Original subtitles

Hand Gestures

Two strangers come together: a man and a woman.

There is an interaction, an exchange of glances.

Two plainclothes policemen observe the action played out before them,

without understanding it.

It is not easy to grasp this sequence of images.

The pickpocket effects a distancing, forbidding expression,

while his hand tries to make contact.

The hand does something entirely different from what the face shows.

The thief opens the woman's purse,

the woman opens her lips.

It seems as though the thief has opened her lips.

She seems seduced rather than robbed.

The hand that commits a crime seems to engender desire.

This is a silent film from 1908.

A woman�s hands hide stolen jewels inside a bar of soap.

The woman in pajamas is the thief.

She has crept across the ledge into the room next door

and stolen the jewels from the sleeping owners.

Back in her room she hides the jewels inside the soap.

Her hands are set against a black background,

so that nothing will distract us from her criminal act.

It is remarkable that this film has no other close-ups.

The camera always shows the entire play-space.

Only the hands hiding the loot deserve a close-up.

The close-up is used to emphasize the criminal act.

Thus it is an �action film,� as they say in English.

This woman, who will later become the thief in pajamas,

has here an expression and a posture that signifies anger

or even evil intentions.

Today we are used to seeing � to receiving a film -

in fragmented images.

The fragments direct our vision.

Without this image-guidance and dialog

it is difficult for us to understand what is going on.

The gestures and facial expressions of actors in silent films

seem to us a foreign language; something one must learn.

This is a book about the construction

of the different sign languages for the deaf.

One might ask, if cinema too had evolved a standard sign language,

would the silent era had lasted longer.

A man tries to warm his numb hands.

These hands cannot hold the matches

and cannot light the fire that is supposed to warm them.

The numb hands should remind us

what a useful tool hands generally are.

What the human hand means is revealed in its failure.

These images are supposed to prove the value of the human hand.

However, they offer little more than a notion of the activity

they are supposed to represent.

The mountain film emphasizes the value of the hand in another manner.

On the mountain man is back � or is still � on all fours.

On the mountain man�s life hangs on the hand�s basic function.

These images appeared between 1934 and 1937 in the US,

in a film promoting job placement services.

The work shown here is interchangeable,

i.e. dissolved in money,

going around from hand to hand � circulating.

Images circulate too.

In 1944 some of those images are recycled in a film

calling for the final war effort against the Germans and the Japanese.

Only the hands of the American workers are shown,

implying that they are all hands of a great allegorical body.

This is a handbook for film actors from 1927.

In the third chapter the author points out

that it makes a big difference whether a gesture is executed

with the back of the hand or with the palm.

He writes:

"The back of the hand is associated with the emotions of the mind,

while the palm - with the emotions of the heart.�

He writes:

"Kissing the back of the hand indicates a formal greeting.

If one were to kiss the palm, we would know at once

that this was not a mere greeting, but a sign of passionate adoration.

Also, a slap with the palm of the hand is a sign of intimacy.

With the back of the hand � it is chastisement.

This is a threatening fist,

and this is a fist that turns its weak side to the one being greeted,

the inverse of a threat.

We can turn our hands and observe it from all angles.

This is impossible with every other part of the body.

A hand can pose before its owner's eyes,

like a man turning in front of a mirror.

And it can also be thought of as a mirror, a tablet, or a stage.

Paper Stage Screen

This is not an action movie.

The man contemplates his palm and produces something with his gaze.

It is not the hand that is acting, it is the eye.

In 1927 this book announced the foundation of an acting school.

Today it still does not exist.

All human labor comprises just a few basic actions:

reaching, grasping, carrying."

This book envisions a language of gestures

and tries to formulate a grammar of film-acting gestures.

It proposes a curriculum for an acting school.

In the third semester they were to study Taylorism.

The economy of movement.

Taylorism: Frederick Taylor wanted to turn human labor into a science.

He introduced the stopwatch in factories

and looked for the most efficient work movements.

Even today we don�t have a clear understanding of the relationship

between the gestures of labor and those of film narration.

The movement economy of labor and of film narration.

The pianist is cinema�s favorite manual laborer.

Film loves to show a pianist's hand as much as a hand holding a gun.

This film called Play of Hands wants to tell its story through hands alone,

that is to say: no faces are shown.

This is a misguided undertaking,

like trying to cross the ocean in a bathtub or the continent on one's hands.

The images work like a guessing game:

as soon as you've guessed what an image represents

it has fulfilled its purpose.

This image stands out.

The hands of the woman giving birth search for a support

in order to endure the pain.

One can say that this image would hold its own

even in a film not obsessed with hands.

Two children are born, one of them will be a concert pianist.

When dealing with piano playing, most cameras tend to cut here,

to cut the hands from the rest of the person.

In war the concert pianist loses one hand;

war has cut off his hand.

Once more the power of hands is addressed through its loss.

There is a whole genre of films

in which the pianist's hands play a special part:

they are cut off, torn off, or they get away of their own accord.

This film is about a pianist who loses both hands in an accident

and has a murderer's hands sewn onto his wrists.

These hands have power of him.

The many hands that are cut off by war or by the camera.

Piano playing is manual labor performed before an audience.

It is show labor meant to represent all other manual labor.

This US war effort film of 1944 also begins with piano playing

and ends with factory labor.

This is a Nazi war effort film.

The worker at the machine watches over the production of a gun.

He is no manual laborer.

He has set the machine in motion and stands watching over it.

But he likes to touch the tool and to pass his hand over it.

He likes to dirty his hand with the grease.

Amira von Schwerin: Archeology of the Right, Berlin 1943:

"Touching as pure touch-gesture was originally a magical act.

This is evident from the ancient form of taking an oath:

the pagan magical oath-object is never seized or grasped,

but is merely touched.�

This film was released after Stalingrad, in 1943,

and the worker could use a magical gesture or two.

The film threatens him too �

what if he makes a mistake and spoils his work?

A violin will be made from this wood.

We are in an old violin- maker�s workshop.

This is from a Nazi newsreel of March 1945.

This film has no destroyed houses, no soldiers,

no camps, no dead, not even a car.

Again we see the manual laborer�s hands,

we are presented with the dexterity of hands.

"The body of the violin has to be built with much feeling and care."

The pleasure with which this hand glides along a the gun barrel

makes us realize that cinema is not a medium of touch, but of vision.

Cinema translates most sensations of touch into glances.

Also, the human hand can resemble an animal.

Every child imagines the hand running away and doing forbidden things.

This cannot remain unpunished.

This is a hand that brings death.

And this is a hand announcing death.

The will leaves the body, the hand cannot grasp anymore.

The essence of life is set free.