The Handeye: Bone Ghosts

Directed by Anja Dornieden

Early 1900s, Robert Musil invites Freud to summon the ghost of Franz Mesmer, discoverer of animal magnetism and forefather of hypnosis. Musil told Freud about a series of dreams, in which a talking flea foretold of impending catastrophes all over Europe, which he wanted to question Mesmer about. It is said that Mesmer obligingly appeared & spoke in a repetitive & oblique manner which was transcribed by Freud in several scraps of paper & hidden separately in a series of objects that would end up in the collections of three Viennese museums. Legend has it that he who could piece together the text would find instructions for the assembly of a film. We visited these museums &, unable to break away the objects from their glass prisons, have made an attempt to reconstruct the film, hoping that the magnetic force inside the objects would transfer to the film’s silver halide crystals, therefore allowing us to make sense of the single written testimony leftover from the séance.