Free Film Screening and Live Score Performance, "The Hands of Orlac" (1924)

Internationally renowned silent-film musicians Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton perform live score!

After a train crash a renowned pianist wakes up in horror: his hands have been amputated and replaced with the hands of an executed murderer. Depicting an artist’s continuous descent into paranoia and madness The Hands of Orlac is a haunting example of German Expressionism that reunites Dr. Caligari director Robert Wiene and actor Conrad Veidt in another spellbinding performance.

Donald Sosin and Joanna Seaton bring their unique blend of keyboards vocals and percussion to major film festivals—New York TriBeCa San Francisco Seattle Denver Telluride Yorkshire—and to MoMA Film at Lincoln Center AFI Silver and other notable venues. They perform often at Italy’s annual silent film retrospectives in Bologna and Pordenone. They have appeared numerous times at Yale Harvard Brown Cornell and Emory Universities and created scores for over 65 silent film DVDs on the Criterion Kino Milestone Flicker Alley and other labels. Their workshops in silent film music and songwriting are popular with students of all ages.

Robert Wiene created his silent films in the aftermath of World War I while the horrors of industrialized warfare and fanatical nationalism persisted. Political instability hyperinflation mass unemployment and urban conflict defined the 1920s in Germany giving rise to expressionist cinema with its hallucinatory films full of nightmares mystery crime madness and desire. 

This free screening of The Hands of Orlac is presented in partnership with the Yale University Art Gallery and the exhibition “Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression.” The curator of “Two Milestones in German Expressionism” is Lorenz Hegel Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies and German Studies.

Host or Publisher Whitney Humanities Center