Great Expectations · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy runs along a flat marsh at dusk and the wind does everything: bends the grass, moves the trees, works the crossbar of a gibbet until it creaks. One of the trees is shaped like a hanged man. The composition has been telling you for a full minute that this place is empty. Then a hand comes into it and takes him by the throat.

There is no cut. No shot of a monster. Magwitch arrives inside the frame you were already reading, out of the one corner of it the camera had taught you not to watch. Guy Green and David Lean put the camera low and the horizon high, so the marsh is mostly sky and the child is a smudge at the bottom of it, and the shock is architectural rather than editorial. It was built into where the picture told you to look.

Deleuze has a word for the frame used this way: the closed set. The image gets treated as a system holding a fixed quantity of information and withholding the rest, and what it withholds is the out-of-field, the space just past the edge that the picture keeps promising is there. Most films spend that promise on continuity, so you believe the room goes on past the door. Lean spends it on ambush. That is his specific invention here, and it is a British film's answer to a problem Hitchcock usually solved with cutting.

There is a second out-of-field on the soundtrack, and it never resolves. For long stretches Walter Goehr's score simply stops and the marsh runs on wind, water, the creak of the post, and the boom of the hulks' guns somewhere out on an estuary you are never shown. Those guns don't open onto an adjacent space. They open onto a whole apparatus of punishment the film declines to locate anywhere, which is why the marsh keeps feeling less like Kent than like a condition.

John Bryan built the church small so that the boy running past it would read smaller still. This is the film's governing grammar: proportion equals power. Pip is dwarfed by Satis House's doors and ceilings and by London; he is large in the frame only at the forge, which is warm and low and cluttered and which the film understands as the thing he will betray. The vocabulary is inherited and the debts are specific. Rochus Gliese's stage-built marsh and city for Sunrise is the precedent for making the lens rather than the location do the dramatising; Vincent Korda's deliberately oversized and undersized pieces in The Thief of Bagdad are where scale becomes a statement about who has authority in a shot; Gregg Toland's studio moor in Wuthering Heights is where weather stops being geography and becomes lighting. From Citizen Kane Lean takes three habits as one package — floor-level camera under ceilinged sets, hard key printed down to true blacks, and Robert Wise's breakfast-table elision. Deleuze would call the opening marsh an any-space-whatever: a space given to you as pure affect before it is given as a place, with no establishing topography to hold it down.

Worth saying what this is not. Bazin's case for deep focus was that it leaves the world whole and lets you choose where to look, and its moral force depends on the space being real. Lean's depth is carpentry. Corridors recede because they are shorter than they appear, and the film's Oscar for art direction is in that sense an award for a very beautiful lie. He gets Bazin's depth without Bazin's ontology, which turns out to suit Dickens, whose London was never a documentary either.

Then there is the room. Satis House is lit almost entirely by candle-motivated sources, so the yellowed dress and the grey ruin of the cake seem to give off their own weak light while everything around them dissolves. Sunlight is excluded absolutely. The clocks stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

This is what Deleuze calls a crystal-image, and the concept earns its keep here. A crystal-image is one where the present in front of you and something that is not present — a memory, a reflection, a former self — have fused so completely that you cannot pull them apart. Miss Havisham is not remembering her wedding. She is still in it, in the dress, at the table, in a light that has not been allowed to change. The temptation is to call the room a symbol of the past, and the stopped clocks do work as the film's one great condensing object, the thing everyone remembers. But symbol is too weak a word for what the scene does. Nothing in Satis House is behind anything. Time has split into a present that goes on and a past that refuses to become past, and both are on screen at once, in the same frame, giving off the same light.

Deleuze distinguishes kinds of crystal, and this one is precise: the crystal in decomposition, an ordered and once-aristocratic world rotting from inside. The bridal table is furred with cobweb. The cake is collapsing into its own decay. And decomposition of this kind is productive, which is what makes the concept explain more than a theme would. A child raised inside stopped time comes out as a weapon aimed at other people's futures. That is Estella, and it is why she is cold rather than cruel. She was manufactured in a room where nothing is allowed to happen next.

Against that room, the rest of the film is all next. Lean had been one of Britain's best editors before he directed, and Great Expectations is where the cutting becomes authorship: years pass in a dissolve, a journey becomes a departure and an arrival, the boy becomes the man on a gestural match rather than an announcement. What licenses all that compression is John Mills's retrospective voice, and the film is candid about it, opening on the novel itself with hands turning to the first page. Deleuze would file that voice under the recollection-image: the past neatly dated, framed, and narrated from a present that survived it. Lean got the device from Rebecca and Jane Eyre, which had already paired a narrating survivor with a great house preserved as a wound. The joke of his film is that the device fails exactly once. Pip's voice can date everything except Satis House, because a crystal has no date to give.

What this did to filmmaking is easy to underrate now that it looks inevitable. Lean proved a five-hundred-page serial could be cut like a newsreel and still feel complete, and that adaptation could be an act of design rather than illustration — the set doing the reading of the book. Bryan pushed the tilt further two years later in Oliver Twist. Nearly eighty years on, the gibbet, the stopped clocks and the cobwebbed cake are not one interpretation of Dickens competing with others. They are the default visual memory of the novel, which is a stranger kind of victory than an Academy Award.

So watch it twice. Once for Pip, whose story is all forward motion and dissolves. Once for the house, where the film quietly stops being a story at all. By the account most often repeated, Kay Walsh argued for the redemptive ending the film adopts, which insists a room like that can be broken open. See whether you believe her.