Sightlines · a concept

impulse image

brute drives tearing fragments from a milieu; naturalism (distinct from realism), governed by entropy.

On screen: compulsion, degradation, appetite, a downward slope toward exhaustion/death

Belle de Jour (1967) — Séverine is driven by a masochistic compulsion she cannot articulate and the film will not explain; Deneuve was directed (as Bresson directed Pickpocket) to perform the drive as pure surface, with a…
The Exterminating Angel (1962) — Compulsion, appetite and degradation erupting beneath the dinner party — morphine, sex, hunger, the slaughtered sheep roasted on burning furniture
Greed (1924) — Trina fondling and finally bathing in her gold coins — not a goal pursued but a drive working the body; Deleuze names Stroheim a founding case
The Young and the Damned (1950) — The whole film organized around drives — hunger, cruelty, lust — rather than reasoned action; Deleuze's own named example
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) — The household's behaviors — Rabour's boot ritual, Monteil's predation, Joseph's brutality — present a world of pure drives erupting beneath the bourgeois social surface; Buñuel is Deleuze's exemplary…
Häxan (1922) — The grave-robbing, the kissing of Satan's posterior, infants and corpses in the ritual: compulsive appetites on a downward slope of degradation
Nosferatu (1922) — Orlok as appetite without a person — rat-like, taloned embodiment of pestilence who feeds and spreads rather than schemes, a pure drive erupting beneath the bourgeois town
La Roue (1923) — The naturalist armature descending from Zola's La Bête humaine — the driver, his engine, and a desire for Norma that Sisif cannot name, circled for hours without being spoken.
Metropolis (1927) — The false Maria's erotic dance before the men and her goading of the workers into a machine-smashing frenzy — raw drive erupting beneath the social order, on an irreversible slope toward the flood
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) — The Woman from the City as pure appetite miming the drowning; the seduction-toward-murder built as a downward slope (line-of-slope) of compulsion beneath the social surface
Pandora's Box (1929) — Lulu as a pre-moral creature of appetite and instinct around whom lust, jealousy and murder erupt as compulsions others can't govern
Un Chien Andalou (1929) — The man drags two grand pianos loaded with rotting donkeys and two roped priests across a room — religion, death and culture hauled by raw appetite
City Girl (1930) — The rough seasonal laborers of the harvest crew, whose appetite and communal disorder strain the marriage nearly to breaking — naturalism inherited from 'Greed', the same ancestor that supplied the…
L'Âge d'or (1930) — Modot's lover driven by an appetite he cannot manage — kicking a dog, slapping the hostess, hurling a plow and burning tree from a window; love as compulsive drive, not a situation acted upon
The Blue Angel (1930) — Rath's methodical destruction by a passion he cannot govern — the naturalist tragedy of a man pulled out of respectability into a world of pure drive
Freaks (1932) — The melodrama's surface (marriage-for-money) is driven from beneath by appetite, possession, and cruelty rather than by reasoned action — drives, not deeds, move the film.
Scarface (1932) — Muni's Tony as a grinning, appetite-driven child-killer who grabs rather than deliberates — silk robes, steel shutters, the coveted moll — never a sensory-motor choice but compulsion.
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — Pretorius as pure appetite, gin in hand, dragging Henry off the wedding night toward forbidden acts of creation on a slope that only runs downward.
Toni (1935) — Drawn from a real crime of passion among immigrant laborers; jealousy and possession erupt beneath the orderly surface of wages, marriage, and work
Orphan's Picnic (1936) — beneath the pastoral picnic runs a layer of pure drive — the 'ravenous' orphans filching food and Donald's temper as a symptom, sloping downward toward exhaustion as the bees mass
The Tale of the Fox (1941) — A feudal court of predators and prey where complaints against Renard accumulate and successive envoys — the bear, the cat, the badger — are dispatched and each mutilated; the post-synchronised…
Cat People (1942) — Irena's condition as a drive rather than a decision: a marriage that cannot be consummated, jealousy and passion as triggers, the caged bird that dies from her proximity, the sketch of a panther…
Obsession (1943) — Gino introduced as a body slumped in the back of a truck — 'pure physical presence before it is character'; appetite and compulsion driving the adultery-and-murder plot beneath the social surface
Scarlet Street (1945) — Chris is driven by an infatuation he cannot interrupt rather than by decisions; Lang's 'deterministic machine in which each of Chris's attempts at love, art, and finally self-assertion only tightens…
The Lost Weekend (1945) — The four-day bender as an appetite running on its own clock: the hidden bottles, the lies, the missed country weekend, the theft of a purse — a dramatic engine that is 'not external conflict but the…
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) — Frank, the drifter governed by appetite — Garfield's restless, sweating physicality; he stays at the diner not by decision but pulled by food and a glimpse of Cora
Pursued (1947) — Dean Jagger's Grant Callum plays the vendetta as 'quietly implacable rather than melodramatic,' and the Callum family is 'simultaneously refuge and threat' — drives erupting beneath the social…
Brighton Rock (1948) — Pinkie acts from compulsion rather than motive: a razor carried like a habit, a flinch of nausea at any touch, a marriage undertaken only to stop a witness's mouth.
Drunken Angel (1948) — Kurosawa withholds the machinery of a gangster picture (no heist, no rise, no criminal enterprise) and substitutes drive and appetite: Matsunaga's return to Okada plays as gravitation, not decision
Macbeth (1948) — Welles opens with the witches molding a clay figure of Macbeth — the protagonist literalized as a thing shaped by malevolent forces; he is pulled toward murder by appetite, not deliberation
