Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
2024 · Rungano Nyoni · On Becoming a Guinea Fowl on Sightlines
A road at night, empty in both directions. A car stops. A woman in a Missy Elliott costume, full regalia, still on hours after the party, gets out and finds her uncle lying dead on the tarmac.
That image is the film, and it's worth sitting with before saying anything clever about it. There is a corpse, which is the most urgent thing a story can put in front of you. There is a woman in a costume, which is the most absurd. Rungano Nyoni puts them in one frame and doesn't adjust the lighting, the music, or the acting to tell you which of the two to feel. She holds it.
In most films, a body in a road is a starting gun. Someone sees a situation, and the rest of the picture is that person acting to change it. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and he meant it as a description of an entire century of cinema: perception flows into action, the cutting exists to carry that current, and a situation is something that gets resolved. Shula perceives. Shula does not act. She can't, because what killed her uncle in any sense that matters to this family happened years ago, and everyone at the funeral already knows it. Deleuze's word for what she's standing in is a pure optical situation: an image that arrives with nothing to do attached. His word for her is the seer, the voyant, the character who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher and an endurer. The road is what he called an any-space-whatever, a space that has quit its job as a setting for action and become pure feeling. He found those in the bombed-out lots of postwar Italy. Nyoni finds one in tarmac and headlights.
This vocabulary earns its place because without it the film gets filed as slow. You wait for the confrontation, the scene where Shula stands up in the middle of the funeral and finally says it aloud. It doesn't come. The film isn't withholding a climax. There was never one in the design.
What's there instead is the funeral itself, in its full length. Relatives arrive. Grief is performed on schedule. People eat, sleep on floors, and argue about who owes what. Deleuze had a term for these stretches that the plot doesn't need: dead time, temps mort, the everyday simply held. Most directors cut them. Nyoni builds out of them. And what she's hunting inside them is something Deleuze took from Brecht and called the gest: a posture, an attitude, a way of holding the body that exposes the social arrangement underneath it. When the aunts execute the rites of mourning with real skill for a man the family has agreed not to discuss, the posture is the accusation. No one needs a speech. The bodies are already testifying.
Her specific invention is a matter of timing, and it's harder than it looks. David Gallego's camera holds a composition to the precise point where a rite's beauty and its cruelty are visible at once. Cut a beat early and you have ethnography. Hold a beat too long and you have satire at the expense of people Nyoni plainly loves. She has said the rites are both beautiful and suffocating, and the film refuses to pick. The technique has a pedigree she's open about. Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor proved a locked-off wide tableau held past comfort is a comic instrument. Dogtooth supplied flat affect inside symmetrical framing so that family pathology reads as clinical procedure rather than melodrama. Her own I Am Not a Witch established the grammar, including the trick of anchoring a whole social horror to one absurd symbolic object: the witches' ribbons there, the guinea-fowl costume here.
Deleuze has a small pair of terms for objects that this film uses beautifully. A mark is an object that means by habit, where seeing it tells you what comes next. A demark is the thing that snaps the habit and forces you to interpret. Shula in the Missy Elliott costume beside her uncle's body is a demark of the purest kind, and Nyoni never lets her change clothes quickly enough to let you off. The guinea fowl is the other kind of object, the symbol, the one that condenses the film's organizing relation. A children's television lesson threaded through the film explains that the guinea fowl is the bird that cries out to warn the flock that a predator is near. The title is a process, not a state. On becoming.
Which raises the film's real question: is there a flock? Deleuze argued that modern political cinema doesn't work by representing a people who already exist. It works through the fact that the people are missing, and the filmmaker's task becomes summoning one. The cousins here aren't a movement. They're a few women in a crowded house comparing notes. Sembène's Moolaadé is the exact craft debt, blocking women's collective resistance across communal courtyard space so the group becomes the subject rather than the backdrop, and Nyoni uses that choral framing for the aunts and cousins. A flock is being assembled in real time out of people trained since childhood not to make noise.
The house they're assembling it in is what Deleuze called a crystal in decomposition: an ordered world rotting from inside, where the order and the rot are the same structure. The respectability of this Bemba middle class isn't a lid over the abuse. It's the machinery that keeps it running. Two ancestors meet here. Buñuel's guests in The Exterminating Angel cannot leave the room, and no one can say why; this family cannot say one sentence, and no one can say why. Sembène's Xala dissected bourgeois patriarchal authority through ironic tableaux, and Nyoni is writing in that line, on her own family's ground.
What it does to narrative is show that a reckoning can run entirely on ritual duration, with the revelation distributed across days instead of detonated in a scene. What it does to film is prove that the deadpan-surrealist dialect, long treated as European property, speaks Bemba without becoming either exotic or borrowed. It's too new to have descendants. What it hands forward is the funeral as a whole form.
Watch it again and don't watch Shula. Watch the older women, and what their bodies are doing while they perform the rites correctly. Then ask which of them has been waiting her entire life for somebody to cry out.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations — Shula stops on an empty night road and finds her uncle's body: an image with no action attached to it, since what destroyed this family happened years earlier and cannot be reversed.
- the seer (voyant) — Shula endures the multi-day funeral as a watcher rather than an agent; the confrontation scene the film seems to promise never arrives.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The deserted nocturnal road, a patch of tarmac cut out of darkness by headlights, which serves no action and functions as pure affect.
- dead time (temps mort) — The extended funeral proceedings — mourners arriving, eating, sleeping on floors, arguing over money — which Gallego's camera holds well past the point the plot requires.
- the gest — The aunts performing the Bemba mourning rites with anthropological precision for a man the family refuses to name as an abuser; the ritual posture itself becomes the indictment as the held composition curdles.
- crystal-decomposition — The middle-class Bemba household whose respectability is the very machinery sustaining the buried abuse — the Exterminating Angel and Xala debts, an ordered world rotting from within.
- demark — Shula still in her Missy Elliott costume beside her uncle's corpse: an anomaly that breaks every customary chain the scene sets up and forces interpretation.
- symbol — The guinea fowl from the children's television lesson threaded through the film — the bird that cries out to warn the flock — condensing the film's organizing relation and naming its title as a process.
- the people are missing — The cousins are not a movement but a few women comparing notes inside a crowded funeral house; the warning cry precedes the flock that could hear it, with Moolaadé's choral courtyard framing used for the aunts and cousins.