Mano Destra, Italian for “right hand,” is a 1986 Swiss art film in Italian. Cleo Übelmann wrote it, directed it, and starred in it. Shot in black and white, it slows a piece of lesbian erotic objectification on purpose: one woman ties another until rope, posture, and gaze replace the usual grammar of a sex scene. For adult viewers who know BDSM and fetish, this is not a thriller with a dungeon subplot. Bondage is the event. The film is about the politics of looking, and about restraint as a complete experience rather than a lead-in to penetration. The women are adults.
Domination and submission between women sit inside a ceremonial frame. The camera treats tying as labor, intimacy, and composition. Black and white drops the temperature to something like sculpture: body and rope. The “right hand” of the title reads as craft and control, the dominant hand that ties and also writes the scene. Julia Knight, in Women and the New German Cinema, describes the film as exploring what sadomasochism might liberate, while breaking the stock picture of what SM is supposed to look like. B. Ruby Rich, in New Queer Cinema, called it deserving of instant cult status.
Cherry Smyth, in “The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film” (Feminist Review, 1990), placed the images “beyond sex.” She compared them to an ice-cold fruit drink one is forbidden to taste: desire aimed at death, at nothing, and at “utter completeness” at the same time. That reading treats Mano Destra as art that can carry theory, not as a niche porn listing. Images from the film later appeared in the 1988 book The Dominas – Mano Destra, credited to the Cleo Übelmann-Group, which carried the work into print fetish culture. Peter Strickland has named it a favorite and a source for The Duke of Burgundy. Both are European art films that take a female D/s ritual seriously as form.
