Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of When the Wind Blows
1986 · Jimmy T. Murakami · When the Wind Blows on Sightlines
Jim takes the doors off their hinges and leans them against the wall at the angle the pamphlet prescribes. He is pleased with the work. Hilda is worried about the paintwork. Hold that image, because everything the Bloggses do from here will be exactly like it: careful, obedient, skilled, and attached to nothing at all.
Gilles Deleuze wrote two books about cinema that turn on one idea. Most films run on what he called the movement-image: someone sees a situation, does something about it, and the situation changes. Threat, response, resolution. It's also how most people believe a life works. Deleuze thought that circuit snapped after the Second World War, because the war produced things no action could answer, and a different cinema came out the other side, one in which people mostly look, wait, and endure. He called the hinge the crisis of the action-image. The symptom is plain: a character can no longer react adequately to what they perceive.
What makes When the Wind Blows stranger, and much harder, than its gentle surface suggests is that both regimes are in the same cottage.
Jim and Hilda are still living inside the movement-image, and their evidence is good. Their war was the Blitz, and the Blitz had a shape. A siren, a shelter, a morning of clearing up, the neighbours, the wireless, the authorities who eventually turn up. That is Deleuze's large-form action-image almost by the book: a situation big enough to enclose you, which calls out a response, and the response counts for something. The Bloggses aren't stupid. They're running the right software on the wrong war.
Deleuze has a good term for the way they hold that war: sheets of past. Not a dated flashback, a memory with a year stamped on it, but a whole region of the past you move around inside. The Blitz isn't something Jim remembers. It's the room he's standing in.
Into the gap where thinking should go, the film puts paper. Deleuze argued that when the sensory-motor link goes slack, clichés rush in to fill it, and a cliché in his strict sense is a ready-made link between what you see and what to do. The civil-defence leaflets are that, industrially produced. Jim reads them aloud the way a man reads instructions he fully intends to follow properly. The doors leaned at their prescribed angle are the film's argument compressed into an object: correct procedure with nothing behind it. Deleuze would call the leaflet a mark, a thing that means something only because of the habit-chain it belongs to. Behind this door is safety. The film spends its whole length cutting that chain while the couple keep pulling on it.
Murakami's specific invention is what makes the cruelty land. Rather than paint the cottage as flat backgrounds, the production built it: physical miniature rooms with real depth, real furniture, real props, with the hand-drawn cel characters composited into them. The camera can push in, track, crane, drift through kitchen and parlour like a live-action camera. The effect is almost too apt to be an accident. The house is solid. The people are pencil. Crockery has weight, the wallpaper takes light, and Jim and Hilda are soft coloured lines moving across a world more materially present than they are. When the decline starts, the set is what survives.
After the flash there is a stretch of false relief. They've done everything the state asked. Now there is nothing left to do, and the film crosses over into the other cinema. Deleuze's name for this is the pure optical and sound situation: the moment where a character, and we with them, can only look and listen, because no action is available. The person who does that he calls a seer. Jim and Hilda become seers without ever noticing they've stopped being agents. The running time fills with dead time — tea, tidying, lying down, the everyday held open long past the point where it advances anything. Deleuze found that in the neorealists, who found it in rubble. Briggs and Murakami find it in a Sussex kitchen.
What we watch instead of plot is a slope. Deleuze kept a term for this in his account of naturalism: the line of slope, an irreversible downward run toward exhaustion and death where every scene sits lower than the one before. The mise-en-scène takes the slope in step with the bodies. Dust, disorder, a tidy home coming apart at the same rate its owners do. That structure is inherited fairly directly from The Plague Dogs, which had already proved a British animated feature could refuse consolation start to finish and be better for it.
By the last act the film is barely showing events at all. It's showing postures. Deleuze's late cinema of the body is about exactly this: a film that gives up on action and hands you attitudes instead, the way a person sits, the tiredness in a shoulder, duration carried in a body rather than a plot. Peggy Ashcroft's Hilda fretting about the mess and about propriety while her body fails is not a scene of anything happening. It's a gest, in Deleuze's sense: a posture that exposes an entire social relation. Hilda's gest is housekeeping as decency. John Mills's Jim has the other one, trust — the bearing of a man who believes the authorities are on their way, held until it becomes the most frightening thing on screen.
None of this would cut if the film argued. It never does. The pressure comes entirely from what we know and they don't, which is Deleuze's thirdness, the relation-image: meaning that sits in no single shot but in the relation the audience holds across them. Nothing on screen says the doors won't work. We say it. That's why the film can stay so soft-spoken; the horror has been outsourced to us, and we perform it on ourselves for the whole running time. The War Game had lit the same fuse twenty years earlier, staging nuclear attack through mundane British domestic detail and quoting real civil-defence advice back at itself. Briggs weaponizes it with a couple you'd be glad to have next door.
