Jason and the Argonauts · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The head turns first.

Everything else about Talos stays exactly where it was: the bronze legs planted either side of the cove, the sword laid across one shoulder, hard Mediterranean noon on all of it. Then, with a groan like a gate that hasn't moved in a hundred years, the head grinds around and looks down at the men who have just robbed his treasury.

Nothing has attacked them. A statue has noticed them.

That groan is the best door into Deleuze this film has, because the sound is doing the philosophy. Deleuze takes from Bergson a blunt definition of what a living thing is: a gap. Light and pressure come in, movement goes out, and in between there is a delay where the incoming shock has not yet become an outgoing act. He calls that gap the centre of indetermination, or just the interval. It isn't a figure of speech for consciousness; it's the working definition. A rock has no interval. What makes a creature a creature is that it takes a moment.

Harryhausen gives Talos an enormous one, and then makes you hear it. The head turn is the interval stretched until it becomes audible, perception separating from action across several seconds of tortured bronze. Every animator since has understood that this, and not the design, is where life gets manufactured.

Now look at what the face does while it happens: nothing. Deleuze's name for a face like that is the qualisign, the immobile reflecting face that holds one quality instead of passing through a sequence of them. Usually the example is a Falconetti or a Garbo in close-up. Here it's a mask that physically cannot change, and the effect is worse than an expression would be. Talos is all attention and no interior.

Deleuze opens his cinema books on a distinction that normally stays theoretical, and that this film turns into a job description. Ancient art reconstructed movement out of privileged instants — the posed climactic form, the moment worth sculpting. Cinema does the opposite, sampling motion into any-instant-whatevers, equidistant ordinary slices, none of them the good one. Harryhausen worked both ends at once. He built the picture from key drawings: finished, posed, climactic images that fixed camera position, lens height and the exact zone of frame the creature would occupy before a foot of film was exposed. Wilkie Cooper shot to those drawings. Then Harryhausen stood at the animation stand and filled the space between the poses one twenty-fourth of a second at a time, in hundreds of positions nobody is meant to notice singly. The privileged instants are the plan. The any-instants are the labour. And the particular eeriness of his creatures, heavier than life and slightly too deliberate, is the seam between the two showing.

Deleuze has a phrase for how that lands: the non-organic life of things. He takes it from the expressionists, where a gradient of light and shadow makes matter itself seem to writhe. Jason has no shadow-gradient whatsoever. It was shot flat and bright because rear-projected plates lose their detail in the dark, and it reaches the same destination on a different road. Bronze walks. Stone moves. Bone fights. Under the quest, the film's actual subject is the uncanniness of the object that lives, which is precisely what the man at the stand was doing to latex over a metal armature.

The quality carrying all of it is weight, and weight is not in the image. The models are small. Bernard Herrmann supplies the mass: slow, brazen, low writing for Talos that tells the ear what the eye can't be shown, and a dry percussion battery for the skeletons that is simply the sound of bone. Weight here is what Deleuze calls a quality-power, an intensity presented for its own sake rather than as a property of some object. Try the skeleton duel with the sound off. It's men fencing with a diagram.

The compositing discipline teaches the frame as a system rather than a window. Cooper photographs the Argonauts small and low on the beach with a great deal of empty sky above them, and the camera cranes its gaze up at nothing at all. That vacancy is a reserved register, a slot in the picture that a giant will later occupy and thereby inherit the shot's real light, real ground, real horizon. Harryhausen's whole conviction is that the impossible ought to be photographed rather than drawn.

As narrative, the film is honest about being a string of beads: a voyage where each landfall yields one marvel and then lets it go. Deleuze's term for that shape is the vector, the line of the universe, a zig-zag joining spaces that have nothing in common except the trajectory touching them. It's a weak engine, and the screenplay knows it, which is why Beverley Cross installs Zeus and Hera above the whole thing with a wager and a strictly countable number of permitted interventions. That restores an encompassing situation to a picaresque that had none, and it converts spectacle into arithmetic. You sit there counting Hera's remaining favours.

The gods watch through a pool. The film builds its own audience into itself, a perceiving pair looking down at a framed surface where mortals move, which is also a fair description of Dynamation, where two spaces are married into a single image. Deleuze calls a perception framed inside another perception a dicisign. Niall MacGinnis plays Zeus as genially bored, a supreme being with the manner of a senior civil servant, and it's the coldest idea in the picture. Meanwhile both leads were dubbed by other actors, which flattens them into a storybook acoustic. The bronze giant is the most present body on screen.

None of this is self-generated, and the film is candid about the debt. Willis O'Brien laid down the grammar in The Lost World (1925), ball-and-socket armatures married to photographed actors through double exposure and split-screen mattes. King Kong (1933) refined it into miniature rear projection, the puppet animated a frame at a time in front of a back-projected plate of live actors, which is the exact procedure Charles Schneer's unit later industrialised and trademarked as Dynamation. On Mighty Joe Young (1949) Harryhausen animated most of the gorilla himself under O'Brien and learned the eyeline-matching and contact-shadow discipline that makes Talos's foot land on the same ground the actors stand on. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) is where he cheapened the method into a two-element sandwich so a creature could pass behind real objects. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) gave him one skeleton against one swordsman. The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) drilled the company in directing actors against partners who would be inserted months later. Jason multiplies the skeleton by seven, sets it against three fencers rehearsed to counts, and empties the technique in a single sequence the analogue era never topped.

Forward, the traffic is heavy. Army of Darkness is an extended bow; the animated skeleton became permanent furniture in fantasy film, comics and games; the digital skeleton crews of later blockbusters are its descendants by other means. Phil Tippett, Dennis Muren, Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro and Nick Park have all said as much themselves.

So what did it do to the art. Before Harryhausen, marvels were drawn and looked drawn, or built and cost a fortune. He demonstrated a third possibility: that a fabricated being could be given weight, an interval, and a share of the real world's sunlight, and that one person could manufacture it in a small room at a few seconds a week. It also produced, decades early, the strangest acting problem in modern cinema — parry where nothing is, look where nothing is — which is now simply how large films are made.

Watch the head turn again. Count how long he takes to decide.