Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Wind That Shakes the Barley
2006 · Ken Loach · The Wind That Shakes the Barley on Sightlines
A boy in a farmyard is asked his name. He gives it in Irish. They tell him to say it properly, in English, and he says it again the same way, and for that they take him inside and beat him to death. The camera doesn't move in close. Loach and Barry Ackroyd shoot from a slight remove on a longer lens, roughly where a neighbour at the gate would be standing, close enough to see and too far to stop it.
Hold that shot, because everything the film knows is in it.
Deleuze has a name for the kind of instant Loach is after. He calls it the any-instant-whatever: the ordinary sample of movement, the frame that has no special claim on meaning, as against the privileged instant — the posed climax that painting and theatre handed down to cinema and that most war films still live on. Loach spent a career refusing the privileged instant. His raids and reprisals and executions are sudden, ugly and quickly over, with none of the accelerating coverage that would tell you a Scene is happening. The boy's death gets no pietà. It gets the weather.
And the posture the boy takes before he dies has a name too. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls it the gest: an attitude of the body that exposes a whole social relation without anyone explaining it. A young man standing in a yard saying his own name is the entire colonial arrangement, compressed into four seconds and a syllable count.
Loach looks like the last filmmaker who needs French philosophy. That's exactly why the taxonomy is useful here. Deleuze's cinema books aren't a decoder ring; they're a catalogue of what images can be made to do. And what Loach built in this film is one of the most disciplined action-image machines in modern cinema, built so that it can be run deliberately into a wall.
The machine is what Deleuze calls the large form. A global situation presses on people until someone acts, and the act transforms the situation. Occupation is the encompasser here, the synsign: the thing that surrounds every scene and calls the action out of it. The binomial is force against force, Black and Tans against a flying column in the Cork hills. And the imprint is the mark the situation and the man leave on each other. Damien arrives as a doctor with a post waiting in a London hospital. By the middle of the film he is putting a bullet into an informer, a boy he has known since childhood. Cillian Murphy plays it as a man radicalized against his own gentleness, which is the imprint made visible on a face.
Deleuze also describes what he calls respiration-space, the alternation between the vast milieu and the thin taut line of the action. Loach gives you exactly that rhythm and gives the land the better half of it. Green-gray, wet, beautiful, entirely indifferent. Then the flat report of a rifle in open country, and it's finished, and the birds carry on. George Fenton's music stays out of it. The silences after the shooting do more than any score would.
This is the neorealist contract, and the film knows its debts. Rome, Open City is the root: location shooting among real streets and real ruins, an occupation-and-resistance plot, a resistance leader's execution given as plain fact and not martyrdom pageant. Bazin defended that cinema because it refused to pre-digest the event, leaving the real ambiguous and making the viewer do the sorting. Loach hardened the ethic into a method, and the method arrived in Kes: non-professionals cast for where they come from, shooting in story order, the camera witnessing instead of dramatizing. Cathy Come Home supplied the polemical spine, private suffering staged as public indictment. Culloden and The Battle of Algiers supplied the you-are-there reconstruction of colonial violence and the cell-ambush-reprisal pulse that structures the middle of this film.
Then there's the scene that is Loach's own invention, and it isn't a battle. The column crowds into a room to argue about the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil, and they shout past one another about land, debt, property, and whether the Republic they are dying for will change who owns anything. Deleuze has a category for images like this: the discourse-image, where action is transposed out of the fist and into argument, and the image poses a problem it cannot solve. Loach makes the political meeting the action sequence. It gets the same distance, the same overlapping unglamorous coverage, the same refusal to cut in and tell you who's right, as the killing did. The template is his own Land and Freedom, militia and villagers arguing ideology round a table in Spain, moved to a cramped room in Cork. Giving an argument the weight of a gunfight is itself the argument.
And here the large form breaks its promise. The act arrives. The Treaty is signed, the state exists, the British go. Nothing transforms. The binomial folds inward and the enemy line now runs between two brothers. Deleuze says of modern political cinema that the people are missing: the collective in whose name everything was done does not yet exist, and the film can't conjure it, only mark the hole where it should be. The Free State stands. The Republic is deferred. What survives is the song. The title comes from a nineteenth-century ballad about the rebellion of 1798, another one that lost, and in a culture where the ballad is how political memory is kept, singing is a form of doing. Deleuze calls that fabulation: legending, the storytelling that holds a place open for a people who haven't arrived.
Jonathan Morris closes the circle in the cutting room. The execution of one of their own near the beginning is answered by the execution that ends it, the same ground, the opposite uniform. Teddy gives the order, then carries the letter to the woman Damien loved. No release is offered.
Watch it again and watch where people are standing during the argument, not during the ambush. The film settles who the enemy was. It leaves open the question the men in that room never answered, and it is still the question: won for whom?
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The linear, causal build from occupation through radicalization to guerrilla war: a global situation presses until decisive acts are taken, structured as Situation→Action→new Situation.
- the encompasser — The occupation and the Cork countryside as the constant surrounding milieu that calls the action out of every scene — 'the landscape is a constant presence, beautiful and indifferent, against which the human cruelty plays out.'
- binomial — Flying column against Black and Tans in the first half; after the Treaty the same force-against-force structure folds inward, Free State officer against Republican brother.
- empreinte — Damien, a doctor with a London hospital post, is remade by the situation into a man who executes an informer he has known since childhood — 'radicalized almost against his own gentleness.'
- any-instant-whatever — Ackroyd's longer lenses from a slight remove, the camera 'catching action already underway rather than staging it for us'; the violence filmed without accelerating coverage so brutality is 'sudden, ugly and quickly over.'
- the-gest — The young man beaten to death by the Black and Tans for refusing to give his name in English — a bodily attitude that exposes the entire colonial relation without exposition.
- respiration-space — Alternation between the wide, wet, muted green-gray Cork hillsides and the taut line of the ambush, with 'the flat report of gunfire in open country' and the silences after.
- discourse-image — The flying column's argument over the Democratic Programme of the First Dáil — staged cramped and overlapping as a genuine political meeting, posing the land-and-property question the film will not resolve.
- people-are-missing — The ending refuses catharsis: 'the Free State stands, the Republic is deferred' — the collective in whose name the war was fought never arrives, and the men who bled together turn on one another over whose freedom the state will serve.
- story-telling / legending — The title drawn from Robert Dwyer Joyce's ballad of the 1798 rebellion, folding the events into a longer cycle of insurrection and defeat; diegetic song carries more weight than score 'in a culture where the ballad is itself a form of political memory.'
- montage-organic — The built symmetry Jonathan Morris closes in the cutting room — the killing of the informer among their own ranks near the start answered by Damien's execution at the end.
- temps mort — The observational cutting that favours the authentic reaction and lets scenes breathe, resisting tightening and punching-up; 'the silences after violence are as important as the sound of it.'