Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Miracle Worker
1962 · Arthur Penn · The Miracle Worker on Sightlines
A napkin on the floor. Water across the table. A small fist in a plate of food, and a young woman's hand closing over that fist and putting it back on the fork. The dining-room doors are shut. Crockery breaks. And it goes on, well past the point where a 1962 prestige picture would have cut away and let a dissolve do the work. Arthur Penn keeps the camera in the room and lets both of them get tired.
That scene is the film, and the film is about a hand.
Penn's invention is easy to state and hard to overpraise: he shoots a hand the way Dreyer shot a face. In The Passion of Joan of Arc, Dreyer had proved that a movie could be built almost entirely out of close-ups, that a jaw and an eyelid could carry an argument with no dialogue underneath it. Deleuze gave that discovery a name. He called it the affection-image, and his point was that a close-up is not a detail cut out of a larger space. It is its own kind of image, with its own job: it holds a feeling that has not yet turned into an act. Penn takes Dreyer's grammar and moves it down the arm. Helen Keller cannot see or hear; touch is the only channel she and Annie Sullivan share; so the palm becomes the film's expressive organ. Caparrós's camera goes in close on grasping, resisting, spelling. Hands here do what faces do in Dreyer.
Deleuze splits the affection-image in two, and the casting sits exactly on the split. There is the reflexive face, a smooth contour that holds and reflects a single quality, and the intensive face, all feature and pressure, a face being crossed by something. Bancroft's Annie is the first kind: watchful, dry, working out of her own history of near-blindness and institutional hardship, a woman who has decided in advance not to pity anybody. Duke's Helen is the second. Appetite, mouth, no audience and therefore no composure. Put the two in one frame, which Penn does for most of the running time, and the conflict is legible without a word of dialogue.
Name what is underneath it, too. Deleuze has a category for films in which the social surface peels back to show pure drive: the impulse-image, built on two floors. The derived milieu is the furnished, actual place. The originary world is the savage energy that place is barely covering. The Keller house is a genteel Southern household with a table, a napkin to be folded, a father at the head of it. Sullivan has to force Helen to eat from her own plate, which tells you what Helen had been doing, and that the household allowed it, because pity had quietly decided she was not yet a person. The table is the derived milieu. The fist in the food is the originary world coming up through the tablecloth. Deleuze noticed that these films almost always run downhill, toward exhaustion and death. What is remarkable about this one is that Annie Sullivan's whole project is to make the slope run the other way.
So this is a movement-image film, thoroughly, and it is worth saying plainly, because the reflex with a great film is to promote it into the difficult category. The Miracle Worker is a large-form action-image: an encompassing situation presses on someone until a single act transforms it. The encompasser is the house and grounds themselves, with doors and tables staged as obstacles and the pump in the yard as destination, plus the family's love, which operates as a wall. The engine is what Deleuze calls the binomial, force against force. Here that is hand against hand, closed against closing. And the film literalizes one more of his terms almost by accident of its subject. The imprint, in Deleuze, names the bond where a situation and a character stamp each other. Annie spells W-A-T-E-R into an open palm. The stamping is not a figure of speech. It is letters pressed into skin.
Now the thing almost no other film attempts.
Deleuze takes three categories from the philosopher Peirce and sorts cinema's images into them. Firstness is quality, pure feeling. Secondness is action, force meeting force. Thirdness is relation: meaning, the sign, the rule that lets one thing stand in for another. The relation-image is Deleuze's name for images that work on that third level, where the sense comes from a connection the viewer holds in mind. A mark is an object caught in a customary chain: see the gun, expect the shot. A symbol is the one object that condenses a film's whole relation.
For nearly the entire film, Annie is manufacturing marks by brute repetition. Hundreds of spellings into a hand that takes them as a game, or as noise, or as the toll for something she wants. Habit without sense. Then the pump. Water running over one palm, letters going into the other, and the two stop being separate events. The mark turns into a symbol. Helen's broken attempt at the word is the single most important sound in the picture, and Penn has starved the soundtrack of significance up to that point precisely so it can land. A film whose central character hears nothing saves everything for one voice.
That is the claim I would make for it. This may be the only film whose climax is the birth of the sign. Not a rescue. Not a confession. A relation.
