Whose Hands, Whose Toil: The Subjective Camera and the Alienated Body

By Osman Arslan Film History, Cinematography, Directing January 4, 2026

The crispness of the bill is the first thing you notice. A counterfeit 500-franc note passes from one hand to another in the opening moments of Robert Bresson’s L’Argent (1983), and the camera observes not the faces of the transactors but the transaction itself. It isolates the gesture, transforms it into a purely mechanical, almost sacred, ritual. The hands are not expressive; they are instruments, components in a chain of cause and effect that will unwind with grim inevitability. This is the cinema of the detached fragment, where the body is disassembled into its constituent parts, each part a clue to a spiritual state. But what happens when the camera refuses this fragmentation? What if, instead of abstracting the hand, it stays with the whole, weary body? Consider Arati (Madhabi Mukherjee) in Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963), walking door to door in the sweltering heat of Calcutta, a fledgling saleswoman. Here, the camera does not detach. It follows, it breathes with her, its handheld instability mirroring her fatigue and apprehension. It immerses us in the oppressive materiality of her labor.

These two moments, separated by two decades and half a world, reveal a profound schism in how cinema has used the subjective camera to depict labor under capitalism. They invite us into a critical space where we must ask what, precisely, the camera’s proximity to the body accomplishes. My contention is that while an influential strain of Western cinematic subjectivity, seen in the work of Bresson and later echoed in Barry Jenkins’ haptic modernism, mechanizes the laboring body into a transcendent or fragmented icon of resistance, effectively evading the granular misery of capitalism’s grind, a contrary approach found in Ray’s humanism and fused with Chantal Akerman’s radical minimalism traps embodiment in inexorable, diegetically immersive cycles. This latter tradition challenges the myth of individualistic liberation, exposing labor not as a process to be aesthetically overcome but as an inescapable material condition. In this cinematic dialogue, the body is not a site of potential escape but the very terrain of its impossibility.

The Detached Icon versus the Immersed Body

At the heart of Bresson’s late-career masterpiece, L’Argent, is a radical depersonalization. Drawing on his Jansenist-inflected worldview, Bresson creates a world governed by an invisible and unforgiving grace, or the lack thereof. His use of the camera is not subjective in the conventional sense of a first-person point of view; rather, it creates what Gilles Deleuze termed an "any-space-whatever," a disconnected, fragmented space where actions exist independent of psychological motivation. When the protagonist, Yvon, handles tools, cash, or eventually, a weapon, the camera frames his hands with an ascetic precision. These shots are not about conveying his experience. They convert his body into a series of synecdoches, icons of a soul caught in a deterministic trap. This is a form of mechanized transcendence. The physical labor, whether it is the work of an oil delivery man or the grim business of murder, is stripped of its sweat and toil. It becomes a clean, diagrammatic representation of a spiritual fall. The camera’s focus on the fragment, the hand, the foot on a pedal, the bill sliding across a counter, detaches the body from the messy, lived experience of capitalism and elevates it into a purely moral or spiritual problem. The alienation is metaphysical, not material.

Satyajit Ray offers a powerful counterpoint from the developing world. In Mahanagar, made twenty years prior, the camera’s subjectivity is rooted not in spiritual abstraction but in physical exhaustion. As Arati begins her job selling knitting machines, Ray’s camera, wielded with a new, almost documentary-like freedom for him, sticks with her. When she walks through the unfamiliar, crowded lanes of Calcutta, the handheld frame trembles slightly, registering the uneven pavement and the press of the crowd. We feel the humidity and the draining effect of the sun. The perspective shots from Arati’s point of view, looking up at imposing doorways or facing dismissive housewives, are not fragments; they are immersive links that forge an empathetic bond between her body and our own. In the spirit of André Bazin’s belief in the camera’s power to reveal the real, Ray’s subjective style anchors us in the lived reality of navigating a patriarchal, capitalist city for the first time as a working woman. The labor is not an icon but an experience. Where Bresson’s camera dissects the body to diagnose the soul, Ray’s camera inhabits the body to register the socio-economic pressures exerted upon it. This is not transcendence; it is entrapment within a system whose weight is felt in every step, in every bead of sweat. The critical perspective offered by scholars like Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who analyzed the anxieties of the new middle class in post-Nehruvian India, finds its perfect visual corollary here: the dream of upward mobility is constantly burdened by the physical cost of its pursuit.

