Hands in the machine

In this article, I examine how Maya Deren and Marie Menken’s mid-1940s filmmaking enacts a gestural aesthetic. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s thinking gesture (his discussion of “moving tools” the thoughtfulness hands), draw attention to importance hands in work. Visual Variations Noguchi (1945), Menken employs handheld Bolex camera explore different material properties art objects. Through her sweeping camerawork, film editing sound, she transforms Noguchi’s into new, cinematically stuttering, borderline abstract compositions. At Land (1944), Deren’s unnamed protagonist (played by herself) is filmed reaching, touching, clasping grasping way through highly mutable world. re-working mythic quest narrative, function as gestural, thoughtful means adaptation. Hands also provide with manual manipulating “film form”, manually piecing together surfaces, shots scenes. Land, both artist-filmmakers use their transform human gesture. foregrounding (onscreen offscreen), enact desubjectified, cinema.