Three Colors: White · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man kneels in a Paris Métro tunnel with a comb wrapped in paper pressed to his lips. He is a hairdresser. The comb is the last working tool of his trade, and he isn't cutting anything with it; he's playing "To ostatnia niedziela," a Polish tango from before the war, down a tiled corridor of people who don't know the tune. That's Karol Karol's Paris in one shot. A skill nobody wants, a language he can't speak, and an instrument that's a joke about an instrument.

White gets filed as the light one in the trilogy and left there. It's worth staying, because something specific has come loose in it, and Deleuze happens to have the right name for the broken part.

The standard engine of narrative cinema goes like this: a person perceives a situation, the situation presses, the person acts, the action changes the situation. Deleuze called that arrangement the movement-image, and he argued it stopped working after the Second World War. What came after was full of people who see clearly and can do nothing with what they see. He called the break the crisis of the action-image, and its central figure the seer: someone who watches and endures where a protagonist would act.

The first half of White is exactly that, played for laughs, which almost nobody had tried. Karol's divorce is conducted in French, a language he doesn't have, with a court interpreter standing between him and his own life; his words reach the judge out of another person's mouth. Later Dominique holds a telephone receiver to the bed so he can hear the thing he was divorced for failing to do. Deleuze's term for a scene where a character can only look and listen, with no action available, is a pure optical and sound situation. That phone call is one of the cruellest in cinema. It's also a gag, and the film knows it.

Notice that both scenes work through the ear. Edward Kłosiński's Paris keeps Karol small in the frame, hunched, shot through glass and grilles, blocked as an object other people are discussing. The image gives us his position. The sound gives him information he can't use. Voice keeps coming apart from body: an interpreter's mouth, a lover's bed down a wire, and finally a cry through a hotel door that the staff outside read instantly and correctly. Deleuze traced this split between soundtrack and visible body in Duras and Straub, where it's austere and political. Kieślowski runs it as farce. Three times, the truth arrives through a wall.

Against all that talking, the film's one lyrical image says nothing at all. The frame blooms out: overexposure and diffusion, built in front of the lens and finished in the lab, with no grading suite to add it later. Dominique on the church steps in her wedding dress, and then white swallowing everything. Deleuze has a category for this, lyrical abstraction, the white field as the alternative of the spirit, grace instead of shadow. Kieślowski fills it with an unconsummated marriage. Then he repeats it. The same memory punctures the present again and again, unchanged, and this is where Urszula Lesiak's cutting does something new: the whiteout is both the most beautiful image in the film and its running gag about obsession. A recollection-image is supposed to be a memory the present reaches for and uses. Karol's never converts. It arrives, it blinds him, the film cuts. He can't think with it. He can only be interrupted by it.

Objects do the acting instead. The two-franc coin he keeps as a talisman, hard currency made worthless by a border. The pale stone bust of a woman, which he keeps because he can't keep her, and which the thieves who steal his suitcase smash. Deleuze's naturalism has a name for the part-object charged with compulsive force: fetish. Kieślowski had been granting things this quasi-agency since Dekalog; inside a farce it becomes the whole engine. The plot runs on a coin, a comb, a bust and a suitcase.

He goes home as freight. What he arrives in is a rubbish tip under a wide sky, with Warsaw around it in slush, grey blocks and unfinished construction. Deleuze called spaces like this any-space-whatever: space that has stopped being the setting for an action. This one goes further. It's an originary world, a savage floor showing through under the new market that will shortly hand Karol a desk, a fax and a mobile phone. Kłosiński is precisely the right man to photograph it. He shot Man of Marble handheld inside institutional rooms on available light with no flattering key, and he had already filmed predatory capitalism as greasy physical fact on The Promised Land. He brings both to post-1989 Warsaw. Where Idziak's Blue filters nearly everything, White refuses prettiness and lets white break in on a documentary evenness.

Then the film does its trick. Karol rebuilds the action-image from scratch. He perceives, he acts, and his actions transform the situation completely. Every link in the chain is forged. He buys land on a tip-off, fakes his own death, wills his fortune to the woman who took everything from him, and has her imprisoned for murdering a man who is standing outside her prison with binoculars. Deleuze's forger is the figure who doesn't discover truth but manufactures it, shifting identity as he goes, and his creative principle is the powers of the false, where true and false stop being decidable and that undecidability turns productive. Karol Karol, a man with a doubled name, is one of cinema's great cheerful forgers. The film's argument underneath the joke is serious: equality, the middle word of the tricolour and the subject of this panel, is not available to him. He can only counterfeit it.

Two things make the forgery work on us and not just on Dominique. First the cut. Kieślowski and Piesiewicz had built Dekalog on the ellipsis that omits the act and resumes at its consequence, and White applies it to entire reversals of fortune. We see results; the mechanisms are mostly skipped. Second the camera. Kłosiński's flat registration comes out of a Polish tradition that distrusts decoration, the same observing camera Kieślowski turned on Jerzy Stuhr's face in Camera Buff. Cinema's oldest contract is that the photographed thing was there. White uses that contract to certify a death that never happened. Preisner refuses to celebrate any of it: the tango was written early, in the forward-composed method the two men worked out on No End, so it behaves like Karol's inner voice rather than commentary, and it withholds the swell a revenge plot keeps asking for.

What this did to narrative is small and permanent. Revenge stories are built to discharge. This one discharges completely and settles nothing, and it leaves its last image as a question. A man who has rebuilt his entire capacity to act is standing outside a prison, looking through binoculars at a window, in the same posture he had when he was penniless in a Métro tunnel. He's a seer again, better funded. Did he ever leave the optical situation, or did he only furnish it?

Watch it again for the sound. Every decisive event in White reaches somebody through a barrier: an interpreter, a receiver, the wall of a suitcase, a hotel door. And count the whiteouts. The one image Karol can't stop having is the only thing his money never buys back.