Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Zulu
1964 · Cy Endfield · Zulu on Sightlines
First there is the sound. Before a single warrior appears on the skyline above Rorke's Drift, the hills carry chanting and the drumming of shields, and the men behind the mealie bags look up at an empty ridge. Then the ridge fills. Line after line of shields and plumes comes over the crest, held in a wide, high shot so that you can count them, or try to. Nobody fires yet. The camera has done its job: you know how many are coming, and so does every soldier on the wall.
That ridge is the best way into Zulu, and into a part of Gilles Deleuze's thinking about cinema that suits the film well. Deleuze divided film history into two broad regimes. In the first, which he called the movement-image, a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. Seeing leads to doing, and the editing serves that chain. In the second, the time-image, the chain breaks and characters can only watch. Zulu belongs wholly to the first regime. That is no mark against it. It is one of the clearest demonstrations of the action-image working at full strength, and seeing the machinery makes the film more gripping on a rewatch.
The precise form is what Deleuze called the large form of the action-image. Its shape is simple: a situation, an action, and a changed situation. A world presses on a group until a decisive act transforms it. Deleuze's great example was John Ford, and Fort Apache sits in this film's ancestry for exactly that reason: the drill, the roll-call, the friction of command among professional soldiers facing an indigenous nation on an imperial frontier. Endfield takes Ford's regimental texture and squeezes it into a single compound, roughly a day and a night, and a company that only gets smaller.
The situation in this scheme has its own name, the synsign, meaning the encompassing milieu that calls action out of people. Here it starts as news. Isandlwana has fallen, warnings arrive, the missionary begs them to evacuate, and then the numbers become known. The milieu is that valley under the Drakensberg, and Super Technirama 70 was made to show it: a sideways-running negative built for sharp, fine-grained views of vast landscapes and massed figures. The format is the synsign made visible. Stephen Dade's widescreen frame is used for information more than for painterly beauty. Deleuze treated the frame as a closed set, a system of information, and Zulu treats its frame that way literally: how many, from where, and how thin the red line at the wall has become.
Then comes the shape of the space. Deleuze described how the large form breathes, opening onto the huge milieu and then pulling tight into the line of the action. Dade alternates extreme long shots of the hills with eyelines and hands inside the perimeter: loading, aiming, the bags of the barricade. You breathe out into the valley and in to the Martini-Henry's breech. John Jympson's cutting keeps returning to the geography of the station, so you always know the state of each wall. The suspense depends on that.
The second key term is the binomial, force against force. The duel is usually a hero and a villain. In Zulu it is two collective bodies, and it begins before any blow lands, as a contest of voices. The chant rises from the hills. The Welsh soldiers answer with "Men of Harlech." Song meets song, built in the cutting room as much as on set. The film turns the duel into sound first. (The regiment's Welshness is a romantic anachronism. The scene is fine drama all the same.)
What makes the binomial unusually intelligent here is that both sides read each other. The Zulu attacks are staged as probes, feints and flanking rushes that test the perimeter. Deleuze had a term for an act that could belong to two different situations: the index of equivocity. Every rush down the slope poses the defenders that question. Is this the attack, or a probe to draw our fire? The soldiers must interpret before they can act, and the battle becomes a tactical argument rather than a massacre. Few films in the genre give the enemy a strategy at all.
The lulls matter as well. Endfield banks tension in long quiet passages, and it is worth seeing why these differ from the "dead time" of modern cinema. In Antonioni a pause floats free of action. In Zulu every pause is loaded. It is the gap between volleys, and the next attack goes off because of it.
There is also a harder truth, and the lens helps you see it. From the wall, the Zulu army is shown mostly as what Deleuze called a dividual: a crowd rendered as one affective unit, a moving mass of shields. That serves the siege picture's dread. It is also the imperial point of view, inherited from The Four Feathers and Gunga Din, where the massed African force exists to be held off. The film grants that army discipline and dignity, but it seldom crosses the wall to stand inside it. The missionary's objection to the whole enterprise is voiced, then sidelined. The film's form is its politics.
Where does that leave Zulu in the theory of film? André Bazin argued that when the truth of an event depends on two things being present together, montage should give way to the single frame that holds both. The great wide shots of the valley filling while the line waits do exactly that. They show the danger as a relation of scale, defenders and multitude in one image, and they don't fake it in the cutting room.
The ancestry is clear in the lineage. From Beau Geste comes the walled outpost and its fixed defensive choreography. Sahara supplies the procedural spine: ration, count, hold. They Died with Their Boots On gives the closing ring, which Endfield's shrinking perimeter inherits. Arriving late in the cycle, Zulu refines all of it into its purest procedural form, where character is shown entirely through function. Who panics, who steadies, who improvises. Stanley Baker's Chard is an engineer with a bridge to build. Michael Caine's Bromhead begins as a languid fop and hardens into command. The large form changes the world, and it changes them too.
So watch it again for the ridge. Watch the moment of looking before the moment of firing, and the way every image gives you a count. Zulu makes the action-image visible as a machine: perception loaded, held, then fired in rotation. Once you can see the mechanism you can admire it, and you can also see what it keeps outside its frame.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — Classical siege structure: warnings, the fall of Isandlwana and the known numbers press on a fixed company until the defense must answer it; one place, roughly a day and a night, a shrinking cast.
- the encompasser — The valley beneath the Drakensberg, filmed in Super Technirama 70 extreme long shots, as the encompassing milieu that calls the defenders to act.
- binomial — Two collective bodies set force against force, first in sound (the Zulu chant and shield-drumming answered by 'Men of Harlech'), then in volley fire against massed assault.
- respiration-space — Dade alternates vast high-angle exteriors of the hills with tight shots of hands loading and aiming at the mealie-bag barricade.
- index-of-equivocity — Zulu attacks staged as feints, flanking rushes and reconnaissance probes, so each rush could be the real assault or a test to draw fire.
- the closed set (cadre) — The widescreen frame used for information rather than painterly composition: how many are coming, from where, how thin the line has become.
- out-of-field-relative — Chanting and drumming heard from the hills before the warriors are seen; the ridge implies the space beyond it before it fills.
- dividual — The Zulu advance shown from the defenders' side as a single moving mass of shields and plumes cresting a ridge.