Lifeboat · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man's leg is coming off, and Hitchcock points the camera at everyone except the leg.

The amputation of Gus's leg is assembled from the faces around it and from what the frame refuses to show. Hitchcock spent his career talking about Kuleshov: cut a neutral face against a thing and the audience supplies the feeling. Here he cuts a ring of faces against a thing that isn't there at all. You perform the surgery.

Hold onto that. It's the whole film in one sequence, and it's the door into what Gilles Deleuze thought Hitchcock had done to cinema.

Deleuze finishes his account of classical cinema with Hitchcock, the filmmaker who brought relation into the image. Plain version: most shots show you a thing. A Hitchcock shot shows you a relation between two things, and a relation can't be photographed, so somebody has to hold it. That somebody is you, the third term that completes what the picture only sets up. Deleuze calls this the relation-image. Lifeboat is that idea stripped to a bench experiment: in a boat there's nothing to look at but people, and nothing to know but what people are doing to each other.

Start with the box they're in. For Deleuze a frame is a closed set, a system saturated with information, to be read rather than just inhabited. Here it's closed twice, by the frame and by the gunwales. Glen MacWilliams composes in tiers, using thwart and mast and gunwale so four or five faces sit at different depths without the image flattening. Nobody can leave, which means the ordinary way a film relieves pressure, cutting somewhere else, is gone for the length of a feature.

Deleuze splits off-screen space in two. There's the relative out-of-field, the space next door: the corridor past the window. And there's the absolute out-of-field, which isn't next door and isn't anywhere you could walk to, a whole that presses on the frame without being a place. Most films drift between them. Lifeboat has almost no relative out-of-field; there's nothing next door but water. So everything the movie is actually about — the war, the shore, the Allied cause, the ship on the bottom — is forced into the absolute. Which is why it doesn't play as a survival picture. The world is present the whole time and never once as a location.

That also breaks the engine of 1940s cinema. Deleuze's large form is the shape of the war film: an encompassing situation bears down until somebody acts decisively and changes it. Here it can't be photographed, so it has to be argued into existence by people who disagree about what it is. Every attempt to name the situation becomes a proposal, and every proposal has to be counted.

Bergson, whom Deleuze is rebuilding, says a living thing is a gap. Something comes in as perception, something goes out as action, and the creature is the hesitation between. Deleuze calls it the centre of indetermination. Lifeboat turns a whole vessel into one: nine people take in identical information and can't convert it into a single act. Who holds the tiller is the argument of the movie.

Hitchcock's invention here is the reaction shot as a ballot. Deleuze's name for a shot that shows someone in the act of perceiving is the dicisign, a perception of a perception. The cutting is juridical. A proposal is made and the camera polls the boat. The debt runs back to Eisenstein's quarterdeck in Battleship Potemkin, where a collective decision gets built in the cut between scrutinized faces and never spoken aloud, and to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, where the close-up is cut free of its space and becomes evidence at a tribunal. MacWilliams runs Dreyer's tribunal on a boat with no courtroom. Hitchcock adds a wrinkle Dreyer never needed: nobody aboard can withdraw, so privacy has to be manufactured optically. On this boat the only door is a cut.

Then there's Willi. Deleuze distinguishes a mark, an object that means by habit (see a gun, expect a shot), from a demark, the thing that breaks the chain and forces you to interpret instead of anticipate. Willi is a demark with a pulse. You pull a drowning man from the sea, which means mercy, and he is the man who sank you. It's folded into language too: he understands English and lets them believe he doesn't, so every line spoken over his head is doing two jobs. Renoir got there first in La Grande Illusion, where German, French and English are barrier and bridge and the enemy officer is played straight, a craft problem rather than a moral lapse. Hitchcock imported that solution into a war whose outcome was still open.

Everything converges on the killing. Deleuze borrows a term from Eisenstein's crowds: the dividual, a collective acting as one affective unit rather than a sum of persons. Dorothy Spencer's cutting has to make a mob out of individualists who've spent the film refusing to cohere. Then Hitchcock withholds the release. Held shots, silence, nobody able to look at anyone else. The boat reaches unanimity exactly once, and that's what it spends it on. The film never says whether it was right. That silence is either the movie's honesty or its evasion, and eighty years of argument haven't settled which.

Deleuze has a category for an image that poses a problem instead of resolving one: the discourse-image. Lifeboat's problem is what a coalition of individualists does when it finally has to agree on a direction, and the film won't answer it. Bosley Crowther attacked it in the Times for granting the German competence, stamina and foresight while the Allies bickered and drank. Fox curtailed the release. Steinbeck, who wrote the source story, objected publicly to the treatment of Joe, so the politics were contested inside the production as well as in the press. But the formal fact under the fight isn't in dispute. Lifeboat was punished for refusing to keep the right answer safely off-screen, and that refusal is the achievement.

The line in: The Petrified Forest gave Hollywood the single-set play, re-blocking a fixed room by reseating bodies instead of moving the camera, an armed outsider forcing the group into talk. The Lady Vanishes was Hitchcock's own rehearsal, a sealed carriage of national types who have to be argued into acting. Spencer had already cut a vehicle-bound ensemble in Stagecoach, where the seating order carries the class hierarchy; she brings that method to the boat, where the seating order carries the politics. The line out is Rope, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window. The confinement cycle starts here, and this is where Hitchcock learned that a fixed vantage isn't a limitation to be beaten but a machine for making an audience complicit.

Watch it again with one question in hand: when does Hitchcock let you see the thing, and when does he only let you see people seeing it? The tally is lower than you remember. The sky behind those actors is a projection and every viewer in 1944 could tell, and it doesn't matter, because the film's real background was never the sky. The argument isn't in the dialogue. It's in where the camera stands while the dialogue happens, in who's in frame when the vote is taken, and in the leg you never see.