The Thief of Bagdad · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Smoke comes out of a bottle on a shore and keeps coming. It climbs, thickens, resolves into a bare foot the size of a boat, then a leg, then a giant laughing somewhere up in the weather. Down at ankle height stands a boy. The two are unmistakably in that shot together. Neither was ever in the same room.

Rex Ingram was photographed against a blue backing. Sabu was photographed elsewhere. Lawrence Butler's unit married them with a travelling matte, a technique this production pushed out of the laboratory into working practice and took an Academy Award for. André Bazin, the critic who taught a generation to trust the unbroken shot, argued that when the meaning of a scene is that two beings share a space, you must not cut them apart; the photograph's authority comes from the fact that the thing stood in front of the lens. The Thief of Bagdad keeps the letter of that law and voids its spirit. Giant and boy do share a frame. The space is fabricated, and the film never pretends otherwise. It invites you in rather than fooling you.

Gilles Deleuze divided cinema at a hinge: films where perceiving leads to acting, and films where it stops leading anywhere. The first he called the movement-image. A character sees a situation and does something that changes it. Nearly all studio cinema runs on that circuit, and this one runs on it at full throttle, in the shape Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image — a whole world out of joint, pressure accumulating, until decisive acts set it right. His name for that enveloping milieu is the encompasser, the situation that surrounds people and squeezes an act out of them. Vincent Korda built it literally. Palace stairs, temple interiors, the vault of the All-Seeing Eye, all scaled so that human figures register as small bright marks against architecture. The tyranny is in the set before anyone speaks a line.

That form breathes, too: vast milieu, then the taut thin line of the action, then vast milieu again. Deleuze calls it respiration-space, and you can hear the film doing it. Charles Crichton's cutting alternates long held pictorial shots, the reveal of the Djinni, the ascent to the Temple of the Dawn, with the fast farcical chop of the marketplace and the escapes. Wide and slow, then close and quick.

The strangest thing in the picture is what happens to movement itself. Watch Abu on the magic carpet, astride the mechanical horse, carried in the Djinni's fist over the deserts of the American Southwest. He is not moving. The world is. Deleuze has an exact name for this, drawn from his writing on dance: the movement of world. Ordinarily a character moves through a stable world; here he goes still, held and carried and absorbed, and motion is handed over to everything around him. Deleuze places it in the dream-image, the onirosign — images that circulate by wonder rather than by cause and are anchored to nobody's remembered past. That is exactly this film's dramatic mode, a tale told, opening into episodes that connect by enchantment instead of consequence. And here the concept and the machinery turn out to be the same thing. A travelling matte works by immobilising the actor and printing a moving world around him. Miklós Rózsa was allowed to compose certain sequences in advance so that footage could be shot and cut to playback, which means the motion was timed to music that already existed. Deleuze reached the movement of world by watching a dancer get taken over by the dance. Korda's unit reached it as an engineering problem, and an industry was built on the answer.

One time-trick, and it pays to be precise about what it is not. The film opens on a blind beggar who turns out to be Prince Ahmad, and he narrates his own fall before the picture returns to the present. Deleuze calls that a recollection-image: a dated flashback standing in for a former present. Memory in the service of story. You always know where you are. The nesting is inherited anyway, along with the composited flying carpet, from Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod (1921) by way of the 1924 Fairbanks Thief. The radicalism here is optical, not temporal.

Then there is Conrad Veidt. He brought Jaffar out of German silent cinema almost intact: suspended stillness broken by a single unfurling gesture, the eyes carrying the scene, a grammar he built as Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and as the frozen Ivan in Waxworks, whose bulbous forced-perspective Baghdad this film's design also descends from. Ahmad's blinding is that somnambulism turned outward. Deleuze reads expressionism as the discovery of a non-organic life in things, shadow and matter carrying a will of their own, and Korda's unit moves it out of shadow and into objects. The great toy horse. The Silver Maid, a six-armed mechanical dancer Jaffar deploys as a murder weapon. Lovely things with something dead behind the eyes.

And into colour. Georges Périnal does not use Technicolor to look natural; he uses it as feeling. Cobalt and turquoise for the magical register, hot gold and red for the courts, near-monochrome for the beggars' world. Deleuze's colour-image is a colour that absorbs a scene instead of describing it, the situation dissolved into a hue and held there. Outside animation that was close to unprecedented in 1940, and it is the discovery Powell walked away with.

Notice how much of this is about eyes. The eye painted on Jaffar's ship. Ahmad blinded and cast out. The All-Seeing Eye that Abu must climb a temple to steal. Sight returning at the moment justice does. The eye works here as a symbol, the object that condenses a film's organising relation, and the relation is the movement-image's own precondition. Perception feeds action. Blind Ahmad cannot act, only narrate. Give him his sight and the circuit closes and the usurper falls.

The debts backward are specific. William Cameron Menzies's deliberately oversized 1924 sets, where the hero read as a speck in an infinite palace; Menzies worked on this one too, uncredited. Fairbanks's vaulting, hand-over-hand climbing, transposed wholesale onto Sabu. Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which assembled fantasy from separately photographed flat planes on a multiplane rig, the layered-element logic that Butler's blue screen executes photographically. Korda's own Things to Come (1936), where the inhuman architecture and the practice of scoring before shooting were already in rehearsal.

Forward it is nearly everywhere. Harryhausen's Sinbad cycle starts from this vocabulary of giants and sorcerers. Disney's Aladdin (1992) borrows the structure and doesn't trouble to change the names. Blue-screen compositing became the default grammar of effects filmmaking and remains so. Within British cinema the truest heir is Powell himself: what he learned here, that design and colour and music can carry meaning with no help from dialogue, became Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, where the same artifice and often the same craftsmen stopped serving spectacle and started serving psychology.

That is the significance. Before this film a fantasy image was a trick inserted into a photographed world. After it, the world itself could be assembled from parts and hold together as one continuous place. Every impossible space you have watched since is downstream of that.

The film also knows what it has made. Its own moral is that craft in a tyrant's hands turns monstrous: Jaffar can command anything except love, so he counterfeits it as a silver automaton, and the counterfeit kills. And the boy refuses the settled world entirely. Offered an education and a place at court, Abu steals the carpet and goes. Watch him next time, and watch how often he is perfectly still while everything beneath him moves.