Hands give us metaphors for the urgency of collective labor, but they also appeared as surreal and uncanny images across the silent film archive. In this playful program, laboring limbs fall in love, catch fire, metamorphose into toy animals, chop wood, cut films, smoke pipes (while pregnant!), hypnotize circus dancers, and build zoomorphic shelters from the storm—all accompanied by Dreamland Faces’ live original score that includes Northrop’s historic pipe organ.

The seven films in this program include Stella Simon’s rhythmic choreography of disembodied hands, Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork footage shot in the 1920s, Alice Guy-Blaché’s voracious comedy of maternity cravings, Ladislaw Starewicz’s stop-motion fable starring dead bugs, Segundo de Chomón’s phantasmagoric animation, a grotesque German puppet film, and a social satire about gendered labor and the disastrous results of editing film newsreels on a too-tight deadline!

Co-presented with Archives on Screen, Twin Cities.