I am choosing to examine the 2013 Korsakow film, Hands: Thinking Out Loud (or HΔNDS, which I am going to call it), by Armstrong, Johnston and Malchevski. I am intrigued by this K-film’s strikingly simple and poignant examination of human behaviour.
This Korsakow film is an interactive archive of various 10-second video clips linked by the theme of hands. Human hands perform everyday activities – cooking, cleaning, drawing, eating, reading, holding, conversing.
The user browses through a fixed database of video clips via its video hyperlink interface. This follows the hypertext mode of i-documentary (Aston & Gaudenzi 2012). The Korsakow work opens with the title HΔNDS, white against a black background, letters individually flickering. This is accompanied by musical guitar plucking. A single row of small, black-and-white video clip thumbnails appears at the bottom of the screen.
When the cursor hovers over a thumbnail, the associated video plays. When the user clicks on a thumbnail, they are taken to a new interface arrangement: four video clip thumbnails arranged in square formation. The top left clip is coloured; the rest are in black-and-white.
The user may hover the cursor over any thumbnail to play the associated video, or they may click on the thumbnail to make it the coloured top left video, and explore its related video clips. Hence, the interface “links assets within a closed video archive and gives the user an exploratory role… enacted by clicking on pre-existing options” (Aston & Gaudenzi 2012). The K-film seems to provide no narrative. Thalhofer argued that interactivity can free the author from “forcing a point of view onto his audience” (Aston & Gaudenzi 2012). This interactive interface promotes the absence of narrative/argument. Rather, the user is encouraged to seek relations between the videos through multilinear exploration.
A technical commonality among these videos is close up framing of hands, and resultant exclusion of much visual context. The viewer is invited to appraise this isolation from context in terms of aesthetics. Another frequent technical choice is deliberate, conspicuous focus pulls on hands.
Similarly, this serves to re-focus the viewer’s attention on the hands and reinforce their aesthetic value. Such deliberate selection and omission of content concerning aesthetic value is characteristic of the abstract form in experimental film. Thus, the work may perhaps be classified as an abstract i-doc. In fact, Astruc insisted upon connecting new technology “with the aesthetics of the avant-garde” (Sørenssen 2008). This K-film uses new technology to make art from fragments of actuality and “scavenged footage of experiences and expression” (Bordwell & Thompson 2013). These video clips abstract pictorial qualities – form, shape, line, texture, colour, movement – of the human hand from its everyday practical context for the purposes of noticing. In this sense, HΔNDS can be likened to the 1924 film Ballet Mécanique, which divorces various human body parts in motion from their everyday context. Bordwell and Thompson (2013) term this extrication from everyday practical context as “impractical interest”; viewers are sensitised to the abstract qualities of perhaps mundane things and made to perceive them as “interesting for their own sake” – aesthetically and poetically rousing.
HΔNDS seems to operate through the abstract film approach of themes and variations (Bordwell & Thompson 2013). The fundamental variations within the theme of hands are life-stage and activity. The students’ accompanying essay describes their decision to compare different life-stages and, evidently from the video clips, the varying behaviour associated with those life-stages. We see children’s hands, young hands, adult hands, and elderly hands performing activities typical of their age and of their generation, as well as performing specific mannerisms exclusive to their owners. We see a young girl insecurely clutching her phone, an elderly woman washing dishes.
We are asked to appreciate the divergent appearances of various hands – plump softness of youthful hands, angular qualities of adult hands, elderly hands lined with a lifetime of experiences. One particular video clip does this beautifully – elderly hands shift around in a fixed frame, strikingly sharpening or blurring the heavily lined hands.
The diegetic sound of each video clip is another variation, and also a vital part in the process of “training the spectator to watch the film” (Bordwell & Thompson 2013). Dialogue – voice tone, pronunciation, language, subject matter – clues us as to which life-stage is being represented. For example, colloquial language and lax pronunciation often accompanies video clips of youthful hands. However, at the same time, diegetic sound serves to reinforce the focus on visuals. We are only privy to a minute snippet of these conversations and interactions, rendering most of them too far out of context to be meaningful. There are even a number of video clips where the dialogue is in a different language. This comments on the prevailing theme of human interaction, as well as nourishing the authenticity of the K-film by saturating our aural sense in real-time sound. But it mainly serves to redirect our attention back to the aesthetic and poetic appreciation of the hands.
The non-diegetic soundtrack blankets the K-film in a continual loop of acoustic guitar string plucking. The song has a flickering quality to it – plucking tempo, pitch and volume all fluctuate and flutter in and out of focus. The result is an immediate, poignant mood of fragility and intimacy and sincerity.
In fact, this impression of fragility is repeated in every element of the Korsakow film. It is a theme, which comments on the overarching theme of hands – or, more implicitly, human behaviour and interaction and experience; the human condition. Everything in this Korsakow film is flickering. The focus pulls on the hands. The reflexive life and stillness of videos at the mere hover of a cursor. The soundtrack’s fluttering tempo and pitch. Its fluctuating volume. The flickering title, HΔNDS. The intimately changeable interface design and content. Everything is fragile. The hands of all ages are delicate in appearance and in gesticulation. Everything is flickering, faltering, fluttering, fluctuating. Everything is vulnerable. Sensitive. Every element seems to have a life. The K-film itself has a pulse. It is this tone which gives HΔNDS an honesty. A sincerity. In its essence, HΔNDS balances abstract film with interactive Internet-documentary, playing with art while seeking truth. This illustrates Aston and Gaudenzi’s (2012) “fundamental belief in the human need to try to make sense of the world around us, using whatever tools are to hand”.
Hands: Thinking Out Loud is a beautifully candid examination of human behaviour, interaction, experience; the human condition across all ages and generations. It is the definition of “art for life’s sake” (Bordwell & Thompson 2013).
References:
Armstrong, A, Johnston, M, Malchevski, M 2013, HΔNDS, Korsakow film, viewed on 29/3/14, <http://vogmae.net.au/classworks/media/2013/kfilms/hands/#/?snu=148>.
Aston, J, Gaudenzi, S 2012, ‘Interactive documentary: setting the field’, Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 125-139
Ballet Mécanique 1924, experimental short film, Fernand Léger, France
Bordwell, D, Thompson, K 2013, Film Art: An Introduction, 10th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York
Sørenssen, B 2008, ‘Digital video and Alexandre Astruc’s camera-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?’, Studies in Documentary Film, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 47-59