Oliver Twist (1948) — The plot's engine is hunger — a boy asking for a second serving of gruel — and the film's world runs on appetite and degradation beneath the parish's social surface
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) — Beneath the adventure plot, greed runs as a compulsion older than reason — Dobbs is driven, not deciding; “the money wants him.” The downward arc to ruin is the impulse-image’s signature.
Criss Cross (1949) — Steve returns to his old neighborhood driven not by a motive but by an appetite he cannot release — an armored-car guard 'rationalizing his way toward annihilation.'
The Queen of Spades (1949) — Walbrook plays Herman as already in the grip of something from the first scene, deliberately unmodulated and escalating by intensification; monomania, not decision, drives every act.
The Set-Up (1949) — The recurring grotesques — the man eating steadily through the carnage, the woman screaming for blood — present the crowd as pure appetite erupting through the ordinary business of a fight night.
White Heat (1949) — Cody as creature of compulsion beneath the heist plot — migraines that fold him double, the casual pistol-shot into the trunk, affection swapping with murder mid-breath
Gun Crazy (1950) — Bart's compulsive gun-love and the couple's downward crime spree dramatize naturalism — pure drives erupting beneath the social surface rather than a sensory-motor problem solved by action
Night and the City (1950) — Fabian's wrestling-promotion scheme presented as compulsion/appetite rather than choice — 'a man engineering his own destruction,' conduct read as symptom of a drive
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) — Each criminal is undone not by villainy or hubris but by a 'recognizably human weakness' — an appetite that pulls him toward ruin (Doc pausing to watch the dancing girl seconds from escape)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) — Stanley as pure appetite (hurling the meat to Stella, the poker/beer/wet-shirt physicality) and Blanche as inward compulsion — drives, not decisions, govern the apartment
The Prowler (1951) — Webb Garwood is not a flamboyant villain but ressentiment made ordinary: an ex-athlete convinced the good life was stolen from him, whose evil grows straight out of everyday envy, and whose object is…
The Lusty Men (1952) — The studio-imposed title over a film whose real subject is appetite for money, glory and escape erupting beneath the sport's commercial surface.
Gate of Hell (1953) — Moritō is not courting Kesa but obeying a consuming, involuntary appetite — pure drive between affection and action, never resolving into goal-directed love
Pickup on South Street (1953) — Skip's mercenary indifference to country and ideology; a world of pure appetite and survival running beneath the anti-communist surface, with Moe selling scraps of information to dodge a pauper's…
The Big Heat (1953) — Vince Stone's sadism played as compulsion and appetite — Lee Marvin's cruelty as impatience, violence as the shortest line to what he wants
The Wages of Fear (1953) — The first-act portrait of Las Piedras: drifters rotting on credit, appetite and degraded nerve shown instead of action, men defined by what they cannot do.
Él (1953) — Francisco acts constantly (courtship, surveillance, accusation, punishment) but his acts answer a drive rather than the situation before him; the film is a portrait of appetite selecting an object…
La Strada (1954) — Quinn's Zampanò as sealed appetite and compulsion — eating, breaking chains, the sudden ungovernable rage that kills Il Matto; drives erupting beneath the social surface
Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954) — Mifune's feral Takezo in the first act — 'physically volcanic,' wide-legged stance, explosive lateral movement, pure appetite and fury before discipline
East of Eden (1955) — Cal driven by a wound he cannot name — the discovery of his living mother — his restless compulsions reading as symptoms of a hidden drive
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) — Ralph Meeker's Hammer as a sneering, venal appetite moving through Bezzerides' sweat-and-labor LA milieu, degrading everyone he touches.
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) — Archibaldo is driven not by decisions but by an appetite seeded in childhood: the music box that convinces him he can kill by wishing, and a lifelong project of becoming a connoisseur of murder…
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) — Frankie is driven by the craving rather than by decision — the cold-turkey lockup where his body burns down the drive shows appetite acting before the man does, between affection and action.
The Night of the Hunter (1955) — Powell as itinerant woman-killer driven by appetite, the switchblade opening inside his coat at the burlesque show — a man rendered as compulsion rather than psychology
Forbidden Planet (1956) — The Id: a drive erupting from beneath a furnished domestic surface, visible only where the crew's blaster fire and force field illuminate it
Written on the Wind (1956) — The Hadleys don't pursue goals; they obey compulsions — Kyle's alcoholism, Marylee's nymphomania, the dread of sterility — appetites read as evidence of a hidden drive
A Face in the Crowd (1957) — Rhodes is driven by appetite rather than intention — 'folksy charm masks a swelling appetite for power,' Betty Lou marking 'the callousness of Rhodes's private appetites' — a character who feeds…
Sweet Smell of Success (1957) — Hunsecker's unexplained, incest-tinged compulsion to destroy his sister's romance; acts that read as symptoms of an appetite for total control he can't name
Cairo Station (1958) — Qinawi's behavior is appetite rather than decision — the dossier's 'nearly unbearable study of sexual frustration' whose violence is produced by poverty, disability and contempt, played by Chahine as…
Nazarín (1959) — Andara's violence, Beatriz's ardor that is 'not entirely spiritual,' and Ujo's hopeless devotion give the film a substratum of appetite and compulsion beneath its religious surface; the fetishized…