In Naomi Uman's 2002 film "Hand Eye Coordination", cutouts of hands are reassembled and made to dance or crawl across the screen. By evoking the bodily gestures used to construct the film-the work of the hands manipulating found-footage images- Hand Eye Coordination locates the immediacy of the body at the place of vision while displacing the eye from its primacy as the origin of the image's production. This short movie, a film caught in the act of its own making, can thus serve as a shorthand for Uman's broader investigation of the place of the body at the site of production.Explored through found-footage works and experimental documentaries made between 1998 and 2003, Uman's film situates the body in a double relation to the image, first as its genetic property, its incorporated origin and that which makes possible its formal arrangement. Scratches, stains, and visible seams, an entire catalog of "imperfections" visible in the images of her early films, act as testimonies to the production process and the intimacy between the filmstrip and the filmmaker's labor embedded in the film.
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