Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kiss of the Spider Woman
1985 · Héctor Babenco · Kiss of the Spider Woman on Sightlines
A man lies on a bunk in a gray room, describing a dress.
Valentín has his back to him. He has been down the corridor and come back wrong, and now his cellmate is telling him about chiffon. Then Babenco cuts and the gray is gone: soft light, a score swelling on cue, a woman moving through it with her face half behind something. Then the ochre again, because Valentín has interrupted to point out that the movie Molina loves is Nazi propaganda.
That alternation is the whole picture, and it arrived in 1985, the same year Gilles Deleuze published his second book on cinema. The coincidence is worth pressing, because the film demonstrates his central idea more plainly than most of the European art films he actually wrote about.
Here is the idea. In most movies, seeing leads to doing. A character perceives a situation, and acts to change it; the cutting exists to carry that current. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and he thought the war broke it. What replaces it is a situation a character can see and hear but cannot act on — a pure optical and sound situation, in his phrase — and the person inside it stops being an agent and becomes a seer. A prison cell is the literal form of this. Valentín's politics are a doctrine of action and he is lying on a mattress, unable to lift his head. Molina has no politics and nothing to do either.
This matters because it rescues the film from the complaint most often made against it: that nothing happens, that it is two men talking. The stalled circuit is the subject. What fills it is a voice.
Deleuze has a name for that too. He distinguishes dialogue, where people exchange information, from the speech act that invents — a voice that legends rather than reports. The dossier's technical note is exact here: the spoken word is what summons the images, and the editing is organized around Molina's narration rather than around events. Nothing is being retrieved. This is not a flashback structure; there is no verified past on the other side of the cut. Molina is embroidering, and we watch the embroidery get its own lighting, its own orchestra, its own screen.
Which makes Molina a forger, in Deleuze's precise and admiring sense: not a liar but someone who produces truth instead of finding it. He is a window-dresser by trade, a professional of the beautiful false front. He is an informer, placed in the cell to extract names, offering a counterfeit friendship. And the film he adores is a fascist romance. Deleuze called this the power of the false — falsity treated not as a defect to be corrected but as a generative force, the thing that makes new selves and new attachments possible.
Put that against the oldest promise cinema made about itself. The realist wager, Bazin's wager, is that the photographic image carries the imprint of something that was really there, and that a camera pointed patiently at the world will not lie to you. Babenco holds that credential honestly: Pixote was made with a documentary eye on street children, and it supplies the grain and the fatigue of these cell scenes. He then puts the argument for the consoling lie in the mouth of the man the state has filed as worthless — and lets the revolutionary, who is right about the propaganda, be wrong about what it is doing in the room.
The film's genuine formal invention is a casting decision. Sonia Braga plays the heroine of Molina's movie, Valentín's absent lover Marta, and the Spider Woman of the title. One face across three orders of unreality. Deleuze called the image where you can no longer sort the actual from the virtual a crystal, and this is one: when Braga appears you cannot file the shot as fantasy, memory, or myth, because the film has deliberately fused the three into a single recurring body. He also describes how such an image forms — a seed dropped into a saturated solution, around which everything crystallizes. Molina's narrated melodrama is that seed, and the cell's dull props answer it. Shared food, bedding, a made-up little ritual of dinner. They become loaded because a movie was told over them.
Meanwhile the bodies are doing the work Deleuze assigned to modern cinema: not the body that acts, but the body that waits, eats, tires, is carried back and cleaned up. Hurt's performance is built from attitudes, postures held long enough to be read — which is exactly why it has stayed contested for forty years, the stereotype question and the straight-actor question both fastening onto its visible theatricality. Deleuze's term for a posture that exposes a social relation rather than expressing a private feeling is the gest. Molina's femininity is played as gest, and the film knows it.
The politics run through the same mechanism. The country has no name. The movement is never shown; it exists only as the names the state wants said aloud. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema can no longer assume a people is there behind the hero — the people are missing, and film's job becomes inventing one. Both men in this cell invent a people. Molina's is a fascist fiction in evening dress. Valentín's does not exist yet.
The craft debts are audible. Sternberg's veil-and-shadow lighting of Dietrich in Shanghai Express is reproduced almost intact in the Spider Woman, and Deleuze prized that lighting as a place where illumination stops describing objects and becomes a field in its own right. Casablanca supplies the doomed-lovers-under-occupation template Molina pastiches, glamour lighting included. Streetcar supplies the hothouse single set that rests on one actor's total physical transformation. The Defiant Ones supplies the chassis: two ideological opposites locked together until proximity does the arguing. Cabaret supplies the fantasy grammar, decadent staged performance intercut against advancing fascism — and that same Kander and Ebb line came back later to turn this film into a stage musical.
Forward, the industrial consequence is the one people forget. An independently financed drama shot in São Paulo took a Best Picture nomination and a Best Actor Oscar, which is now read as an early signal of the specialty-film wave that ran through the nineties.
Watch it again for one thing: the moment Valentín stops interrupting. He is right about the propaganda the entire time. He surrenders anyway, and the film asks you to decide whether that is corruption or love. It declines to tell you.
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations — A two-hander set almost entirely in one cell: Valentín is physically depleted by torture and Molina is jailed on a morals charge; neither can act on anything they perceive, so the film is built from looking, listening and waiting.
- the seer (voyant) — Valentín, a man whose revolutionary politics are a doctrine of action, spends the film immobile on a mattress as an audience for Molina's narration — an endurer rather than an agent.
- acte de parole (legending voice) — Molina's narration is the film's connective tissue; the dossier notes the spoken word is what summons the images and that the cutting is organized around his voice rather than around events.
- le faussaire — Molina is a window-dresser by trade, an informer planted in the cell to extract information, and a narrator who embellishes a melodrama he is remembering — a protagonist who manufactures truth rather than reporting it.
- puissances du faux — The picture Molina loves and retells is a Nazi-era propaganda romance; the film makes that falsity the source of intimacy and transformation rather than something to be corrected.
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — Sonia Braga plays the film-within-the-film heroine, Valentín's absent lover Marta, and the Spider Woman — one body binding fantasy, memory and myth so that no shot of her can be filed as one or the other.
- the seed (crystal formation) — The narrated melodrama is dropped into the cell like a seed into solution: the drab props — shared food, bedding, Molina's small domestic rituals — become emotionally loaded around it over the course of the film.
- attitudes & postures — Babenco stages the relationship as two bodies negotiating a confined geography — eating, sleeping, tending the aftermath of torture — with blocking and lens choice carrying the story in place of action.
- the gest — Hurt's Molina is built as a study in constructed femininity, a set of held attitudes whose visible theatricality is exactly what has kept the performance in critical dispute about stereotype and casting.
- lyrical abstraction — Von Sternberg's diaphanous veil-and-shadow lighting of Dietrich in Shanghai Express is reproduced in the Spider Woman fantasy figure: softened light and filtration used as a field of its own rather than to describe objects.
- the people are missing — The country is unnamed and Valentín's movement is never shown — it exists only as the information the authorities have tasked Molina with extracting — so the political has to be conjured by voice rather than depicted.