Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2001 · Peter Jackson · The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on Sightlines

Four figures crossing a ridgeline, small as commas, and behind them a mountain nobody built. Hold that shot a moment. Nearly everything Peter Jackson invented here lives inside it, including the quality criticism finds hardest to praise: a film where people see trouble and go do something about it.

Deleuze cut cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation, feels it, and acts, and the act changes the situation; cutting exists to keep that chain unbroken. In the time-image, action stops working. The character can only watch and endure, and time quits being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you are looking at. Deleuze thought the first regime cracked after the Second World War, when characters began perceiving more than they could answer. Fellowship rebuilds it in 2001 at full power and without irony. Everyone in this film can act on what they see. A good part of the relief it gives comes from exactly that, and it is worth saying plainly, because the usual way to compliment a blockbuster is to find the art-film hiding in it. There isn't one here. The achievement is the machine itself, working.

Deleuze has a precise name for the shape: the large form of the action-image. An encompassing situation presses on people until a decisive act transforms it. The encompasser gets its own sign, the synsign, meaning the milieu is what calls the action out of the characters rather than the other way round. Middle-earth is an unusually literal case, because Jackson built the encompasser out of ground you could stand on. The mountains behind those four figures are real mountains. WETA's miniatures were so large the crew called them bigatures. When the world presses on Frodo, it presses with weather.

Now the concept that reads this film better than any other I know. Deleuze says the large form breathes. It swings between the vast open milieu and the taut narrow line where the action actually happens, out and in, and he calls that rhythm respiration-space. Fellowship is built on the cycle. A ridgeline, a whole country of air, four specks. Then a mine: corridors, close air, a cave-troll in a room. Then air again. Across three hours the editing pulse is a lung. The debt is named and exact. Lean's Lawrence of Arabia taught cinema to dwarf a solitary walker inside a landscape, and Jackson takes that composition and makes it periodic. Lean used the wide as revelation. Jackson uses it as the inhale before a corridor.

Trace the route and a second figure appears, the vector, or line of the universe: a broken zig-zag joining places that have no business sharing a story. A sheltered green valley. A mine. A mountain of fire. The Fellowship's line does not develop one space, it strings unlike spaces together, which is why this plays as a walking film rather than a war film. The plot is transit.

Then there is what is never in the frame. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field, the room next door you know is there, from the absolute out-of-field, a presence beyond the frame with no location at all, a whole leaning on everything you can see. The Ring's evil creator is that. He is not a body in this film, he is pressure. And Jackson's most underrated instrument does the work: Howard Shore's leitmotif score, in the line running from Korngold's Robin Hood through Star Wars, where recurring themes are assigned to peoples and things like architecture. A leitmotif is an audible out-of-field. The Shire's theme under a mountain pass puts the Shire inside a shot that does not contain it. The Ring's motif creeping under a conversation means the Ring is acting while it stays out of sight.

The frame itself is the other invention. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a system holding a certain quantity of information, composed rather than merely found. Jackson's forced perspective takes that literally. Actors of identical height share one frame at different scales, and rigs slide during the take to hold the lie while the camera moves. The composition is not recording a size difference, it is manufacturing one, and it is only true from the camera's exact seat. That is the Metropolis inheritance, the Schüfftan process, and King Kong's matting of live actors into scaled models. Something odd and lovely follows. Bazin's realism asks us to trust the shot and not cheat the space, and Jackson's landscapes are perfectly Bazinian: indexical, weathered, unfaked. His hobbits are pure trickery. He gets the moral authority of a real mountain and the deceit of a false body in one unbroken image. Star Wars had already made physical models the engine of spectacle, shooting things rather than painting them, and Jackson pushed that to its limit. The creatures descend the same line: Harryhausen's hand-built skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, where a monster earned its weight by being matter, is why the cave-troll lands with mass instead of gloss.

