"Michael Bartlett (born in Salinas, California) has been living for about a decade in West Berlin. He has an extensive background in music and in fact earns his livelihood as a member of the city's Radio Symphony Orchestra. From its very first shot, Bartlett's Concert for the Right Hand announces itself as a film preoccupied with forms, textures, rhythms. This is narrative cinema fueled by images and objects, a story that unfolds almost without dialogue. It is a work reminiscent of classic silent film, evoking situations and settings from Hans Richter and F.W. Murnau, the early René Clair and experimental Luis Buñuel. Bartlett's plot description at best offers a skeletal representation of the film's rich body, a story about mixed and matched parts: 'The right arm of a mannequin provides the missing link in a chain of events that wreaks havoc on the lives of two bachelors. Pierre Duval, owner of a small boutique in West Berlin, and Eric, groundskeeper in a park, fall victim to incredible circumstances that seem destined to bring them together.' Solitary individuals, evenings spent alone, the desire for a better half: Concert for the Right Hand has the construction of a chain letter, a film in which a continuing play of displacement and dismemberment provides the narrative energy. Duval and Eric, in the quintessential German tradition, become doubles, mirror embodiments of lack. We cut back and forth between a dank basement flat and an extravagant interior as we follow similarly aimless lives and empty gestures. An expressive display of light and shadow, the film abounds in weirdness and Stimmung. Objects demand their own rights and take on an independent existence, forms become corporeal, artificial hands have a will of their own, and clocks leap from their perches and roll down the street...surfaces give way to deeper dimensions, where tangible reality becomes feverish dream." Eric Rentschler