Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Macbeth
1971 · Roman Polanski · Macbeth on Sightlines
Mud. It is in nearly every frame — sodden ground, gray sky, smoke in the halls, dogs and servants and animal pens crowding the edges of the shot. Gilbert Taylor lights all of it like weather rather than like drama: flat, cold, overcast daylight, with none of the gothic shadow the material invites. And then a king is murdered in his bed and Polanski does not cut away. He holds it. Later he holds the killing of Macduff's wife and children the same way, well past the point where you would like him to stop.
Shakespeare's play reports those deaths. A messenger tells you. Polanski shows you, and that one decision reorganizes the whole tragedy, tilting it off rhetoric and onto act. Almost everything interesting about this film follows from it.
Deleuze sorts films by what holds them together, and most films run on the action-image: someone takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the act settles things. His grandest version of that is the large form, where a whole world presses on a man until one decisive deed transforms it. Macbeth is nearly a textbook of the shape. Polanski's twist is that he makes the deed into labor — slow, effortful, physically disgusting — and then shows the situation refusing to change. Kill Duncan and you have the crown, the same wet country, and more men to kill. The engine keeps turning and nothing is transformed. That is why a film shot in wide anamorphic landscapes feels so closed in.
Deleuze has a more exact name for a world where deeds come out of appetite rather than decision: naturalism, his word for the cinema of Stroheim and Buñuel, the realm of the impulse-image. It works in two layers. On top is the derived milieu, a real furnished dateable place — here Bamburgh and Lindisfarne, Wilfred Shingleton's smoky halls, rough timber, feasts, livestock. Beneath it lies the originary world, a swamp or cave or pit where only drives and their exhaustion exist. Polanski stacks the pair literally. Under the castles he puts the witches, and they are not three stagey crones on a heath but a large coven of naked women of every age in a subterranean lair. Grubby, carnal, entirely without dignity. That is the point. Prophecy stops being an oracle and becomes a bodily fact, something that comes up out of a hole in the ground.
What the originary world does to time is what Deleuze calls the line of slope: not a fall from a height, which is tragedy's shape, but a gradient, an entropy, a descent with no bottom step. The film's own synopsis says it better than theory does. He sinks into the bloody mud of a path with no return.
This is where a little film theory earns its keep. Bazin argued that duration and unbroken space carry a moral weight that cutting cannot fake — edit around an event and you have protected the viewer from it. Polanski's held murders are that bet at full stake, and they are aimed squarely at the two Macbeths before him. Welles in 1948 built his out of papier-mâché crags and voodoo mist; Kurosawa built Throne of Blood out of Noh masks and drifting fog. Both are magnificent and both are abstraction. Polanski keeps Kurosawa's sense of prophecy as physical menace and throws out the ritual. From Welles's own Chimes at Midnight he takes the one element that isn't stylized: the Shrewsbury battle, handheld, men floundering in the mire, combat as filthy work. Bergman's Seventh Seal supplied the rest, an overcast medieval flatland with the divine switched off.
So much for the world. The strangest thing Polanski does is to the inside. Most of Macbeth's soliloquies arrive as voiceover, interior monologue laid over a quiet watchful face, Jon Finch doing very little. It is a genuine invention and a genuine risk: the most famous rhetoric in the language, and nobody declaims it. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up, a feeling registered but not yet spent in action; its finest form here is the potisign, the icon of power, a face at a threshold with intensity gathering under the skin. Finch's Macbeth is young, handsome, pliable, suggestible. You watch the thought arrive in him before the deed does.
Polanski also gives us Macbeth's eyes directly, in brief first-person shots and in hallucinations staged as plain photography — the dagger, the blood visions. An image that shows us a perceiver perceiving is what Deleuze calls a dicisign: we feel the camera there as a second perception wrapped around the first. The device is not new for him. It is Repulsion's subjective camera, a woman's room warping around her, carried whole into an eleventh-century castle. What it yields is a crystal-image, a shot where what is actually present and what is imagined cannot be pulled apart and the film declines to sort them for you. The witches are ambiguously real and psychological at once, the same undecidability that made Rosemary's Baby work, only now dragged outdoors into the cold.
Which brings you to the ending, invented outright. After Macbeth's head comes off and the rightful king is restored, Polanski adds a wordless scene: Donalbain, the younger brother, riding alone toward the witches' lair. Not a line of Shakespeare supports it. It closes the circuit. Restoration becomes recursion, and Scotland turns into what Deleuze calls a saturated crystal — an enclosed world with no outside, where the exit is another door back in.
The film arrived so heavily freighted that people mostly read past it. It was Polanski's first feature after Sharon Tate's murder, and it was financed by Playboy Productions, so the violence got explained by the first fact and Francesca Annis's unclothed sleepwalking by the second. Both readings dissolve the film into gossip. The naturalist account gives the bleakness a formal cause instead: this is what a Shakespeare tragedy looks like when you put it in a world of drives, weather, and entropy, and let the ordinary go on around the atrocity — the servants, the dogs, the feast being cleared. The argument it settled, that screen Shakespeare belongs to bodies and mud rather than to the proscenium, is roughly the one adaptation has operated under ever since.
So watch it again for the corners of the frame. The animals, the weather that does not care, the Third Ear Band's dry archaic drone declining to swell. The great speeches start to sound like what Polanski makes them, a frightened young man talking to himself in a cold house. And then decide what the last shot claims: that the witches caused any of this, or only that they are always down there when somebody comes riding down the hill.
Concepts in play
- naturalism — Shingleton's lived-in Dark Age Scotland — smoky halls, animal pens, mud everywhere, servants and dogs and feasts surrounding atrocity, so that horror erupts inside a fully material world of appetites
- originary-world — The witches staged not as stagey crones but as a large coven of naked women of varying ages in a subterranean lair, stripping the supernatural of theatrical dignity and making it grubby and carnal
- derived-milieu — The location shoot at Bamburgh Castle and Lindisfarne, rough timber and stone and torch-lit interiors, presented as a plausible dateable feudal surface beneath which the witches' cellar lies
- entropy / degradation — The irreversible descent named in the film's own premise — sinking 'into the bloody mud of a path with no return' — and the murders of Duncan and Macduff's household edited to withhold relief, held until they become degradation rather than event
- action-image-large-form — Polanski's 'relentless externalization of violence,' literalizing what the stage reports secondhand and reorienting the tragedy 'from rhetoric toward act' — the decisive deed staged as physical labor that leaves the situation untransformed
- icon of power — The soliloquies delivered as voiceover interior monologue over 'a quiet, watchful face' — Finch's un-declamatory, pitched-to-the-camera performance of a weak, suggestible man on the threshold of murder
- dicisign — The much-noted first-person device — the world seen briefly through Macbeth's eyes — and the subjective staging of hallucination, the locked-to-a-disintegrating-mind camera carried over from Repulsion
- hyalosign — Macbeth's dagger and blood visions shot with photographic restraint rather than spectacle, so the supernatural is 'ambiguously real and psychological at once' and the film refuses to adjudicate
- saturated crystal — The invented wordless coda: Donalbain riding alone toward the witches' lair after the restoration, converting the play's return of order into a closed cycle with no outside