Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Sabotage
1937 · Alfred Hitchcock · Sabotage on Sightlines
A boy sits on a London bus with a parcel under his arm. On the way he has been stopped by a street vendor who wants to demonstrate toothpaste on him. A woman's little dog climbs into his lap and licks his face. The traffic will not move. The parcel holds two cans of film and a bomb, and the bomb is set for 1:45. You know that. Stevie doesn't.
Watch the sequence again and notice what is actually in the shots. A puppy. A salesman. A clock face. A crowd out for a parade. There is no menacing figure, no lurking shadow, nothing in any single frame that a stranger walking in halfway would find alarming. The dread isn't in the images. It's in the gaps between them, and the gap is you.
That is the thing Gilles Deleuze thought Hitchcock had invented, and it's worth taking the long way round to see why.
Deleuze sorts cinema into two big regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it; the cut serves that chain, and the film resolves when the act lands. Sabotage keeps all of that machinery. It is a Gaumont-British thriller with a saboteur, a detective, and a deadline. But Hitchcock adds a term the machinery never had. Deleuze calls the result the relation-image, or the mental-image: the film stops presenting actions and starts presenting relations between things, and a relation is not in any shot. Somebody has to hold it. Hitchcock, Deleuze says, puts the spectator inside the film — not as a witness, as a working part.
Why bother with the vocabulary? Because it explains the strangest fact about the bus sequence, which is that it's assembled almost entirely out of things that are not the bomb. If suspense were an emotion the film transmits, Hitchcock would film the danger. Instead he films a dog, and hands you a job.
Deleuze borrows two more terms for how Hitchcock loads ordinary objects. A mark is an object that means what its habit means: film cans go to the projection booth of a suburban cinema, the most unremarkable delivery in this film's world, since the Verlocs run the Bijou and reels arrive there every week. A demark is that same object torn out of its chain. One can isn't a film. The man who built what's inside it sells birds for a living and sends the boy off with a cage of canaries and a kind word.
And the film's organizing symbol is celluloid itself. The Verlocs live in the rooms behind their own screen. The bomb travels disguised as cinema. The physical stock of the medium is the thing that detonates. Hitchcock is not being coy about who packed the parcel.
The sequence is also an argument with the history of cutting. Griffith, in Intolerance, perfected the cross-cut that accelerates toward rescue — Deleuze's organic, American montage, where parallel lines converge and salvation arrives on the last beat. Sabotage runs that figure to its full length, every convergence in place, and then lets the bomb go off. The grammar survives; the guarantee is withdrawn. The other half of the grammar came from the opposite direction. Ivor Montagu, the film's associate producer, co-founded the Film Society and was Britain's main conduit for Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and the Odessa Steps had already shown how to cut fragments of a rising threat against helpless bystanders until dread accumulates that no single shot contains. The Kuleshov principle underneath — meaning is made between shots, not inside them — is the relation-image in miniature. Hitchcock took a claim about two adjacent frames and stretched it across a whole picture.
It pays off at the dinner table. Verloc, a meal nobody is eating, Stevie's empty chair, the carving knife. Hitchcock shoots it in fragments: glances, the knife, her hand, the chair. Sylvia Sidney does the rest in small movements, a threshold crossed with almost no dialogue. What the assembly produces is genuinely undecidable. Deleuze has a name for a gesture that could belong to two different situations at once — an index of equivocity. Did she kill him, or did she stand where the knife was and let it happen? The film won't say, and then it arranges a fire that destroys the evidence, so the law never has to decide either. Sidney reportedly hated being shot in tiny pieces for later assembly. That friction is the method. She wasn't permitted to perform the decision, because the decision had to be made in the cutting room, and finally by us.
Before that comes the scene I'd rewatch first. Numb after the boy's death, Mrs. Verloc drifts into her own auditorium, where a Disney Silly Symphony, Who Killed Cock Robin?, is playing. She laughs. Then the cartoon stages its mock murder trial, cheerfully, in song, and the laugh stops working. In the vocabulary Deleuze reserves for postwar cinema, this is a pure optical situation: a character who can't act, only look, and whose looking is the entire event. He also describes a figure where the person goes still and the world takes over the movement, the way a dance absorbs a dancer. Here a cartoon does it. She doesn't so much decide to kill her husband as receive the decision off a screen. A woman sits in a cinema and a film does something to her. Hitchcock made that shot in 1936, in the middle of a commercial thriller, and it is the single most modern thing in his British work.
