Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Cabaret
1972 · Bob Fosse · Cabaret on Sightlines
A man is beaten in the street outside the Kit Kat Klub. Inside, on the beat, a cymbal takes the blow.
That cut is the film. It isn't a transition and it isn't a metaphor. It's an argument assembled from two pieces of film that have nothing in common except the instant they were joined. David Bretherton won the editing Oscar for Cabaret and it was the right award, because the edit is where this film does its thinking.
Bob Fosse's invention was a rule, and the rule was a subtraction. The Broadway show worked the usual way: people feel something, so they sing. Fosse and screenwriter Jay Presson Allen threw nearly all of those songs out. What survived is what a paying customer in 1931 Berlin could plausibly have watched from a table. The numbers happen on a stage, for money, in front of Berliners. Sally and Brian never sing their feelings at each other. Singing here is a job.
Take the rule seriously and the film stops being a musical about Nazism and becomes something stranger. Deleuze's name for the basic unit of classical cinema is the action-image: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the situation changes. The musical was the last genre where that circuit ran at full voltage, because there the song was the act — you sang and the world reorganized itself around you. Fosse severs the wire. In Cabaret, nobody can act on what they see. So the film transposes action into spectacle: what cannot be done is instead staged, rouged, and sung. Deleuze calls this transposition the reflection-image, the Figure. It's the exact condition of Joel Grey's Emcee, a creature of no fixed age or gender or morality who responds to a catastrophe by putting on a number about it.
The numbers aren't decoration and they aren't quite plot. They're what Eisenstein called attractions, and Deleuze keeps the term: staged shocks dropped into a film to make a point the drama itself can't carry. "Money" is an attraction. "Mein Herr" is an attraction. Neither advances the triangle of Sally, Brian and Max by an inch, and both are doing more work than the triangle is.
Watch how the bodies are built. Fosse's vocabulary is hunched shoulders, splayed knees, jutting hips, one isolated hand. Nothing about it reads as feeling. It reads as a body arranged to be looked at, and Bretherton's cutting on the musical accent fragments it further into a stockinged leg, a tilted bowler, a grin. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. That's what the Kit Kat choreography is: not dancers expressing themselves, but bodies showing you the terms on which Weimar was buying them. Ugly and beautiful at once, which is the point.
The most famous number turns a habit into a trap. A gorilla in a tutu is a burlesque animal act. You know the chain: this is silly, you're allowed to laugh. Deleuze calls an object that runs in its customary chain a mark, and the anomaly that snaps the chain a demark. The Emcee delivers the demark himself, in the last line of "If You Could See Her," when the gorilla turns out to stand for a Jew. The joke has the structure of the pogrom forming outside: it only works if you've already accepted the premise. Around it, Bretherton is intercutting the beating of a man. Neither the stage nor the street contains the film's meaning. It appears in the collision, which is Soviet montage doing the one job Eisenstein built it for, inside a genre that had never needed it.
This splits the film into two theories of cinema, and Geoffrey Unsworth photographed the split. The club is smoky amber, underlit, faces hard-keyed against pooling shadow, composed for meaning. The daylight exteriors are cool and flat and naturalistic, a world offered for belief in the manner Bazin prized. The horror of Cabaret is that the constructed world is telling the truth about the observed one.
Underneath both, Deleuze would find the impulse-image. Naturalism, in his sense, is a milieu revealed as the crust over an originary world of raw drives: appetite, degradation, a slope that only runs down. Sally has a large appetite and a small talent. Max has money. The club's décor is decayed grandeur and the estate the film visits is a wealthy house on the way out, an ordered world rotting from the inside — crystal-decomposition, in his vocabulary. The boardinghouse and the villa are skins. The Klub is what's under them.
Then the music escapes. In a beer garden, in daylight, a fresh-faced boy sings "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" alone, and the crowd takes it up until the crowd is one thing with one feeling. Deleuze calls a collective rendered as a single affective unit a dividual. The sequence is terrifying precisely because the film has spent an hour teaching you that music lives behind a proscenium. Here it's outside, unframed, and lovely.
The lineage is exact. Dietrich's Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel sang only inside her fiction; Fosse made that a doctrine. The Threepenny Opera brought Brecht and Weill to film, where a song interrupts the action instead of expressing it, and the Emcee is that device given a face. Applause found the squalid labor of the backstage. West Side Story proved choreography could be conceived for a lens and carry tragic weight. Fosse's own Sweet Charity had already rehearsed the whole method in "Big Spender." A Hard Day's Night supplied the jagged, rhythm-driven cutting of live performance, which Fosse disciplined into argument. Downstream, that cut-on-the-beat fragmentation became his signature and then the common grammar of music video and of every musical made since.
What Cabaret did to film as an art: it made the musical number a unit of thought rather than of feeling, and it proved a dying genre could survive by getting leaner, colder and more adult instead of bigger. Eight Academy Awards, and Fosse's Best Director in the same night The Godfather took Best Picture.
One thing to carry into a rewatch. Unsworth almost never gives you a clean view of the stage. He shoots the performers through the orchestra, the haze, the backs of heads, so you are seated in the room among Berliners. The Emcee is playing to them. The question the film never answers is when, exactly, you joined them. Next time, watch the audience.
Concepts in play
- The Figure (reflection-image) — Nobody acts on the rise of Nazism; the film's entire response is staged as cabaret — the Emcee answering catastrophe with a number. Action is transposed into spectacle rather than taken.
- attraction-image — "Money" and "Mein Herr" are inserted staged shocks that advance no plot but carry the film's argument — Eisenstein's montage of attractions imported into a musical.
- the gest — Fosse's deliberately grotesque vocabulary — hunched shoulders, splayed knees, jutting hips, the isolated hand — fragmented by beat-synced cuts into leg, bowler, grin: bodies arranged to expose a social relation, explicitly Brechtian per the film's debt to Weimar political theater.
- demark — The gorilla in a tutu runs as familiar burlesque habit until "If You Could See Her" equates her with a Jew — the anomaly that snaps the customary chain and forces interpretation.
- montage-dialectical-soviet — The beating of a man intercut with the Emcee's stage act; the slap of a Nazi falling together with a cymbal crash. The meaning exists in neither shot, only in the collision.
- dividual — "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" begins as an angelic solo by one youth at a beer garden and swells as the crowd takes it up — the gathering rendered as a single affective unit.
- originary-world — The Kit Kat Klub as the savage world of drives beneath the naturalistically staged boardinghouse, Brian's rooms and the von Heune estate; Sally's "large appetite and small talent," decadence treated as intoxicating and doomed.
- crystal-decomposition — The club's décor of decayed grandeur and the wealthy von Heune estate: an ordered, moneyed world photographed as already rotting from within as Weimar curdles.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The stage songs of the Broadway book musical (where singing is the act that changes the situation) are cut; what remains are numbers performed for money that alter nothing, while history accumulates at the edges of the frame.