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 film; 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 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 profilmic 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.