In a well-known passage from his “Work of Art" essay, Walter Benjamin suggests that the film camera can record aspects of the moving body that go unnoticed in ordinary perception. "The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine," he writes, "yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal.” In unthinkingly reaching for a spoon, we are functionally unaware of our body's movement in space, but cinematographic recording never fails to pick up the tiny twitches of the index finger, the anticipatory narrowing of the eyes, the torso's subtle lean forward.
Considering two sequences of ordinary household labor in De Sica's Umberto D and Bresson's Mouchette, this video essay demonstrates the role that such habitual gestures -walking, sitting, reaching, smoking cigarettes, lighting matches, washing dishes-have in creating an impression of reality in postwar European art cinema.