« Sauver l’artiste avec l’homme »: Representations of a Pianist and His Hands in Robert Wiene’s « Orlacs Hände » (1924)

Abstract

« To save the artist as well as the man »: the surgeon who endeavours to save the life and the hands of Paul Orlac, the protagonist in Robert Wiene’s silent film Orlacs Hände (1924), sets himself an ambitious goal. In a successful operation, the world-famous pianist who lost both hands in a train crash is given the hands of a convicted murderer. It is Orlac’s impression that the hands live a life of their own, and that they drive him to commit crimes himself.
How important is it that Orlac is a pianist? Could he have been any other artist? And which image of the pianist as an artist is conveyed by Robert Wiene? A close reading and comparison of Wiene’s film and its literary source (Maurice Renard’s novel Les Mains d’Orlac, 1920) allows us to answer these questions in greater detail, while other contemporary films provide a further frame of reference.