A film about what it means to say an image was made “not by human hands” — a phrase that has travelled from a Byzantine relic to a factory belt to a prompt field, and keeps changing what it promises.
In 944 an imperial official named Theophanes rode from Constantinople to the Sagaros River to collect a mysterious object: the Mandylion, a cloth on which, tradition held, the face of Jesus had appeared without anyone painting it. Four men examined it: the Emperor, his two sons and his co-emperor. The sons saw almost nothing, only the vague outline of a face. The co-emperor saw the eyes of Jesus, and his ears.
Betancourt uses that disagreement over what is seen to open a much longer history: what people mean when they say an image was made “not by human hands”. It sounds medieval and remote. It is not. By the early twentieth century, factories were advertising bread and pistons as untouched by human hands, and the phrase had become a promise rather than a miracle. And it is with us again now, in the way we talk about images produced by systems we cannot see into.
The film is built on one repeating gesture. In each era a hand reaches in to make something — and then fades out of the frame while the work continues without it. The painter’s hand on the panel. The emperor’s son’s hand above the cloth. The baker’s hands mid-knead. The factory worker’s gloved hand above the belt. The designer’s hand at the prompt field.
Everything is painted after Byzantine icons, in oxblood and blue on cracked gold leaf, the twentieth-century factory and the laptop included. The film does not claim that these things resemble each other. It claims that each time, exactly the same claim is made again.
The copied hand is also an argument from art history. The copy of a copy — the image that loses something every time it is reproduced, from Warhol’s silkscreens to a page run through the photocopier again — is how the discipline has long asked what is lost, and what is made, when no hand touches the work. That is what the photocopy sequence is doing. It takes the century of the conveyor belt, where untouched by human hands was a boast, and plays it as a stop-motion made with photocopies, so that the degrading image is the argument, frame by frame.
A painting of a thing that was said to bear the face of God. Theophanes rides out from Constantinople with his torch-bearers and chanters, the river ahead of him and the domes behind. The whole film happens on panels like this one, which is the argument: we are being shown a history of images in the language of images.
The cloth is handed over, painted in the flat geometric fold-convention of the icon — and where the audience expects a face there is only the faintest ghost of one. An icon of an icon, deliberately almost empty.
The Emperor, his two sons and the co-emperor examine the textile together. Three of them lean back; one leans in, lit from within. The sons see nothing but an outline. The co-emperor sees eyes and ears. The film lets the features ghost in for a single beat — then lets them dissolve.
A baker shapes a loaf the way a baker shapes a loaf every morning. Then his hands fade mid-gesture and the bread goes on changing by itself. It becomes a mid-century sliced loaf in wax paper, and is duplicated. Above it the words soften from not by human hands to untouched by human hands.
Five identical loaves travel as offerings. The workers are in blue coveralls with cracked gold leaf behind their heads, hands raised in the orans position. A gloved hand reaches for an incoming loaf and fades before it touches. The belt does not pause.
The panel becomes an icon of a single open hand. A photocopier lid comes down — the hand closing it fades — and the image is copied, and copied again, until it dissolves into halftone noise and then into chunky pixels. That is the seam where the analogue becomes the digital, played as a stop-motion.
Two tech workers in hoodies and lanyards kneel on either side of a laptop, haloed, hands raised in the same orans position as the factory workers. On the screen is a hyperreal Byzantine icon of a hand, suspiciously perfect. It has six fingers. Was it made by AI?
The image generated on the screen breaks into gold pixels, and the pixels reorganise into a hand. It is the same hand.
Roland Betancourt is a historian of Byzantine art and its afterlives in contemporary culture. The Dan David Prize selection committee described him as “a highly creative cultural thinker whose expansive research offers unique perspectives on the Byzantine empire as much as on Disney parks and the modern world, and whose work has reshaped the discipline of art history.”
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.