Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of Jeremiah Johnson

1972 · Sydney Pollack · Jeremiah Johnson on Sightlines

First he can't fish. Then he can't trap. A Western opens on a man who has walked into the Rockies to be left alone, and for the better part of its first hour what we watch him do is fail at chores — set the traps wrong, come up empty, learn from an old bear-hunter where the elk are and how not to die of one winter. Meanwhile the score is singing him into a ballad, as though the legend were already finished and only the man hadn't caught up to it.

Hold on to that gap between the song and the fishing. It's the whole film.

Deleuze thought the Western was cinema's most complete machine for what he called the action-image in its large form: a situation presses on a man, the man acts, and the act transforms the situation. The country in such a film isn't scenery. It's the encompasser — Deleuze's synsign, the milieu whose sheer weight calls the deed out of the hero — and the picture breathes between two scales, the vast land and the taut narrow line of the act that answers it. Ford is the case he keeps returning to. Duke Callaghan's photography is built from that grammar, restaged in the Uinta range: the human figure small and entering an immense frame, blocking that lets terrain dictate where people can walk, threats arriving as distant shapes on a ridgeline. Deleuze has a good word for the rest of it too. Imprint: the two-way mark between a man and his milieu. Johnson's competence, his grime, the wear on everything he owns. The mountain signing its name on him.

So the hardware is all there. What Pollack does is run it and let it fail.

Look at how the vendetta starts. Not from villainy. It starts because Johnson is good: he proves the match of Crow warriors one-on-one, and so they keep coming, one at a time, for years. Deleuze calls the great mid-century break the crisis of the action-image, the moment characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Usually that shows up as impotence, a man who can't act. This film finds the crueller version. Every act succeeds. Each one commissions the next. Perceive, respond, prevail, and the situation is exactly where it was, plus a body. Without that lens the ending reads as ordinary 1972 gloom, the era's standard-issue downer. With it you can see the engine: the film has made mastery itself the trap, which is a very precise thing to say about the myth of self-reliance.

Where does the time go, if not into resolving anything? Into duration. Thomas Stanford's cutting elides seasons and years, and yet the passages it keeps are the ones where nothing advances: the labor, the fumbling, a first brutal winter accreting into skill. Deleuze's term is dead time, temps mort — stretches held for their own sake rather than for what they deliver to the plot, the everyday allowed to take as long as it takes. Bazin had already made the case for why that matters, arguing that cinema's real gift is to preserve the duration and the ambiguity of the world instead of carving it into meanings. Shot in real snow at real altitude with available light, no soundstage: the mountains are this production's entire effects budget, and that is a Bazinian decision before it is a budgetary one. Redford's performance belongs to the same idea. He builds Johnson out of behavior and a deepening stillness rather than speeches, which is what Deleuze late in his life called a cinema of the body — thought carried in postures and attitudes instead of dialogue or plot.

Then there's the burial ground, the film's most radical piece of thinking and the easiest to miss. Johnson is compelled to guide a rescue party across sacred Crow ground, and that crossing kills Swan and Caleb. Note where the catastrophe comes from. Not a bandit, not a fort, not a treaty. It comes out of the ground. The classical Western's land is a surface to be crossed and mapped, and mastery of it is the hero's qualification. Here the land has a layer in it, a history that the trapper's hard-won expertise is precisely the wrong instrument for reading, and the photography stays clear and unexpressive so that nothing marks the stratum until it detonates. Call it a stratigraphic image: landscape as archive rather than arena. The film's limit shows up in the same move, since the Crow register more as a claim the ground makes than as people the film goes inside, and the ending strains against that limit without dissolving it.

And the ballad keeps singing. Deleuze took legend-making seriously enough to name it: fabulation, the act of telling a life into a story that then becomes real. Rubinstein and McIntire's folk-balladic narration does it to Johnson from outside and ahead of him. By the time he has lost his household he is already folklore on the soundtrack. Image and sound tell two different stories and the film never makes them agree, the myth of self-reliance in the music and its cost in the frame. That disjunction is the argument.

Which is why the last beat can't be a gunfight. A wordless gesture across a distance, exchanged with the man who has been hunting him. Deleuze's word for a posture that exposes a relation instead of performing an act is the gest, and this is one of the purest in American cinema. It isn't a treaty. It isn't forgiveness. Nothing in continuity grammar tells you what it is, so the image has to be read rather than followed — a lectosign, an image that has lost its automatic sense and asks to be deciphered. The arc that began with a tenderfoot who couldn't fish ends with a man who can only look. Shane rode off with the myth intact. This hands you a look and lets you do the work.