And the Ring. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a world where drives erupt beneath the social surface, fastened to a part-object, a relic or a scrap, charged with compulsion. That is the fetish in his technical sense, and the Ring is one: obsession, possession, an artifact of terrible power that is carried rather than used. Jackson came to this from splatter comedies and from the haunted lyricism of Heavenly Creatures, which is the right résumé for an object that takes people over. He had practice in the haunted register long before he had the budget. A second Deleuzian name fits too, and the difference between them is the point. In the relation-image, where meaning comes from relations the audience holds rather than from acts on screen, the Ring is a symbol: the one object condensing the film's organizing relation, that power and appetite and being watched are the same thing. The fetish is what the Ring does to a body. The symbol is what it does to the story.

What the film did to narrative began as a financing decision. Three films shot back to back on a mid-tier studio's money in New Zealand, a gamble with no real precedent. Because it was one production, the first part never has to be a complete meal, and a bond can be built across nine hours instead of asserted in two. Deleuze's word for that bond is the imprint: situation and character marking each other until neither can be described without the other. Fellowship earned and tested, with the walking doing the work. The industry read the result and revised its assumptions about fantasy, about long-form adaptation, and about where a blockbuster could be made; New Zealand's film economy was remade in a few years.

One thing the film declines to settle. Is the Ring's power a property of the object or of whoever carries it? It keeps both live, and that undecided middle is why the walking matters more than the fighting.

So watch it breathe. Time how long Jackson holds the wide before the world closes to a corridor, and listen for what the score puts in the room that the camera has left out.

Concepts in play

respiration-space — The film's three-hour pulse alternates vast milieu-space with the taut line of action: four tiny figures crossing a ridgeline against entirely real mountains, then the enclosed corridors of Moria and the cave-troll, then open air again. Directly extends the Lawrence of Arabia debt of dwarfing solitary figures in landscape, but makes it periodic rather than revelatory.
action-image-large-form — A global situation (an artifact of terrible power, its evil creator rising) presses until a decisive act is undertaken: a fellowship forms to carry the Ring to Mt. Doom, the only place it can be destroyed. Situation compels act; act is meant to transform the situation.
the encompasser — Middle-earth as a milieu that calls action out of its characters, built from real matter: Alan Lee and John Howe's design, WETA's 'bigatures', and mountains that are entirely real, so the encompassing world presses with actual weather.
the movement-image — Perception leads to action and action changes the situation throughout; nobody in the film is reduced to watching. In 2001 this rebuilds the regime Deleuze described as cracking after WWII, unironically, at full power.
out-of-field-absolute — The Ring's evil creator is never a locatable body, only pressure on everything visible; Howard Shore's leitmotif score makes that unlocatable whole audible, the Shire's theme sounding over spaces that do not contain the Shire and the Ring's motif under scenes where the Ring is unseen. Lineage: Korngold's Robin Hood scoring, extended through Star Wars.
the closed set (cadre) — Forced-perspective trickery lets actors of identical height share a frame at different scales, with sliding rigs for Gandalf and Frodo holding the illusion during camera movement. The composition manufactures the information rather than recording it, and is only true from the camera's exact position. Descends from Metropolis's Schüfftan process and King Kong's matting of actors into scaled models.
line of the universe — A walking film whose spine is a broken zig-zag between spaces that share nothing: a sheltered valley, a mine, a mountain of fire. The journey strings heterogeneous milieux together rather than developing one.
fetish — The Ring as part-object charged with compulsive force, carried rather than used; the film's facets are obsession, possession and the occult, and Jackson arrived from the haunted lyricism of Heavenly Creatures already fluent in that register.
symbol — The same object read in the relation-image register: the Ring condenses the film's organizing relation between power, appetite and being watched, which is why the whole plot can be stated as the movement of one small thing.
empreinte — Three films shot back-to-back as a single production let the bond be built across nine hours rather than asserted; the dossier's 'fellowship earned and tested' is precisely situation and characters marking each other through the walk.

How The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was received →