Oliver Twist · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A dog throws itself at a closed door.

That is all Lean gives you of Nancy's murder. The room is sealed, Bull's-eye scrabbles at the wood, and the blow lands somewhere you cannot see. You assemble the killing yourself out of an animal's panic, and having assembled it, you own it. Then the dog goes on behaving strangely, and its behaviour is what hangs Sikes.

Deleuze called the space a frame implies but withholds the out-of-field, and he split it in two. Sometimes the withheld space is simply next door, continuous with this one, a room you could walk into. Sometimes it's a beyond that no floor plan could locate. Nancy's murder is the first kind, and Lean uses its ordinariness as a weapon: the wall is three feet of plaster, the horror is on the other side of it, and the film refuses to step through. Deleuze also sorts action cinema into two shapes. In the large form, a situation presses down on a character until he acts and changes it. In the small form it runs backwards — you are shown an act and must reconstruct the situation from it. The signs of that reverse motion he calls indices, and the one working here is the index of lack: a gesture that means by way of what's missing from it. The dog is the index. Sikes is the lack. It is a piece of silent-cinema logic Lang had already brought to sound in M, where offscreen noise and dead silence do the threatening, and Lean, who worshipped silent film, takes it further than his script needed him to.

Once you notice the withholding, you find it everywhere. Fagin is glimpsed through banisters, through doorframes, through hanging cloth. The camera keeps putting something between you and the adults, and where it puts you is exactly where a nine-year-old stands: at the edge of the room, watching a conspiracy he can hear but not parse. Deleuze's word for an image that shows you someone in the act of seeing is the dicisign — perception caught in the frame of another perception, so that you feel two pairs of eyes at once, the child's and the camera's over his shoulder. This matters because the film's reputation for a "child's-eye view" makes it sound like sentiment. It isn't sentiment. It's an optical system, applied with a rigour that never lets up.

The sets carry the other half of the argument. John Bryan built streets that narrow to impossible vanishing points, upper storeys shrunk to fake depth, ceilings pressed down onto the actors. Guy Green lit it to hide the joins: pooled lamplight, everything around it dropped to black, faces lit from below. The grammar comes straight from Caligari, where raked flats and crushed doorways trap a figure in painted space; Bryan rebuilds it in three dimensions so the trap has real carpentry in it, the way Murnau built a whole marsh and village on a stage for Sunrise. Deleuze would call this milieu a synsign — an encompassing world that doesn't decorate the action but produces it, imprinting itself on whoever moves through it. Here the imprint is literal. The set is engineered to make Bumble monumental and Oliver a doll. As the dossier puts it, the forced perspective is not decoration, it is the film's argument.

And underneath the parish, the indentures and the drawing rooms, there's something older. The film opens with ten near-wordless minutes: a woman in labour crossing a thorn-lashed moor, the storm cut against her contractions, a workhouse gate looming out of black. She gives birth and dies. Deleuze's term for a milieu that turns out to be the crust over a savage substratum is the originary world, and its cinema is the impulse-image — a world running on appetite and exhaustion rather than on decisions. Look at what actually drives this plot: a boy asks for more food. The workhouse scenes are cut for percussive rhythm, spoon and scrape and echo accumulating until the request lands and the whole track drops into silence. That's montage in the Soviet sense, a collision that jumps to a new quality, deployed in the middle of a Rank prestige picture about a Victorian novel.

Lean had been one of Britain's best editors before he directed, and the compression is his signature. Seventy miles to London become signposts and a dwindling figure. The Maylies are gone, Monks is a shadow, and Dickens's sprawling serial is filed down to one line of the universe: workhouse, undertaker, road, Fagin's kitchen, Brownlow's drawing room, the rooftops of Jacob's Island. A zig-zag through disconnected spaces, each hitched to the next by nothing but the child crossing it.

Which brings us to Fagin, and to the thing that cannot be walked around. Deleuze distinguishes a face that reflects, holding a quality across a still surface, from a face made of features — a nose, a jaw, a hairline pulled forward as intensity. Freeborn's prosthetic makes Fagin entirely the second kind, and the features were copied from Cruikshank's etchings by way of Lon Chaney's 1922 build-up. Caricature is a machine for converting a person into a symptom, and antisemitic caricature is that machine aimed at a people. The film's most advanced piece of craft exists to reproduce one. It got the picture banned in Israel, demonstrated against in Berlin, and held out of America until 1951. Naming the mechanism precisely isn't an alibi for it. It's the only honest way to say what the craft was doing.

The date is 1948, and that's the argument for the film's place. In Italy, cinema was losing faith in the action-image — Bazin was making the case for reality photographed rather than constructed, deep focus, ambiguity left in. Lean went the other way with total conviction and built the most complete sensory-motor machine British studios ever produced, on stages, with no location work of consequence. His invention wasn't fidelity to Victorian London. It was fidelity to the illustration of Victorian London: storyboard every setup from the book's own etchings, then build it. The film doesn't look like the period. It looks like the book. That method, worked out on Great Expectations and perfected here, is why the London of Broken Blossoms and the London of every fog-and-gaslight picture since feel like a continuous tradition, and Freeborn carried the appliance craft forward to the apes of 2001 and to Yoda.

Watch it again and count the barriers. Banister, doorframe, cloth, the sealed room. Then ask why the most legible feeling in the film belongs to a dog who doesn't understand what he heard.