Sightlines · a concept

naturalism

the impulse-image *regime* (distinct from realism): an originary world doubling a real milieu.

On screen: a world of pure drives erupting beneath the social surface

Belle de Jour (1967) — Buñuel films a world of pure drives running under polite life; the film withholds psychology entirely, presenting compulsion as fact rather than motivated response — Deleuze's exemplary cinema of…
The Exterminating Angel (1962) — A world of pure drives breaking through the social surface; Buñuel is Deleuze's exemplary naturalist
Greed (1924) — Adaptation of Norris's McTeague (via Zola): a deterministic world of pure drives erupting beneath the social surface
The Young and the Damned (1950) — A world of pure drives erupting beneath the social-problem surface; the flat, unpitying staging of cruelty
Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) — Fetishism, cruelty and murder are filmed with the same plain gray lucidity as a dinner, exposing appetite and decay as the real substance under provincial bourgeois manners.
Pandora's Box (1929) — the unmoralizing fatalistic descent; catastrophe accumulates around Lulu's innocence with no editorial frame of punishment or redemption
L'Âge d'or (1930) — A world of pure drives (hunger, sex, aggression, death) erupting beneath the impeccably maintained bourgeois social surface
Freaks (1932) — A world of pure drives erupting beneath the ordinary social life of the circus backstage — eating, flirting, gossiping — until they declare themselves.
Scarface (1932) — The realistic crime story cracks open to reveal pure drive beneath the social surface; the incest undercurrent and killing of his own blood erupting through the Prohibition crust.
Obsession (1943) — Cain-via-Zola fatalism where lust and money pull ordinary people to ruin; descends directly from Renoir's La Bête humaine, Deleuze's own naturalism exemplar, on which Visconti's apprenticeship draws
The Lost Weekend (1945) — The film takes the social-problem picture's furnished world — brother, girlfriend, apartment, neighborhood bar — and lets pure drive erupt through it, treating addiction as 'compulsive…
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) — the film treats lust and homicide as drives erupting beneath the respectable surface of a roadside marriage, in the lineage of Cain's hardboiled source
Black Narcissus (1947) — The palace as a world of pure drives — heat, eroticism, appetite — erupting beneath the nuns' disciplined social surface
Brute Force (1947) — Munsey's sadism as bureaucratic, self-controlled appetite erupting beneath a surface of bourgeois refinement: the record player and ordered surfaces of his office, and the beating administered while…
Odd Man Out (1947) — Beneath the drab social surface, pure appetite: Shell the scavenging bird-fancier negotiating Johnny's value with the priest, Newton's Lukey wanting his eyes for a painting, Hartnell's barman wanting…
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) — The film descends from Stroheim’s Greed (in the lineage), Deleuze’s own paradigm of naturalism; the social surface cracks to expose pure drive underneath.
White Heat (1949) — a world of pure drives erupting beneath the procedural/social surface; the picture runs Cody's pathology against the cops' rational pursuit
The Asphalt Jungle (1950) — The dossier's 'sociological sympathy' and Maddow's social-realist screenplay present a world of drives erupting beneath the social/criminal surface, in the lineage of literary naturalism
Forbidden Games (1952) — The Dollé and Gouard families' venal feud erupting through the surface of Christian ritual — funerals, insults, the graveyard brawl — adults performing the forms of mourning without feeling.
Gate of Hell (1953) — a Zola-like world of raw drive erupting beneath the formalized aristocratic surface of the Heian court
Él (1953) — The bourgeois-Catholic surface of an ordered household with ecclesiastical décor, beneath which pure drive erupts; Buñuel treats respectability as pathology's natural habitat.
East of Eden (1955) — A world of pure drives erupting beneath the moral surface of the valley; Cal as appetite seeking a downward slope
The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) — A world of pure drives (addiction, gambling, guilt) erupting beneath the melodrama's social surface, the whole milieu running down toward exhaustion.
Written on the Wind (1956) — Beneath the glossy Texas-oil surface, a world of pure drives erupting; Mitch the geologist reads the ground as Sirk reads the family
Nazarín (1959) — Beneath the Porfiriato's social order the film exposes a world of drives — the prostitute's crime, the possessive loves of the two disciples, the dying woman who wants her lover instead of heaven.
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) — Violet's Encantadas monologue: baby sea turtles devoured alive by birds, told as the face of God — a world of raw drives erupting beneath the social order
Eyes Without a Face (1960) — the patrician surgeon and ordered clinic as a respectable surface beneath which a world of pure drive keeps erupting
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) — Beneath the sitcom-flat florist-shop surface, the film exposes a world of pure compulsive drives (the eating plant, the masochist, the flower-eater) — Deleuze's Zola-lineage naturalism in comic form.
The Skeleton of Mrs. Morales (1960) — A world of drives running beneath the social surface: pious wife, gossiping neighbourhood, respectable husband, and underneath all of it appetite and cruelty observed without moralizing.
The Young One (1960) — Buñuelian anti-melodrama: a false rape charge, a lynch mob, a child endangered by an older man, systematically drained of easy affect so that drives erupt beneath the social surface of preserve…
Viridiana (1962) — the realist drama peeled back to expose drives writhing under the religious and class surface — Buñuel as Deleuze's paradigm naturalist
Onibaba (1964) — A world of pure drives presented amorally; desire and violence rendered continuous with the wind-thrashed grass rather than set apart as ethical acts
Repulsion (1965) — Carol's androphobia presented as a drive erupting beneath the social surface, with no clinical diagnosis or backstory supplied
Night of the Living Dead (1968) — a world of raw drives erupting beneath the social surface; Romero strips the zombie of voodoo causation and refuses to explain it
They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) — Adapted from McCoy's hardboiled 1935 novel within the American naturalist tradition of Cain and his peers; an originary world of drives wearing the ballroom's clothes.
Tristana (1970) — A placid provincial-Catholic surface (bells, cassocks, the parlor) under which nothing but appetite and possession operates; Buñuel refuses music or emphasis so the drives never announce themselves…
Carnal Knowledge (1971) — A world of pure drives erupting beneath the buttoned-up social surface; Feiffer/Nichols expose appetite churning under the polite mid-century rituals
Even Dwarfs Started Small (1971) — A world of pure drives — grabbing, breaking, consuming — erupting beneath the institution's social surface, refusing satirical or redemptive meaning
Macbeth (1971) — Shingleton's lived-in Dark Age Scotland — smoky halls, animal pens, mud everywhere, servants and dogs and feasts surrounding atrocity, so that horror erupts inside a fully material world of appetites
Wake in Fright (1971) — The hunt sequence, lit only by spotlights and headlamps and using real licensed-cull footage, shows a world of pure drives erupting through the social surface of a working mining town.
Deliverance (1972) — Boorman uncovers a world of pure drives erupting beneath the civilized surface, the structure of Deleuze's naturalism chapter (Stroheim/Buñuel).
Frenzy (1972) — The Covent Garden market of appetite — eating, fruit, consumption, disposal — presented as a world of pure drives under the social surface
Last Tango in Paris (1972) — Via Pasolini's Accattone, a world of raw drive and degradation beneath the bourgeois surface; the butter/sodomy sequence as eruption of pure appetite
The Holy Mountain (1973) — A world of pure drives erupting beneath the social surface rather than dramatic realism; excrement transmuted to gold as the film's founding operation
The Night Porter (1974) — Controlling idea is closer to Sadean master/victim and Freudian repetition compulsion than melodrama — a world of pure drives erupting beneath postwar Viennese manners.
The Phantom of Liberty (1974) — Flagellation watched by Carmelite monks, an incestuous seduction, a lecture on the arbitrariness of sexual taboo, sadomasochism — drives erupting under the bourgeois surface, staged as household…
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) — A world of pure drives erupting beneath the social surface; the cannibal household as Zola-style naturalism, no psychology or backstory, only instinct
Fox and His Friends (1975) — The dossier names it outright: 'a modern naturalist tragedy in melodramatic dress,' with Franz Biberkopf borrowed from Döblin as the decent man ground down by a merciless social order.
The Stepford Wives (1975) — The Men's Association's predatory drive to abolish and replace women erupting beneath the respectable suburban surface
In the Realm of the Senses (1976) — A world of pure drives (jealousy, appetite, pain) breaking through the decorous 1936 inn-world of geisha song and kimono.
Insiang (1976) — Beneath the social surface of the slum — laundry, neighbours, the water pump — the film exposes a world of pure drives: appetite, possession, sexual violence.
Eraserhead (1977) — The exposed, uncontrollable biological body (the creature) as the irreducible source of horror, extending Browning's Freaks — drives erupting beneath the social surface rather than naturalistic…
Sorcerer (1977) — The four prologues (political violence, financial crime, terrorism, organized crime) present a world of drives erupting beneath the social surface, converging on an oil town where the men are trapped…
In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) — Beneath the social surface of 1978 Frankfurt (speculation, television, arcade offices) the film exposes a world of pure drive and appetite; the prologue's astrological fatalism sits in ironic tension…
Midnight Express (1978) — A world of pure drives (craving, decay, brutality) erupting beneath the polite surface; the Zola/Stroheim/Buñuel/Losey lineage of drives sliding toward death
Alien (1979) — A world of raw drives erupting beneath the social surface — both the creature and the Company treat the body as a vehicle for an elementary urge.
Woyzeck (1979) — Büchner's anti-romantic project filmed as a world of pure drives (hunger, jealousy, institutional appetite) erupting beneath the social surface
Altered States (1980) — A world of pure drive revealed beneath the social surface — explicitly prefigured by Forbidden Planet's 'monsters from the id,' the unconscious externalized as lethal force
Pixote (1980) — A world of pure drives beneath the bureaucratic and legal surface; the absence of any moral climb-out
Escape from New York (1981) — A prison governed by drives and degradation, sloping irreversibly toward death — the decayed-future America the synth score world-builds without dialogue.