Number 24 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A young man stands at the back of an Oslo tram in the autumn of 1940 and does the one thing the film will ask of him over and over: he reads the faces. The carriage is ordinary. People going to work. Somewhere in it might be a man who reports to the Gestapo, and the only way to know is to watch how a stranger watches you. Number 24 is built on this small, continuous act of looking, and that is the first clue to why a French philosopher who died before the film existed can help you see it.

Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, begins cinema not with story but with perception. Before anyone acts, an image is selected: a living center picks out from the swarm of the world only what concerns it, only what it might act on. He calls cinema's rendering of this the perception-image — the film foregrounding the act and angle of looking itself. Most war films spend perception instantly, converting it into chases and gunfire. Andersen slows it down. The drama of occupied Oslo, as the film stages it, is a problem of knowing before it is a problem of doing: the street looks like a street, the office looks like an office, and survival depends on reading the threat encoded in surfaces engineered to look harmless.

Here Deleuze's smaller tools fit exactly. He separates the mark — an object that means what habit says it means, the tram that is only a tram — from the demark, the anomaly that breaks the habitual chain and forces you to interpret. The whole texture of the film is mark curdling into demark: the passenger whose glance lingers a half-second too long, the clerk who notices which records you reached for. The city looks, in the dossier's phrase, like ordinary life until it doesn't, and that conversion is the film's basic unit of suspense.

When perception finally discharges into action, it does so with precision, and this is where Number 24 declares its allegiance to what Deleuze called the movement-image — the regime where a character perceives a situation and acts to change it. The Oslo Gang did not fight battles. They destroyed paper: ration-card offices, labour-conscription registers. Deleuze would read these operations as the action-image in its small form, where a single act discloses a situation that had been hidden. Burning the records exposes the secret the occupation would rather keep — that the machinery of control runs not on tanks but on filing cabinets, and that an administrative state can be wounded at its desk. Around these acts sits the synsign, the encompassing milieu that calls the action forth: the occupation itself, present in German signage and requisitioned interiors, a total situation pressing on every frame. The conflict is a binomial, force against force, but a deliberately asymmetric one — a handful of young men against a state.

The tension is manufactured in the cutting room. Andersen tracks several agents across the city in the minutes before an operation, and Deleuze's name for this convergence — parallel lines racing a clock toward a single point — is the organic montage of the American tradition, Griffith's last-minute rescue retimed to sabotage. But the specific grammar here, the way each cut registers exposure rather than excitement, is inherited. It comes from Melville's Army of Shadows, the film that taught European cinema how a safe house breathes and how an edit can mean you have been seen. That debt matters, because Army of Shadows is also where the resistance action-image first cracks: Melville's agents act and die anyway, the sensory-motor circuit shadowed by futility — what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image, the dawning sense that doing no longer changes anything.

Number 24 knows this inheritance and chooses, against it, to restore the confidence of the deed. Its subject is 1940, the moment of radicalization, the decision to resist while resistance still feels like a live option. This is the film's real argument, and it is a formal one: it borrows modern cinema's patience without surrendering the older conviction that a single choice can still bend a situation.

Which is why its quietest device is also its sharpest. The dossier notes the particular silence that follows a close call — a held moment where no one acts and everyone only listens. Deleuze would recognize the seed of a pure optical and sound situation, the opsign, the cinema where a character can do nothing but look and hear. In the time-image proper, that suspension becomes the whole film. Here it is a held breath that recharges the circuit; the watcher becomes an agent again. Number 24 lives on that hinge.

That is finally its place in the long Norwegian discourse on the war — from Kampen om tungtvannet and Nine Lives through Max Manus and Andersen's own The 12th Man, each negotiating the same inherited demand for documentary authenticity. Number 24 moves the conversation from the wilderness to the city, from survival-endurance to administrative sabotage, from the lone runner to the network. Watch it for the quality of its looking. The next time the camera holds on an empty Oslo street and nothing happens, notice that nothing happening is the most dangerous thing the film can show you — and that you, by now, are reading the faces too.