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 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