White hands appear and vanish in front of a dark, minimalist setting, playing joyfully with each other. After a first encounter between two hands, a game of seduction follows; a domineering character soon emerges between the duo, and the ups and downs of an unbalanced love relationship arise. The literal translation of the full German title is Hands. The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex. The intertitles suggest a classical storyline, while the symbolic protagonists undermine a clear attribution of gender roles or a precise textual reading of the narrative. Reinterpreted in recent years as a feminist film, Hände finds a subtle balance between conventional narration and cinematic abstraction, joining a canon of works by women directors while also offering a different view of romantic relationships. Detached from an objectified female body and the usual eroticized gaze, the love story can be explored in a desexualized context.
The opening credits list Miklós Bándy as the director, based on an idea by Stella F. Simon. However, reviews of the period frequently identify Hände as a work by Simon. As Howard Pollack states in his 2012 book on the composer Marc Blitzstein, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World, it is reasonable to assume that while she wrote the script alone, they directed the film together. Many sources also mention Hans Richter’s involvement, but no clear documentation exists apart from Richter recalling being asked to shoot “abstract waves,” which cannot be clearly identified within the film.
Stella F. Simon, née Furchgott (1878-1973), pursued formal photographic training at the Clarence H. White School between 1923 and 1925 after becoming a widow. Quickly immersing herself in the New York avant-garde community, she moved to Berlin a year later to join the flourishing New Objectivity movement and take filmmaking classes. Simon rapidly made connections with filmmakers in Germany, and was able to get support from Berlin’s Technische Hochschule as well as from the Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf to shoot her one and only film, Hände. She then moved back to New York City and continued her career as a photographer, exhibiting regularly in galleries and museums.
Miklós Bándy, later known as Nicolas Baudy (1904-1971), was a French writer of Hungarian origin who occupied an important place in European political and intellectual life in the 1930s. He was also the author of one of the first articles in French to discuss Swedish abstract experimentalist Viking Eggeling’s short film Symphonie Diagonale (1924). Hände is his only known film.
Reconstructing the timeline for this film is a difficult task: on 31 August 1927 it was shown as a work-in-progress at Berlin’s Galerie Neumann-Nierendorf. Pollack states that afterwards Blitzstein and Simon together edited the film, and while preview screenings of this 609-metre version were arranged in New York and Paris, without music, the public premiere appears to have been a screening sponsored by the November Group at the Gloria-Palast on 16 February 1929, with a Blitzstein score. Simon and Blitzstein subsequently worked on a revised version of the film a few years later; the composer’s four-hand mechanical-piano score was recorded in March 1936, commissioned by RCA and The Museum of Modern Art. The digitization reproduces this later edit, which matches the available recording of Blitzstein’s score. The restoration by the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, with the support of the Förderprogramm Filmerbe, combines a nitrate print from the BFI with a later positive element from the Arsenal Institute in Berlin.

Louise Burkart