#lottewolff

The video below comes, perhaps, from this schedule, from the Radio Times, Thursday 22nd October 1937, where Charlotte Wolff presented 'The Hands of Chimpanzees’, with Alan Best (who, it seemed, worked with Julian Huxley and was a curator at the Zoo), part of the Experiments in Science series. Chimpanzees lent by the London Zoological Society.

Others programmes in the series include:

7 October 1937 | Professor Mary Waller will show some of the unique properties of solid carbon dioxide 

4 November 1937 | Cyril Burt, D.Sc , Professor of Psychology, University College, London, demonstrates the tests which have been devised to estimate intelligence and vocational aptitudes 

16 December 1937 | Reconstructing the Past. A demonstration conducted by Margot Eates, of the Institute of Archaeology

The word of the film’s title carries certain controversies. From the Middle High German Cigäwnär, most likely from a Greek term meaning "untouchable". The Central Council of German Sinti and Roma rejects the use of "Zigeuner" as a designation for the Roma, regarding it as racist and as having been discredited by the Nazis' use of it. Nonetheless, some Romani individuals continue to use and defend the term (from wiktionary).

The film depicts a community on the edge of immense turbulence. Moholy-Nagy holds a strong gaze, as one might expect from a piece of early ethnography. At the same time as the film exoticises the community it depicts, it also holds to a documentary realism: of social conditions and life on the edge of collapse. The question is perhaps whether a film like this was part of a climate that led to the persecution of those it depicts? I imagine not, but I would also like to reserve judgement.  

There is a scene where a bourgeois woman is accosted on the street. She removes her glove and her palm is read. It is shown as a practice of spectacle, intimacy, exchange, revelation, but also as a form of marginality, which also carries into Charlotte Wolff’s practice of palm reading. Moholy-Nagy turns the gaze here: Berlin’s street bourgeoisie are here alienated, placed on curious display.

Lotte Wolff, next to Ernst Schoen on a diagram, was physician, palm-reader and sexologist. In 1952 she published this article in Vogue on palm-reading, next to one on graphology, written by Klara G Roman (who published Hand-Writing: A Key to Personality in the same year). Many questions are raised here: the connection between the fashion press and this type of mysticism; the connection between the fashion press and this circle (Helen Hessel, but also Dora Benjamin); the place of adverts in this press (one thinks of the moment in The Salaried Masses when Kracauer surveys the adverts in magazines in the 1920 and lists the concerns as “pens; Kohinoor pencils; hemorrhoids; hair loss; beds; crepe soles; white teeth; rejuvenation elixirs; selling coffee to friends; dictaphones; writer's cramp; trembling, especially in the presence of others; quality pianos on weekly installments; and so on”); also the connection between Wolff’s palm reading and games of chance, gambling, and sociality.

A copy on eBay reveals the rest of the magazine: