Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Black Cat, White Cat
1998 · Emir Kusturica · Black Cat, White Cat on Sightlines
There is a pig eating a car. It isn't a wreck in a scrapyard. It's an old car parked by the Danube, and the pig works through it slowly, like an animal with all afternoon free, while the people around it chase money, brides and each other. Kusturica keeps cutting back to it. The pig never hurries, and it never stops.
Keep that pig in mind, because it holds the whole film in one joke. Black Cat, White Cat is a farce about appetite: for money, for cocaine, for love, for a party that won't end. It is also about the machine that appetite drives. Matko, a small-time hustler, botches a smuggling deal and ends up in debt to Dadan, a gangster who twitches, sniffs and explodes like a firecracker someone forgot to put out. Dadan names his price. Matko's son Zare will marry Dadan's tiny sister. Zare loves someone else, Ida. The sister has her own ideas. Nobody young wants any of it, so the wedding is on.
What kind of film is this? Deleuze sorts cinema into two broad regimes. In the first, which he calls the movement-image, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, the action creates a new situation, and the editing carries us smoothly from one link to the next. In the second, the time-image, that chain breaks: characters can only watch, and time itself comes to the surface. A lot of the most admired European films of Kusturica's generation live in the second regime. This film throws itself into the first. Every scene here is somebody doing something: a deal, a scheme, a getaway, a lie. Situation, act, new and worse situation. Through the lens of the movement-image, the film's energy stops looking like noise. It turns out to be a principle. In this world, action still works, even if it never works the way anyone planned.
Deleuze is more precise than that, and the precision helps. He separates a "large form" of the action-image, where a huge situation presses until a hero's decisive act transforms it (the western, the epic), from a "small form" that runs the other way. In the small form, a little act opens up a situation that was partly hidden. This is where he puts screen comedy, and he names its key device the index of equivocity: one gesture that could belong to two quite different situations at once. Watch how Kusturica builds the plot on exactly this. The wedding Matko agrees to is a single ceremony that means two things. To the fathers it settles a debt. To the young people it is a trap they have to get out of. Every disguise and swapped arrangement that follows comes from that split. The comedy comes from watching one act tip, at the slightest push, from one meaning into the other.
Then look at the frame. Thierry Arbogast, the cinematographer, came from Luc Besson's glossy thrillers. Here he shoots wide and warm, and he packs the frame with bodies, animals and junk, all in burnished golds and greens. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a system of everything that's in it, and this one is crowded to bursting. The main action in the foreground keeps getting heckled by the background. A goose wanders through. Someone with their own agenda crosses behind the lovers. Deleuze calls the space just past the edge of the frame the relative out-of-field: an adjacent space the frame implies and can reach. In Kusturica, that space doesn't stay offscreen. It walks in, usually carrying a trumpet. The musicians come into the action as if they had been just out of shot the whole time, and the brass never really stops.
There is an old argument in film theory that fits here. André Bazin held that when a scene's power depends on two things really sharing the same space, cutting between them breaks the spell. The film's best gags live on that kind of faith. The animals are real and the stunts are physical. The pig is a pig. We laugh partly because nothing has been faked.
The editing, by Svetolik Zajc, does the other half of the work. Separate lines of action (the debt, the runaway bride, the rival gangsters, the wedding) are cross-cut until they run into each other. That is the convergent parallel montage Deleuze traces back to Griffith, the American way of steering several stories toward one point. Griffith used it for the rescue at the last minute. Kusturica uses it for the pileup.
And the pig? Deleuze has a darker category, the impulse-image, for films where raw drives break through the social surface and drag the world downhill toward ruin. Black Cat, White Cat has those drives in plain sight. Dadan is pure craving. The pig turns metal into lunch. But the slope that should lead to ruin keeps turning into a party. The film takes appetite and decay, the stuff of naturalist tragedy, and plays them as slapstick.
None of this came from nowhere. Time of the Gypsies, written by the same screenwriter, Gordan Mihić, set up the Romani picaresque with its levitations and animal magic. This film replays it as comedy. Underground put a marching brass band right inside the frame and kept the tempo relentless. Here that becomes the default engine. When Father Was Away on Business taught Kusturica to stage a family farce around a celebration and to draw performances from non-professionals, and the cast here, many from Roma communities, carries that forward. Further back are Fellini twice over: Amarcord's crowded frieze of caricatured faces at a communal ritual, and La Strada's on-screen brass melody serving as the film's emotional thread. Behind those stands I Even Met Happy Gypsies, which first filmed the Yugoslav Romani world with local non-professionals, in mud and in Romani. What Kusturica added was the fusion. Folk carnival, Besson's polish and nonstop diegetic music became a single manner, the "Balkan carnival" his name now stands for. It won him the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice.
That leaves a question the film never quite answers. Kusturica made it after the fight over Underground, which was attacked as political apologia, at a time when he spoke of quitting cinema. Black Cat, White Cat drops explicit allegory entirely. Critics have asked whether that was escape or evasion. The movement-image offers a third possibility. Choosing, in 1998, a cinema where people's actions still change their situations may itself be a statement about what a film can still believe in.
When you watch, look past the lovers. Watch the edges of the frame, where the next interruption is waiting. And count the pig's visits.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — A plot driven entirely by action and reaction: Matko's botched smuggling deal leads to a debt to Dadan, the debt leads to the forced marriage, and the marriage leads to escalating schemes. Editing that 'privileges momentum' over contemplative duration.
- action-image-small-form — The farce of 'mistaken arrangements,' disguise and reversal. Small acts keep revealing hidden situations instead of a decisive heroic act transforming a large one.
- index-of-equivocity — The arranged wedding is one act belonging to two situations: debt settlement for the fathers, a trap for Zare (who loves Ida) and Dadan's sister. The disguises and swaps grow out of that split.
- the closed set (cadre) — Arbogast's wide-angle framings 'pack the frame with bodies, animals, and props.' Dense, layered tableaux where background business heckles the foreground drama.
- out-of-field-relative — Musicians 'materializing within the action,' and geese and secondary characters crossing into frame from just past its edges.
- montage-organic-american — Separate lines of action (the debt, the runaway bride, the rival gangsters, the wedding) cross-cut 'until they crash together.' Convergent parallel montage turned from rescue to collision.
- impulse-image — Dadan as 'pure comic id,' twitchy and coke-addled. The pig methodically eating a car. Appetite and decay, the impulse-image's downhill slope, played as slapstick instead of tragedy.