The rest of the film's texture comes from his German apprenticeship: the opening sabotage played as a lightbulb filament dying and London going dark, the hard shadows around the Bijou that any Caligari viewer will recognise, Oscar Homolka's saboteur as a tired trapped man closer to Lang's M than to a melodrama villain. At the aquarium, Verloc stares at the tank glass and watches the city dissolve on it — a daydream attached to no memory, projected onto a pane. Nobody in this film can look at glass without a picture appearing.
Hitchcock later told Truffaut that killing Stevie was a serious mistake: once you have made an audience suffer on a character's behalf, you must not then let the worst happen. That verdict is one of the most consequential pieces of theory ever produced by a working director, and he wrote it out of his own failure. Notice what makes it a rule rather than a bold stroke. If the dread was never on the screen, if it lived in us the whole time, then the explosion isn't something done to a character. Every thriller since that lets you know more than the person on screen is operating on terms this film set, including the one term it broke.
So watch the bus again and count the shots with anything dangerous in them. Then watch the faces of the people delaying him, none of whom have done anything wrong. The question Sabotage leaves open is whether the rule Hitchcock derived from it is true or merely prudent — whether an audience is owed its rescue, or only used to getting one. He found out once, and never risked it again.
Concepts in play
- the mental-image / relation-image — The bomb-on-the-bus sequence is built from shots containing nothing dangerous (a dog, a toothpaste vendor, a clock, a parade crowd); the terror exists only in the relation the audience holds between parcel and deadline — Hitchcock's structural information asymmetry, the audience knowing long before Stevie does.
- mark — Film cans delivered to the Verlocs' Bijou cinema are the most customary object in the film's world — reels going to a projection booth — which is exactly why the parcel reads as harmless.
- demark — The bomb concealed among the film cans, supplied by a mild bird-shop owner who sends Stevie off with a cage of canaries: the object torn out of its habitual chain.
- symbol — Celluloid itself — the Verlocs live in rooms adjoining their own auditorium, the bomb travels disguised as movie reels, and the physical stock of cinema is what detonates.
- montage-organic-american — The Griffith last-minute-rescue cross-cut (Intolerance) is run to full length — accelerating parallel action, clocks, delays — and then refused: the rescue montage completes and the bomb still kills the boy.
- montage-dialectical-soviet — The Odessa Steps grammar of cutting a rising threat against helpless bystanders, carried into the film by associate producer Ivor Montagu, co-founder of the Film Society and Britain's conduit for Eisenstein and Pudovkin; the knife scene is Hitchcock's most nearly Kuleshovian passage.
- index-of-equivocity — Verloc's death is assembled from fragments — glances, the carving knife, the meal, Stevie's empty chair — so the killing arises ambiguously between Mrs. Verloc's will and circumstance; the film then engineers a fire that erases the evidence rather than adjudicating.
- movement of world — Mrs. Verloc, numb after her brother's death, sits motionless in her own auditorium while the Disney Silly Symphony Who Killed Cock Robin? performs its mock murder trial; the resolve to kill her husband arrives from the moving screen rather than from her own action.
- pure optical & sound situation — In the auditorium scene she can only watch and listen — the cheerful diegetic song scoring her turn from laughter to grief — with no action available to her; the watching is the whole event.
- icon of power (the threshold face) — Sylvia Sidney's banked restraint: micro-movements across her face in the auditorium and at the dinner table carry the crossing into violence with almost no dialogue.
- onirosign — At the London Zoo aquarium the tank glass becomes a screen on which Verloc watches the city dissolve — a fantasy circuit attached to no localizable memory.
- expressionism — Bernard Knowles's high-contrast urban photography out of Hitchcock's German training: the opening power-station sabotage played as failing light and a dying lightbulb filament, and the hard-shadow chiaroscuro around the Verloc cinema and the knife murder.