Haptic Impasse and Lyrical Escape

This dichotomy between immersive drudgery and aestheticized resistance intensifies when we turn to two filmmakers of a later generation: Chantal Akerman and Barry Jenkins. In Je tu il elle (1974), Akerman, as the unnamed protagonist, performs a series of domestic actions within a spartan room. The most notorious of these is the scene where she eats sugar from a paper bag with her bare hands for days, followed by a sequence where she methodically rearranges the furniture. Akerman’s camera, almost always static and fixed, turns labor into a structuralist event. The long, unblinking takes refuse to offer psychological interiority or narrative progression. Instead, they insist on the pure materiality of the act. The repetitive sound of her hand scraping sugar or the screech of a bed frame being dragged across the floor becomes the entire sensory world. This is labor as futile, non-productive-capitalist drudgery turned inward. It is a haptic impasse. The viewer is not invited to empathize but to endure. In the tradition of Rosalind Krauss's thinking on the index, the film presents the body’s traces not as symbols but as raw, physical evidence of time spent, of energy expended to no end. Akerman’s subjective gaze indicts the very notion of productive labor by presenting its domestic, un-waged counterpart as an existential trap, a form of self-consumption.

Contrast this with the haptic cinema of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016). Jenkins’ camera is obsessed with the textures of his protagonist Chiron’s world, a quality that critics have rightly celebrated for its sensuous immediacy. In the film’s final third, a grown Chiron has built a life as a drug dealer in Atlanta. Jenkins renders this labor through a series of tactile, lyrical close-ups: the glint of his gold grills, the leather of his car’s interior, the rough texture of a blunt, the slow-motion drift of smoke. This is an embodiment born of survival in America’s informal economies. However, where Akerman uses haptics to register a dead end, Jenkins uses them to create a kind of romanticized armor. The cinematic language, with its lush colors, intimate focus, and soulful soundtrack, elevates Chiron’s hardened body into an icon of resilient masculinity. The labor of drug dealing, a dangerous and alienating reality, is aesthetically transformed into a performance of selfhood. While this creates a profoundly moving portrait of a man forging an identity against impossible odds, it also, in a way, provides an aesthetic escape from the grim mechanics of his trade. Jenkins’ lyrical subjectivity allows the viewer to find beauty and grace within the oppressive structure, a poetic resistance that Akerman’s project explicitly denies. For Akerman, there is no beauty to be found in the scrape of the sugar bag; for Jenkins, there is a whole world in the way light hits a gold tooth.

A Shared Inheritance: Silent Gestures and Modernist Eyes

This divergence in approach is not a historical accident but the result of drawing from different, though occasionally overlapping, cinematic lineages. Both traditions find roots in the silent era’s initial, heady explorations of what a subjective camera could do. Early theorists like Marie Epstein saw the potential for the camera to act as a bodily extension, to render the physical and psychological sensations of a character directly. The classic example is the "unchained camera" in F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), which stumbles and weaves to convey the doorman’s drunkenness and despair. Ray’s work in Mahanagar feels like a direct evolution of this principle, applying Murnau’s empathetic mobility to the specific context of Indian urbanization. He harnesses the realist potential of the subjective shot to create a social document, a cinematic humanism deeply indebted to both Italian Neorealism and this older, silent-era grammar of embodied experience.

