Hands on Film

Hands on Film is a comprehensive study of the representations and on-screen uses of the human limb, spanning the history of the cinema from its birth to contemporary times.

Barry Monahan lectures in the Department of Film & Screen Media at University College Cork. He researches and has published in Irish and other national cinemas from historical, theoretical, and aesthetic perspectives. His monographs include Ireland's Theatre on Film: Style, Stories and the National Stage on Screen (Irish Academic Press, 2009), and The Films of Lenny Abrahamson: a filmmaking of philosophy, published by Bloomsbury in 2018.

List of Images, Acknowledgements, Introduction, 1. Themes - The Framed Hand and Being, Natural and Supernatural Phenomena: Matter Becoming Consciousness, The Nature and Origin of Creativity, Determinism and Free Will: Possession, Self-possession, Dispossession, Modernism: Industrialisation and Technology, Gendered Hands, 2. Symbolism - The Semiotic Hand, The Meaningful Hand and Metonymy, The Manual as Metaphorical, Between Metaphor and Metonym: The Hand and Memory, 3. Aesthetics - The Stylised Hand: Beauty, Ugliness, Genre, Behind the Scenes: Unseen Creative Hands, The Stylised Hand on Screen, The Camp Hand and the Hand in Camp, The Haptic Experience: Screened Sensations, 4. Narration - Hands Doing and Being, Hands as Narrative Actants, Slow Hands and Slow Cinema, Acting Hands and Set Pieces, 5. Characterisation - Hands and Identity, Cultural Contexts for Creative and Destructive Personalities, The Psychopathic Hand, Vocational Hands, Characters and Labour, Manual Details: Emotions and Eccentricities, Concealing and Revealing Characters, Concluding Case Study - Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), Filmography, Index.