Notice what Penn refuses on the way. He never gives us Helen's point of view. No black screen, no muffled subjective tour of her senses. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, the space just past the edge of the shot, from the absolute out-of-field, something present to a film that cannot be located anywhere in its space. The rest of the house on the other side of those dining-room doors is the first. Helen's interior is the second, and it has to be, because any attempt to render it would be a lie told by a camera that sees and hears. The film can only press against it from outside, through skin. That restraint is why the pump is not sentimental. We are not told what happened inside her. We watch a hand change its behavior.
And back to the dining room, because the greatness there is duration. Avakian cuts it for endurance rather than economy, so that repetition and fatigue accumulate in the two bodies and some of it is passed on to us. Deleuze's term for cinema that puts its weight in attitudes and postures rather than deeds, bodies carrying time instead of performing plot, usually gets attached to Cassavetes. It belongs in this room.
The debts are specific. Bazin, arguing about theatre and cinema, said the error was to open the play out into spectacle; the camera's real job was to find the right distance on staging that already worked. Penn had directed this material on Playhouse 90 in 1957 and on Broadway in 1959 with these two actresses, the blocking rehearsed into their bodies, and he kept it. That is the Streetcar solution. Fred Coe's live-television pipeline, the one that produced Marty, gave him the unadorned black-and-white and the performance-first method. Lumet's 12 Angry Men had shown how to build mounting pressure inside one room out of lens choice and cutting. On the Waterfront supplied the Method vocabulary for feeling that cannot get itself said. Johnny Belinda had already proved that a wordless performance could hold the dramatic center of a prestige picture and win for it. This film takes all of that and spends it on about one sentence's worth of plot.
What it leaves behind is two proofs. A feature can be built on a semiotic event. And a realist domestic interior can hold real violence, if the violence is allowed its actual duration. Penn was a few years from the pictures that made him a New Hollywood name. He learned the second lesson here, in a dining room, with a napkin.
Watch it again for the hands. Not the faces. The hands. Count how long Penn spends teaching you to read a palm before he asks Helen to.
Concepts in play
- affection-image — Caparrós's close, unglamorous framing that repeatedly isolates the physical business of finger-spelling, grasping and resisting; the hand, not the face, as the unit that registers feeling before it becomes action
- reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Bancroft's watchful, sardonic Sullivan (a contour face holding one quality, refusal of pity) held in the same frame as Duke's feral, appetite-driven Helen (all feature and pressure), the two entangled physically for most of the running time
- icon of power — The hand at the water pump: flowing water on one palm, letters spelled into the other, micro-movements crossing a threshold into something new
- impulse-image — Helen as 'feral, non-verbal, communicating through violence and appetite'; Sullivan having to force her to eat from her own plate; the household's pity indulging the drive
- originary-world — The genteel Keller household with its table and folded napkin is the derived milieu; the fist in the food and the tantrums that rule the house are the savage originary world showing through it
- action-image-large-form — A whole household situation (Helen ruling by tantrum, the parents' protective indulgence, the negotiation over authority in the home) presses until one act at the pump transforms it; the payoff withheld until nearly the end
- the encompasser — The Keller home and grounds staged as the milieu that calls forth action: doors and tables as obstacles, the pump in the yard as destination, claustrophobic interiors releasing into the open
- binomial — The extended dining-room battle staged as force against force, hand against hand: Sullivan forcing Helen to eat from her own plate and fold a napkin, sustained past the point of comfort
- empreinte — W-A-T-E-R finger-spelled into Helen's open palm — the situation literally stamped into the character, letters pressed into skin
- mark — The repeated drilling of finger-spelled shapes into a hand that treats them as a game or a toll, building a customary chain of habit long before it carries sense
- symbol — Water at the pump, the one object that condenses the film's organizing relation as the feel of flowing water and the spelled word coincide
- the mental-image — The climax is the arrival of relation itself rather than a rescue: Helen's near-wordless attempt at 'water,' which the film identifies as its single most important sound
- out-of-field-absolute — Penn never enters Helen's sensorium — no subjective blackness, no muffled sound design; her interior is everywhere in the film and locatable nowhere in its space, approached only from outside through touch
- out-of-field-relative — The rest of the Keller house pressing on the far side of the closed dining-room doors during the fight; the film largely confined to home and grounds with adjacent space always implied
- attitudes & postures — Avakian's cutting of the dining-room set piece for endurance rather than economy, refusing to abbreviate or soften, so exhaustion and repetition accumulate in the bodies and in the audience