The debts are legible and specific. Ford's The Searchers gives the landscape-as-moral-force and the speck in the immense frame. Shane gives the reverent mythologizing of the lone frontiersman that Milius's script pushed toward and Pollack pulled back into grief. The Wild Bunch sets the revisionist terms and licenses the compressive, elliptical cutting of survival time. Little Big Man supplies the episodic frontier picaresque with a life narrating itself into folklore. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is the direct precedent for the cold desaturated winter palette, the property-rich naturalism of pelts and flintlock and hand-raised cabin, and for the ballad-as-narration itself (Cohen there, Rubinstein and McIntire here). Soldier Blue is the Vietnam-era air the film breathes with the polemic turned down. Forward, its inheritance is partly economic and none the smaller for it: a contemplative Western with almost no action became a surprise hit, which is a proof of market for patient survival cinema. And Redford's refusal of the backlot, his insistence on the actual Utah mountains, belongs to the same instinct that would become Sundance.

Watch it again and time the chores against the killings. The chores build a man. The killings move nothing. The question the film won't answer is whether it believes its own ballad — whether that last gesture is grace, or two men agreeing to stop.

Concepts in play

crisis of the action-image — The vendetta begins because Johnson 'proves to be the match of their warriors' one-on-one: every adequate response succeeds and produces the next duel, and the structure 'deliberately resists resolution. There is no restoration of order, no triumph.'
action-image, large form — The film keeps the classical Western's whole apparatus — encompassing wilderness, trial, mastery, one-on-one combat — while withholding the transforming act; the vendetta is 'open-ended' and the ending 'elegiac rather than climactic.'
the encompasser (synsign) — Callaghan's 'vast static and slowly moving compositions that dwarf the human figure against snowfields, timberline, and sky'; the camera treats the landscape as 'a character and a moral force.'
respiration-space — The film alternates immense milieu-space with the narrow taut line of action: 'Against this measured base, the violent turns land harder for their scarcity'; threats 'appear as distant shapes against ridgelines.'
imprint (empreinte) — Costuming and set dressing favor 'grime, wear, and improvisation'; Johnson's transformation 'registers as duration lived rather than incident narrated' — the mountain's mark on the body, and his acquired competence as its counterpart.
binomial — The first movement is 'a survival narrative — man against an indifferent nature'; the last is a series of one-on-one killings, force against force, with the villain function removed.
the Open — Pollack and Callaghan 'repeatedly stage Johnson as a small figure entering an immense frame,' visually arguing that the wilderness 'both promises freedom and remains sublimely indifferent.'
dead time (temps mort) — 'Long stretches unfold as near-wordless survival montage — the fumbling early failures to trap and fish, the accretion of competence over a first brutal winter — assembled to convey the passage of time... rather than to drive a plot.'
weak links — An 'episodic, quasi-mythic mode rather than a tightly plotted one'; the cutting 'compresses seasons and years elliptically.'
cinema of the body — Redford 'builds Johnson through physical behavior — the labor of survival, the deepening stillness — rather than speeches,' the arc 'carried largely in the eyes and the body.'
the stratigraphic (archaeological) image — Johnson is 'compelled to guide a rescue party across a sacred Crow burial ground,' and the catastrophe issues from that ground rather than from an antagonist; the photography 'favors clarity and grandeur over expressive distortion,' so the stratum is unmarked until it detonates.
fabulation (legending) — The Rubinstein/McIntire score 'includes sung narration that frames Johnson as an emerging legend... it tells us we are watching a figure passing into folklore even as we watch him suffer.'
audiovisual disjunction — The ballad idiom 'deliberately mythologizes' on the soundtrack while the image track delivers grime, failure and grief — sound and image telling two stories the film never reconciles.
the gest — 'The famous final beat — the wary, wordless acknowledgment exchanged between Johnson and his Crow adversary — is an editorial as much as a performance decision, the film's whole meaning delivered in a held look.'
the lectosign (the readable image) — The closing gesture 'converts an unresolvable cycle of violence into mutual recognition' without any action to secure it: an image whose sense must be deciphered rather than followed.
the seer (voyant) — The 'grief-hollowed' Johnson of the final movement ends not in a decisive act but in the held, wordless look of the closing exchange.

How Jeremiah Johnson was received →