Shown in Compétition #3.
Synopsis
As gripping organs, intimately linked to actions, the hands shake, shake, grasp or tear in an infinite round of expressive attitudes extracted from their context. This hypnotic breviary is a reminder that hands cannot remain inert and that they act without the control of the person to whom they belong.
Text from the selection committee
Hypnotic found-footage, in The Devil in The Details, shots of handshakes follow one another on a composition by Steve Reich, Clapping music. Through the repetition of the model, each new detail generates a new way of perceiving the gesture. Minimalism here in the form, it is no longer hands that we observe but signs. Wang Yuyan’s work goes in this direction: the gesture as a pretext, how to go from pre-existing forms to abstraction.
Translation made by the translator www.DeepL.com/Translator
– R.G.
What is the starting point for your film? And could you come back to his name?
With the wish to condense and distill the time that I spent watching horror movies since I was a teenager, I use this project to revisit these films through a slightly different lens. As the horror narratives suggest, what hands are doing often refers to mysterious elements hidden in the details.
In zombie movies, the creatures walk with hands held out in front of them, not to suggest difficulties in vision but, on the contrary, pure purpose. Our hands serve us. They are the instrument of executive action that allows us to manipulate the world and fulfill our wishes. Yet, in other scenarios, our hands are precisely what disobey, embody the will of someone else entirely, perhaps a spirit or an alien presence. This narrative of hands reveals the devil that lies behind these images. It’s about an autonomy addiction: the illusion that we can be fully masters of ourselves.
How long did it take to make your film? How many films did you see to make this mashup of images?
It took me three months to collect the images and classify them. There are about three hundred horror movies.
From the hand, your film presents a new history of cinema. Jean-Luc Godard says in his last film, The Image Book: “the true condition of man is to think with his hands”. Do you think that your film is an attempt to materialise thoughts ?
If the way we employ our hands is changing, we have to keep our hands busy is nothing new. We have always kept our hands occupied. We can think about the reasons for this strange necessity. What are the dangers of idle hands? What function does relentless hand activity really have? What role do the hands have for our thoughts？? What links are there between our hands and our desire? And what happens when we are prevented from using our hands? The anxious, irritable and even desperate states we might experience show that keeping the hands busy is not a matter of whimsy or leisure but touches on something at the heart of our embodied existence. Using our hands to make things is supposed to work against the dematerialized universe that we otherwise inhabit, a remainder or a new efflorescence of the grounding, satisfying bodily techniques of the past. Language, as we have seen, needs to be embodied, and the omnipresence of the world requires that our hands stay busy turning this word into flesh.