) 200 The Devil’s Hand (William J. Hole Jr., 1961) 52–53, 205 The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979) 205, 209 The Emperor Jones (Dudley Murphy, 1933) 97, 241 The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador, Luis Buñuel, 1962) 149 The Fighter (David Russell, 2010) 204 The Front Page (Lewis Milestone, 1931) 56–57 The Fugitive (Andrew Davis, 1993) 239 The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley, 1943) 171–172 The Gate (Tibor Takács, 1987) 152 The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925) 75, 96–97 The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940) 98, 162 The Hand (Henry Cass, 1960) 53–54, 203 The Hand (Oliver Stone, 1981) 39, 45–48, 203, 205, 240 The Handmaiden (Ah-ga-ssi, Chan-wook Park, 2016) 82, 84–87 ‘The Hands’, characters in Hard Times by Charles Dickens 63–64 The Hands of Orlac (1920 novel by Maurice Renard) 27, 39, 42, 50, 143–144, 154, 242 The Hands of Orlac (Edmund T. Gréville, 1960) 27, 39, 42–43, 50, 93, 217 The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, Robert Wiene, 1924) 27, 39, 42, 50, 93, 139, 217 The House Is Black (Khaneh siah ast, Forugh Farrokhzad, 1963) 48–50, 49, 93–94, 146, 147, 147 The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) 203 The Idiot (1869 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky) 214 The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957) 122–123 The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (c.1601–1602 painting by Caravaggio) 35 The Karate Kid (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) 144, 204 The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017) 222 The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese, 1982) 115 The Last Man on Earth (Sidney Salkow, 1964) 152 The Last Supper (c.1495–1498 painting by Leonardo da Vinci) 140 The Lizard’s Tail (1979 novel by Marc Brandel) 45

269 The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002) 121 The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1934) 206 The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971) 218–220 The Mirror (Zerkalo, Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975) 131–132 The Misfits (John Huston, 1961) 123 The Perfection (Richard Shepard, 2018) 206, 221 The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) 146, 184–185, 202, 228, 229–231 The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 novella by Oscar Wilde) 43 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945) 43 The Possession (Ole Bornedal, 2012) 158 The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006) 206 The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, 1993) 184, 228–229 The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009) 130–131 The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) 172 The Science of Sleep (La science des rêves, Michel Gondry, 2006) 149–150 The Second Circle (Krug vtoroy, Aleksandr Sokurov, 1990) 200 The Seventh Veil (Compton Bennett, 1945) 131 The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) 62, 242 The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) 203, 226 The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito, Pedro Almodóvar, 2011) 124 The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) 221–222 The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984) 209 The Thieving Hand (J. Stuart Blackton, 1908) 136–137 The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby & Howard Hawks, 1951) 209 The Turin Horse (A torinói ló, Béla Tarr, 2011) 200 The Uncanny (Denis Héroux, 1977) 127 The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) 34, 240 The War of the Roses (Danny DeVito, 1989) ​ 208 The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) 171 The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956) 216 Thesis, antithesis, synthesis 114, 145, 199–200 see also Soviet montage They Drive by Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940) 236, 240 This Property is Condemned (Sydney Pollack, 1966) 130 This Sporting Life (Lindsay Anderson, 1963) 99–100, 124–125, 241 Time-image 15–16, 197 see also Gilles Deleuze

270  Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Piano Player, François Truffaut, 1960) 110 Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) 208 Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967) 231 Title, Stacey 209 Toback, James 220 Together (Lorenza Mazzetti, 1956) 230–231, 230 Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) 238 Touch 26, 31, 35, 37, 45, 58, 65, 83, 85, 93, 95–96, 99, 101–104, 106–111, 115, 117–118, 123, 128–129, 153, 168, 172–185, 189, 193, 195, 212, 213–214, 229, 235, 236, 239, 240, 242 see also haptic True Grit (Henry Hathaway, 1969) 238 Truffaut, François 110, 115–116 Ulmer, Edgar G. 108 Un Chien andalou (Luis Buñuel & Salvador Dalí, 1929) 43, 117, 149 Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson, 1956) 58, 146–147, 159, 193, 202 Unheimlich 44, 74, 130, 155, 169 Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Valerie a týden divu, Jaromil Jires, 1970) 122 Vampyr (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932) 139 Van Eyck, Jan 104 see also The Arnolfini Wedding (painting) Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) 207 Vertov, Dziga 76, 141 Vidal, Gore 166 see also Myra Breckinridge (film and novel) Vihanová, Drahomíra 129 Violence 42–43, 62, 74, 94, 101, 103, 104, 114, 118, 151, 204–205, 218, 223, 232 gendered 99, 221 Vitagraph (Film Company) 136 Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) 116, 117–118, 216 Von Sternberg, Josef 237 Von Trier, Lars 80

Hands on Film

Walsh, Aishling 82, 84–85, 86 Walsh, Raoul 236 Ward Baker, Roy 27, 29, 152, 231 Warner Brothers (Studio) 143 Warren, Harold P. 155 Waters, John 172 Waters, Sarah 82, 85, 86–87 see also Fingersmith (television miniseries) Watt, Isaac 34 We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011) 227 Wedding rings 122–123 Welcome to the Dollhouse (Todd Solondz, 1995) 172 Welles, Orson 236–237, 238 Wendkos, Paul 218–219 Whale, James 22, 156–157, 158, 209 Wheatley, Ben 126 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962 play by Edward Albee) 236 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Mike Nichols, 1966) 236 Wiene, Robert 42, 50, 139 Wilbur, Crane 152 Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, Ingmar Bergman, 1957) 116–117 Wilde, Oscar 43 see also The Picture of Dorian Gray (film and novella) Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) 170 Wilson, Owen 162 Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) 206 Wiseman, Frederick 231 Working-class hands 96–97, 99–100, 250 Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939) 236 Wyler, William 236 Your Son (Tu hijo, Miguel Ángel Vivas, 2018) 119–120, 122, 222 Yuzna, Brian 157 Zacarías, Alfredo 27, 240 Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964) 236