The one place the film raises its voice is the blast, where the domestic idiom shatters into collage, archival-looking imagery, colour that has nothing to do with the pencil world. That's Deleuze's any-space-whatever in its disconnected mode: space broken into affective fragments that no longer join into a place you could act in. It lasts seconds. Then the kettle again.
The sound sits at a deliberate slant. Bowie's title song and Roger Waters's score are modern, adult, apocalyptic music laid across two people whose frame of reference stopped in 1945. Image and sound are in different decades, and the gap is the content. The soundtrack knows what the pictures don't. The device comes straight from Dr. Strangelove closing on "We'll Meet Again" over the mushroom clouds, but Kubrick used it as a punchline and Murakami uses it as an elegy.
The rest of the pedigree is a studio. TVC London, producer John Coates, Briggs again after The Snowman, which supplied the soft coloured-pencil texture and the roving dimensional camera gliding through a hand-drawn interior. This film spends that charm as capital. Further back, Yellow Submarine founded the TVC house style of flat graphic characters set against constructed depth; Murakami takes the tension literally and builds the depth out of model sets. Watership Down had already proved the British adult animated tragedy could exist at feature length, and licensed the grief.
What did it do to the art? It found the smallest possible scale for the largest possible subject and proved the smallest hit harder. The 1980s nuclear cycle mostly went big — The Day After, Threads, cities and crowds and collapse. This one keeps two voices and one cottage. It also settled an argument about animation. Two years later Grave of the Fireflies made the same case in Japan, and the case was easier to make for having been made here: a drawn film can hold grief without aiming a single line of irony at its own characters.
The question it leaves open is the uncomfortable one. Jim is not a fool. He does what he was told, by people he had every historical reason to trust, using the skills that saved him once. What would you have done instead, and how would you know your own instructions weren't a leaflet? Watch his hands next time through. Every gesture Jim makes is beautifully executed and belongs to a film that ended in 1945.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Jim builds the 'inner core or refuge' by leaning doors against a wall at the angle the civil-defence pamphlets prescribe: a complete, competent, correctly executed action whose inadequacy is written into the flimsy geometry of what it produces.
- consciousness of clichés — The government leaflets supply a ready-made link between what the Bloggses see and what to do; the film's 'Protect and Survive' irony consists of watching the couple physically enact the instructions with complete faith.
- mark — The leaflet and the door function as objects meaningful only through their customary chain — siren means shelter, shelter means morning, authorities mean rescue — a chain the film severs while the couple keep pulling on it.
- the relation-image (thirdness) — The dramatic engine is irony held by the audience: 'the audience understands what the Bloggses cannot.' No shot states the shelter will fail; the meaning lives in the relation the viewer holds across the images.
- large-form action-image — The couple's WWII frame of reference — Blitz, shelter, stoicism, the authorities arriving — is a global situation that calls out a decisive collective response, which is the form they mistakenly believe they are still inside.
- sheets of past — They treat the coming attack as a repeat of the Blitz; their 'romantic memories of World War II' function as a region of past they live inside rather than a dated flashback.
- pure optical and sound situations — After the flash and the false relief, every civil-defence instruction has been carried out and no action remains; the couple can only wait, look, and listen inside the ruined cottage.
- the seer (voyant) — Jim and Hilda spend the second half enduring radiation sickness rather than acting on it — watchers of their own decline who never register that they have stopped being agents.
- dead time (temps mort) — The unhurried cutting built around routines — tea, chores, reading the leaflets, going to bed — continues unchanged after the blast, holding the everyday open long past the point where it advances anything.
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — The film is organised as a slow decline curve — preparation, flash, false relief, long attrition — with dust and disorder overtaking the once-tidy home in step with the bodies, a structure inherited from The Plague Dogs' refusal of consolation.
- cinema of the body — With no action left, the film consists of attitudes and postures: Ashcroft's Hilda fretting about mess and propriety while her body fails, Mills's Jim keeping up his routines through physical deterioration.
- the gest — Jim's posture of faith in 'the authorities' and Hilda's housekeeping-as-decency expose a whole class and generational relation to the British state without either character ever articulating it.
- any-space-whatever (disconnected) — The blast abandons the domestic idiom for a violent shift of imagery and colour, collage and archival-style textures — the register deliberately fractures into fragments that no longer compose an actionable space.
- audiovisual disjunction — Bowie's title song and Roger Waters's score are modern adult apocalyptic music set against a couple whose frame of reference is 1945; the soundtrack occupies a present the characters cannot hear, a device descending from Dr. Strangelove's 'We'll Meet Again'.