The Meaningful Hand and Metonymy

A quick glance through dozens of framed hands on screen invites questions about the function of the images within the overall film. When the hand is more than just a hand, we must investigate how its supplementary meaning is working and whether its signifying role is contributing directly or indirectly to one or more of the central themes of the film. In one instance, the hand might symbolise evil, fate, redemption, retribution, and it may or may not continue to do so emblematically as an objective correlative elsewhere in the same work. However, in another film it might have a wider interrogative scope representing the irascibility of evil, the inevitability of fate, the speciousness of redemption, or the futility of retribution. In the latter instances the singular cinematic moment is connected to a key thematic question. This chapter will consider the former set by evaluating moments when the meanings produced by symbolic use of the hand are either tangential to the main thematic consideration or offered as a transitory contribution in the overall construction of the narrative.

For Giorgio Agamben, a demotion in the importance of gestures in the late-nineteenth century resulted in an interiorising of personal expression. Writing of the period he noted: ‘An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate’ (1993, 137).