Dead of Night · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A car comes down a lane in Kent. Hedges, a gate, a farmhouse with good beams. The architect who gets out has driven down to discuss alterations, and somewhere between the car and the front door his face goes wrong. He has been here. Not on business. In a dream, the same one, many times, and he has never managed to stay asleep long enough to see how it ends.

Walter Craig will not be allowed to alter anything.

That is the whole film, and it is also the quickest way into a set of ideas Gilles Deleuze spent two books on: what happened to cinema in the 1940s, when its people began losing the ability to do anything about what they could see.

Start with the ordinary arrangement. Someone perceives a situation, acts on it, the situation changes, and continuity cutting exists to carry that chain along. Deleuze calls the bond between perceiving and acting the sensory-motor link, and the cinema built on it the movement-image. Horror leans on it hard. You run, you dig, you burn the thing in the barn. Craig perceives better than anyone else in the room; he has the ending already. What he does with it is sit down and take a cup of tea.

Deleuze has a precise name for that failure. The crisis of the action-image is his term for the moment a character can no longer react adequately to what he perceives, and he dates it to Italy just after the war, to people walking through rubble with nothing useful to do. Here it turns up in a chintz sitting room, and it arrives as embarrassment. Mervyn Johns plays the dread as social awkwardness long before he plays it as terror, which is not a softening. It is what a withdrawn capacity for action looks like in an Englishman who does not want to make a scene. Deleuze's word for such a figure is the seer: one who watches and endures rather than acts. The staging keeps saying it. The guests settle into a closed circle of chairs and Craig is always the odd point outside it.

So he listens. Each guest gives him a story, and each story is what Deleuze calls a recollection-image: a dated flashback, a former present fetched back and re-presented. It is cinema's oldest and most modest way of showing time, and an indirect one, because what we get is somebody's memory rather than time itself. Charles Hasse's cutting makes the past arrive politely. A dissolve, a face held while the voice takes over, and we are inside somebody else's past without a jolt.

Then a story leaks. "Just room for one inside, sir," says the hearse driver in one man's dream, and later a bus conductor says it out loud, cheerfully, in a completely different register. Deleuze would call the second one a demark: a term ripped out of the series it belonged to and set down in a foreign one, so habit gives out and you are forced to interpret instead. Cavalcanti learned that at the GPO Film Unit, cutting verse against the image in Night Mail. The technique is documentary rhythm. Here it turns four words into a sentence.

Hamer's mirror episode goes further, and it is the film's most beautiful idea. A mirror hangs in a modern bedroom and declines to reflect it. What it shows is a candlelit Jacobean chamber with its own fire and its own history, and eventually a man who exists only in there. The staging is not an optical effect: it is a second set built as its own left-right inversion behind an empty frame, so the audience is really looking through a hole in the wall, and the illusion holds because the geometry never cheats. The Student of Prague had done reflection-with-a-will in camera in 1926. Hamer's advance is to give the reflection a room and a past of its own.

Deleuze calls an image like this a crystal. Every present, he argues, splits as it happens into an actual thing and a virtual double of itself, and you get a crystal-image when a film catches that split and lets the two sides trade places until you cannot say which one is the original. A mirror is his favourite instance. Googie Withers spends the episode watching her husband become someone else, which is the human version of the same event: two versions of one man, exchanging.

The ventriloquist tale does it with sound. Watch where Hugo is placed, foreground, nearer the lens than the man working him, so the composition gives the part-object precedence over the person. Deleuze's term for a charged fragment like that is the fetish: an object carrying a drive its owner has disowned. Then listen. The sound perspective puts Hugo's voice in the correct part of the room whether or not Frere's lips are moving, and refuses to help us. Voice and body come apart, which Deleuze treats as one of the ways the image stops being self-evident and starts having to be read. Georges Auric's score is intermittent by design, so the worst moments have no music at all and the room is left to do it. Von Stroheim invented the split-voice grammar in The Great Gabbo in 1929, where the dummy says what the man will not. Redgrave changes one thing, and it is the thing that matters: he plays the switch as involuntary.

Against all this the film sets Dr. van Straaten, who explains. Frederick Valk gives him weight and patience, and the rationalist case is never made stupid. It also cannot be settled, and that is deliberate. Photography carries an old contract, the one Bazin built his realism on: the camera is an automatic witness, film does not lie. We have seen the Jacobean room. Deleuze's powers of the false names what a film does when it stops treating that contract as a guarantee and turns undecidability into a working principle. Dead of Night never rules that the tales are true or that van Straaten is right. It removes the position from which the question could be answered.

Which is what the last ten minutes are for. Craig's nightmare is not a memory of anything, so Deleuze would file it as a dream-image, a circuit with no anchor in a datable past. It is assembled as an accelerating montage that raids all five tales, dropping him into the mirror's Victorian bedroom, then a prison cell with Hugo, then the hands of people he has only heard described. Space stops connecting, and the joins are made across the gap rather than through it: Deleuze's irrational cut, where the interval belongs to neither side. Cavalcanti had built that grammar of associative dissolves twenty years earlier in Rien que les heures. Here it becomes the machinery of the fear itself, inside an Ealing picture, as the lighting abandons the flat documentary daylight it opened in for canted angles and impossible rooms. This is why Universal's American cut is a real loss. Dropping the golfing story and the Christmas party removed the daylight, and the daylight is what the dark was being measured against.

Then the car comes down the lane again.

Caligari, the ancestor everyone names, ends by returning us to an asylum, and that return is a floor to stand on: the tale was a madman's and we are outside it. Waxworks lets its frame collapse into the final story. Dead of Night deletes the exterior altogether. Deleuze describes a crystal that has become perfect, an enclosed mirrored world with no outside and no line of escape, and that is the shape of this ending. He also describes peaks of present, several presents coexisting instead of queuing up, and Craig is living at least three. He is arriving. He has already arrived, many times, in a dream he can never finish. And he is carrying an ending that has not happened yet and has already happened.

What the film did to narrative is easy to state and was not available before it. It moved the fear out of the thing and into the shape. No monster is responsible for what happens to Walter Craig. The form is. An architect drives down to alter a house and finds himself inside a structure that will not take alterations, including from the film. Nor can the loop be assigned cleanly to one author: John Baines supplied the mirror and the dummy, Angus MacPhail worked the linking material with him, Dearden shot the frame, Cavalcanti brought the montage and the ears, Hamer built the reversed set, Crichton did the golf. An Ealing repertory converging is its own kind of authorship.

It reached British cinemas in September 1945, weeks after the war ended, among the first domestic films to carry the "H" certificate again, from a studio whose house style had been documentary and national purpose. The genre came back in the form of a mild, tired man who sees exactly what is coming and cannot lift a hand. I don't think the film argues anything by that, and I wouldn't trust a reading that tidied it up. It is worth sitting with.

Watch it again for what it has already told you. Notice where the camera puts Hugo. Notice how often Craig is outside the circle of chairs. And when the car comes down the lane at the end, notice that it isn't a twist. The film has been showing you its shape since the first shot. You took it for a pleasant drive in Kent.