A hands-on way to make a scene

UNFORTUNATELY, I had time to catch only one film at the Hippodrome Silent Film Festival, the annual treat when the Bo’ness cinema screens classic movies with live accompaniments.

Despite the sunshine, there was a full house on Saturday afternoon for The Hands of Orlac, a slab of Grand Guignol about a pianist who loses his hands in an accident and has new ones grafted on.

The miracle turns sour when the bewildered virtuoso can no longer play and finds himself throwing knives instead, because the hands were originally attached to a murderer.

Preposterous? Sure, but also a post-war metaphor for its original 1924 audience; how do you return to your wife, piano and nice little German lifestyle after being part of the horror of the First World War?

Cinema has a long and strange love affair with unruly and errant body parts – especially hands.

I’ve seen films that featured an eye, foot or even an ear becoming possessed, but mitts are the favourites, hands down.

In Evil Dead II, the hero is chased by his own homicidal hand before trapping it under a bucket, weighed down by Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms.

Dr Strangelove has a running gag about a crazed prosthetic arm that keeps flinging out Nazi salutes.

Even Disney has a finger in this pie – in Frozen, Elsa’s hands refuse to play nice, turning everything they touch to ice and snow.

Other writers are a bit more practical about hands-on creativity. James Joyce was once approached by a stranger who gushed: ‘May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?’

‘Certainly not,’ Joyce replied. ‘It did lots of other things, too.’