window to the soul

Man With a Movie Camera offered a refreshingly simple outlook on life. One interesting motif I noticed while watching the film was the repetitious scenes of people cleaning themselves. Crowds of commoners gathered at the beach to wade in the water. Children and men feverishly scrubbed their skin with water from a trough or a pump. Some women modestly cleansed their faces within their own homes, while others received pampering facials at the spa. Everyone, from all social classes and walks of life, partakes in some sort of cleaning ritual. Yet these scenes were frequently juxtaposed with scenes of filth. Men, laboring in the factories, wiped the soot and sweat from their brow. Women smeared their bodies with mud (true, to soften their skin, but still) while their children ran about in the dirt. Viewed panoramically, the streets appeared relatively clean and well-maintained, but the film was sprinkled with shots of the homeless, sleeping in rags on benches, parked on sidewalks littered with trash. The shots of people sleeping, especially of the young woman in the beginning of the film, seemed very intimate, and a bit intrusive. I feel like the shot of the blinking of the woman's eye switching to the shot of the camera's eye, and again to the shot of the flickering blinds of the window pretty much summed up how the camera is like the eye because it serves as a means, or window, through which we can view the soul and the human experience.