Children’s Game #21: Hand Stack

Nerkzlia, Iraq, 2019; 3:49 min
In collaboration with Ivan Boccara, Julien Devaux, and Félix Blume

 

Four boys sit around a big flat rock. The one on the left always starts, slapping his right hand down: “Wahed!” One! The other three follow in unchanging order, “Two! “Three!” “Four!”, rhythmically slamming a hand on the stack, then the other on the next turn, then wrenching one out from under. The pace gets faster, the slapping gets harder, the shouts get louder, hands redden, faces grimace clownishly, until the game collapses into a frenzy of anarchic drumming whose very hilarity acknowledges the violence just below the surface.

Lorna Scott Fox

 

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