An Artist’s Hands: Stella Simon, Modernist Synthesis, and Narrative Resistance

What happens when you mix various threads of absolute or pure cinema, a metonymie vernacular from American Straight Photography, aesthetic and ideological strands from 1920s German photography movements, and a feminist American woman in Berlin between the fall of 1926 and the spring of 1929? The answer to this question may be Stella Simon's 1928 film Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex (Germany), which she made at Berlin's Technische Hoschuk in collaboration with Miklos Bandy.1 Simon's use of an array of stylistic discourses of early 20th century American and European modernism make this film a rich vessel of transatlantic crossfertilization that resists a strict categorization into any singular hermeneutic or national model of avant-garde ideology. Instead, its hybridity operates not unlike Sergei Eisenstein's goals for dialectical synthesis, which seek "to form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator's mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions."2 While the film's varied aesthetic mix may be a window onto the international spirit of avant-garde practice that seized Simon during this period, Hande, or Les Mains, as it was known in Germany and France, is further complicated by two essential features. First, an undisputedly Hollywood-style narrative takes place over the course of three sections: Prelude, Variations, and Finale. second, Simon uses hands as the film's protagonists and as central elements of its decor. Marc Blitzstein, who wrote the mechanical piano score for the film, describes how the hands combine with the film's modernist vocabulary to make the film a challenging avant-garde text: The biggest problem comes from the absence of any precise rhythmic motif; next, in terms of story, this didn't work so well because some of the solos of the hands were not always identifiable and, as far as the film is a study in pure abstraction, the film is a failure because it is too long and because it quenches the thirst of the spectator who expects a story. Despite all of this, however, this film is still extraordinarily interesting and stimulating.3 Here, Blitzstein seizes upon the film's resistance to be read according to any one existing film-theoretical paradigm of 1928-narrative, visual symphony, or absolute or pure film, for example. He points to how Hands undermines a coherent spectatorial position by drawing upon all of these creative modes yet remaining uncommitted to any one in its totality. More importantly, the composer directs his critique toward the hands themselves insofar as they are not easily identifiable. Interestingly, in a 1929 issue of Close-Up, four stills from Hands are published with the following caption: "Hands has four leading roles, two male and two female, as well as Other hands'"4 (fig. 1). While my viewing of the film would support this notion, the hands essentially resist being identified: the so-called mistress hand is easily confused with the leading lady hand, while the male hands are indistinguishable from one another. The hands' anonymity, as Blitzstein suggests, undermines narrative coherence and contributes another layer to the film's already complicated formal strategy. The goal of this essay, therefore, is to tease out the aesthetic sources that both form the film's modernist synthesis and are essential to understanding the context in which Simon chose to employ hands instead of full-bodied actors. Then we may return to the most pressing yet unexplored issue of the film: the effects of Simon's use of hands within a conventional narrative-effects that I suggest radically transform the text into a feminist avant-garde film of the late 1920s. I. A Lexicon of International Photography Discourse By 1926, when Simon arrived in Berlin, Germany was rife with ideologically opposing arguments for the photograph and its aesthetic mission. First, Germany's absolute realism photography movement ran parallel to painting's Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). …