Tess · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A steam threshing machine stands in a field at Flintcomb-Ash, and Tess is on the platform beside it, feeding sheaves into the drum. She has been at it since first light. Her face is black with chaff, the noise is past the point where speech is possible, and the machine sets the pace. It does not tire, so the people on the rick cannot rest. Polanski shoots the sequence roughly the way he would shoot something predatory.

Hold on that posture: a girl's arms moving at the speed of an engine she doesn't own. Deleuze has a name for a body used this way. He calls it a gest, a bodily attitude that makes a social relation visible without anyone stating it. Nobody in the scene explains the agricultural depression of the 1870s, the collapse of rural labour prices, the arrival of capital in the fields. The arms explain it.

That is Polanski's real invention here, and it is larger than it looks. Hardy's novel has a narrator who will not stop commenting: on purity, on class, on the cruelty of the arrangement. The film throws nearly all of it away. Three hours, and almost nothing is explained to you. What remains is behaviour, weather, worked land, and Nastassja Kinski's face. An adaptation of a famously argumentative novel that keeps the argument and deletes the arguing.

Deleuze built a category out of Stroheim, Buñuel and Losey that fits this film better than any account of Victorian melodrama does. He called it the impulse-image, and the idea is simple once stated. Some films show you a world in which the visible social setting is only a crust over something rawer: appetite, hunger, entitlement, the drive to possess. He names the crust the derived milieu and what's under it the originary world. The d'Urberville estate at The Slopes is one of cinema's cleanest derived milieux. It is new, suburban, comfortable and completely fake, a family that bought an ancient name and owns nothing else ancient. Underneath it, money and appetite with a plausible surface.

Then comes the shape Deleuze calls the line of slope, the downward path such a world cuts through whoever it catches. Tess's route is a map of it. Village, then the estate, then the dairy at Talbothays, then the flint uplands of Flintcomb-Ash, then Sandbourne. Each stage is materially colder than the one before.

Why bother with this vocabulary? Because it dissolves the film's most confusing quality, which is that a catastrophe this total has no villain big enough to have caused it. Alec is smooth rather than monstrous, a man of appetite who never once entertains the thought that he did wrong. Angel Clare is the more frightening figure and isn't a villain at all: a self-declared freethinker whose freethinking evaporates the instant Tess tests it. She forgives his own prior affair inside a sentence. He cannot forgive her at any length, and the film gives that exchange its full unbearable duration. Neither man is adequate to the ruin. The impulse-image tells you to stop hunting for the agent. What destroys Tess is a world, and the men are its symptoms. That is Hardy's materialism exactly, and Deleuze hands you something to watch for instead of a moral to accept.

What keeps the film from grimness is that Polanski photographs the originary world as beautiful. Tess is composed again and again as one worker among many in a field, small inside the anamorphic width, staged like a Millet harvest rather than framed for a close-up. The landscape is lovely and it takes no interest in her. Bergson's word for the whole that keeps changing is the Open, and Deleuze carried it into cinema: the sense that the frame gives onto a larger process that will go on without you. Here the process is the year, and Polanski bought it the expensive way, shooting across nine months so the seasons on screen are the real ones. The year is the only thing in this film whose arc completes.

That patience is a theoretical position, not just a schedule. Bazin argued that when a filmmaker holds a shot and leaves space intact, ambiguity gets handed back to the viewer instead of being chewed for them. Hardy's narrator chews. Polanski's held harvest wides, his scenes allowed to finish, his long stretches with no score at all, do the opposite. Deleuze would call those stretches dead time: passages where nothing advances the plot and the everyday is simply held. At Flintcomb-Ash the holding turns harsher. A bleached, colourless upland where no action is available to anyone is what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever, a place emptied of the coordinates that would let a person act in it.

Which brings us to the face. Deleuze separates two ways of filming one. There is the intensive face, features straining, micro-movements building toward a break. And there is the reflecting or contour face, which stays still and holds a single quality. Kinski's Tess is emphatically the second. Critics at the time called the performance too withheld to carry three hours, and that argument has never closed. But she plays a character whose defining experience is being read, claimed and interpreted by everyone around her, and a face that reflects rather than emits is the precise formal answer to that. Her opacity is where the other characters deposit their versions of her.

It isn't possible to write about this film's tact and pretend not to know who directed it. The scene in The Chase is handled without elision and without display: Alec approaches a half-sleeping Tess, and the sequence resolves in withdrawal. Polanski made the film having left the United States rather than face sentencing for a sex offence against a thirteen-year-old, and his relationship with Kinski began when she was fifteen. The restraint on screen is real. It settles nothing.

The lineage is unusually legible. Geoffrey Unsworth brought the Cabaret lens kit, pre-fogging and nets and diffusion, blacks lifted to a milky bloom so the light reads as already remembered; that texture is a lab procedure before it is a mood. He died in Brittany weeks into the shoot. Ghislain Cloquet finished the film, and Cloquet had shot Mouchette for Bresson, where a rural girl's violation is photographed with no camera emphasis whatsoever. That refusal to inflect is why the worst scenes here don't announce themselves. Barry Lyndon had just proved a period film could run three hours on near-available light and painterly tableau. Ryan's Daughter supplied the anamorphic grammar in which weather fills the width and the human figure shrinks, so scale can do the work psychology usually does. Nicolas Roeg's Far from the Madding Crowd established the rule Tess obeys, that Wessex must be photographed as worked land, which this film honours in Normandy and Brittany with a full-scale Stonehenge built from nothing, because its director could not enter Britain. And The Go-Between put class transgression in real hayfields under flat, oppressive light; its director, Losey, is one of the three Deleuze built the impulse-image from. The craft debt and the concept run down the same wire.

Forward, the debt is paid mostly in French. Claude Berri produced this and then made Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources on the same premises: long schedules, land as protagonist, peasant labour taken seriously, tragedy driven by inheritance. Winterbottom's Jude and The Claim take Hardy's materialism at its word. The wider period cycle of the 1980s and 90s inherited the look and the tempo, and the conviction under them, that a period is weather and worked land before it is costume.

The significance is this. Tess showed that an adaptation could carry its whole argument in duration and material, with no narrator, no interiority and almost no music, and that a tragedy of social determinism draws its force from refusing to hurry.

Watch the colour on a rewatch. Chalk and white at the May dance, honey at Talbothays, flint grey in the winter fields. The film is stamping a calendar onto one body. Then it stops at dawn at Stonehenge with the arrest, withholding the execution Hardy insists you witness. Ask yourself, at any point in those three hours, what act was actually available to her. The coldness will stop looking like distance.