Bresson and Akerman, conversely, belong to a more modernist, post-New Wave lineage. Theirs is a cinema of interrogation, not immersion. While the French New Wave toyed with subjective shots, it was often with a Brechtian self-awareness, a desire to deconstruct the illusion. Bresson refines this impulse, stripping it of all playfulness. His camera's perspective isn't meant to make us feel what the character feels; it is, in a Bordwellian sense, a rigorous formal system designed to guide our perception toward a pre-ordained intellectual and spiritual conclusion. Akerman takes this even further. Her long takes are a direct challenge to the consumable, action-oriented editing of classical cinema. Her camera’s gaze is analytical, even confrontational. It shares a heritage with the structuralist-materialist films of the 1970s, which sought to expose the apparatus of cinema itself. This is a subjectivity born of post-1968 European skepticism, one that is deeply suspicious of the easy empathy peddled by more conventional films. The camera does not offer a window into a soul, but rather presents a body as a problem, a site of social and political forces. The Western path, in this sense, leads to a more abstract, cerebral form of subjectivity, while the Eastern path pursued by Ray remains committed to a grounding in sensual, social reality.

The Gender of Toil

Ultimately, this formal divide exposes a political one, most acutely around the question of whose labor is rendered visible and how. A feminist and intersectional lens, in the spirit of bell hooks' work, reveals that the films that most resolutely refuse aesthetic escape are those centered on female labor. In Mahanagar, Arati’s entry into the workforce is not merely an economic necessity; it is a profound disruption of the patriarchal order of the Bengali home. Her labor becomes the engine of her liberation and, paradoxically, a new form of confinement. The subjective camera forces us to experience the anxieties and small triumphs of this journey from a specifically female perspective, subverting what Laura Mulvey famously identified as the male gaze. We are not looking at Arati; we are walking with her, facing the world as she does. Her bodily revolt against domesticity and workplace harassment is rendered through a camera that affirms her presence and her struggle.

Similarly, Akerman’s Je tu il elle presents a radical vision of unwaged domestic labor as a site of existential crisis and queer desire. The protagonist’s endless, repetitive tasks in her room are a visceral protest against the invisibility of such work. When she finally leaves the apartment and engages in a long, intimate sexual encounter with another woman, the film connects the preceding bodily alienation to a search for unalienated physical connection. Both Akerman and Ray use the subjective frame to make a political claim: that women’s labor, whether in the public sphere or the private one, is a unique locus of capitalist and patriarchal pressure. The camera’s persistent focus on the female body performing this labor is an act of political testimony.

Compared to this, the labor in Moonlight operates within a different framework. Jenkins’ film is a masterful exploration of Black masculinity and queer identity, yet its depiction of labor is tied to the performance of a specific, hardened male archetype. Chiron’s body becomes a text on which the brutal lessons of his environment are written. The film's lyricism celebrates his survival and the tender soul beneath the armor. This is, without question, a vital and necessary political act. Yet, it remains distinct from the critique of labor seen in Mahanagar and Je tu il elle. The focus remains on the individual’s path toward self-realization within a homosocial world, rather than a systemic critique of labor as a gendered category. The subjective camera serves the poetry of individual becoming, a stark contrast to the collective, materialist critique offered by Ray and Akerman.

In the end, we are left with two fundamentally different philosophies of the camera. One path uses subjectivity to craft icons of resistance, to find a transcendent poetry in the face of degradation. It offers a kind of solace, a belief that the human spirit, through aesthetic representation, can rise above its material conditions. Bresson’s spiritual diagrams and Jenkins’ lyrical bodies both, in their own ways, propose an escape. The other path refuses such consolation. It insists that the camera’s duty is to bear witness to the inescapable, to immerse us in the cycles of toil until we can no longer ignore their crushing weight. Ray’s tired footsteps and Akerman’s scraping spoon offer no catharsis, only the profound, unsettling recognition of a system at work on a body.

Which camera is more honest for our own moment, an age of digital gig work and alienated labor mediated through screens? Perhaps the question is not which is better, but what each reveals about our own desires when we watch. Do we seek a cinema that beautifies our struggle, that assures us of an indestructible inner self? Or do we need a cinema that denies us that comfort, that forces us to sit with the sheer, unglamorous fact of the work itself? As I watch Arati and her husband at the end of Mahanagar, their faces a mixture of fear and fragile hope as they look out at the vast, indifferent city of Calcutta, I find no easy answers. There is only the weight of their shared glance, a subjective look that contains not just their own future, but the unresolved question of all our labors. It is a look that does not conclude the argument but insists that it has only just begun.

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