The Adventures of Baron Munchausen · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hot-air balloon sewn out of women's underwear rises over a city under siege. Someone in Gabriella Pescucci's costume shop actually stitched that thing, someone rigged it, and Giuseppe Rotunno photographed it going up. There is the whole film in one object: an obvious fabrication, physically present, doing real work.

It gets into the air because an old man in a theatre lost his temper. The film opens mid-performance in the besieged city, and the play being performed is The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. A man stands up in the house to say the actors have it wrong, that he is the Baron, and that what actually happened was better. Everything after that is his correction.

Deleuze has a name for that man. He calls him the forger, and the regime he opens the powers of the false. The plain version: most narration arrives with a sorting job attached. It happened or it didn't, he's lying or he isn't, and the film eventually tells us which. Deleuze noticed a set of films that quietly cancel the sorting, not to be coy but because the telling is doing something a verdict would kill. A forger in this sense is not a con man after your wallet. He is someone whose account of the world is the only version on offer, and who keeps producing more of it. Deleuze's word for the activity is fabulation, legending: a man caught in the act of inventing himself out loud. The Baron does this for two hours while a rival version of him goes on playing on the stage in the same building. Neither version wins.

Why bother with this lens? Because the ordinary one convicts the film. Judged as a plot, Munchausen is shapeless. The episodes don't cause each other, the middle stretch slackens (a fair charge, made at the time and still true), and the hero's claims can't be checked against anything. But Peter Hollywood's cutting treats the transitions as deliberate ruptures: besieged city to Sultan's court to lunar landscape with no connective travel, "and then" carrying the entire burden of causation, exactly as it does when somebody is telling you a story out loud and daring you to interrupt. Deleuze calls a join like that an irrational cut, an interstice. It doesn't connect two spaces, it sets them beside each other across a gap. Classical continuity hides the cut to manufacture a because. Gilliam exposes it to manufacture an and. Inside each episode the coverage stays fairly conventional, which is the necessary ballast: the images are strange enough that spatial sense has to come from somewhere.

The theatre, then, isn't a frame the film escapes. It's a seed the film grows out of. Deleuze's crystal-image is the moment an actual thing and its double stop being separable. A mirror is the cheap case. A stage inside a film is the rich one, and the Baron's intrusion into a performance of himself collapses the tale into its telling in the first minutes. Afterwards every environment keeps its proscenium. The moon is a stage set with a painted void behind it. Vulcan's forge under Etna is a mechanical spectacle. The Sultan's court is a run of tableaux. Dante Ferretti's design never pretends to document a world; it insists on staging one, and insists that the staging is the argument.

That puts the film in an odd relation to the tradition running from Bazin. Bazin's case for realism is that a photograph carries a trace of what stood in front of the lens, and the camera's authority is the authority of having been there. Gilliam keeps the letter of it and flips the result. There was no digital option in 1988 — this is close to the last major fantasy epic built almost entirely without one — so every wonder had to exist: full-scale and miniature sets, matte paintings, forced perspective, wirework, mechanical creatures, optical printing, all supervised by Richard Conway at Cinecittà. The image is therefore an honest photographic record of an object that is itself a lie. Deleuze would call that a crystalline description: a description that doesn't point at some pre-existing thing but composes one and then stands in its place. The painted void behind the moon isn't standing in for a void. It is the void.

It's also why the film looks better now than what displaced it. The Abyss arrived a year later, Terminator 2 two years after that, and the marvelous became renderable, revisable, cheap to iterate. The seams here — visible joins, painted skies, the palpable weight of built things — read as evidence rather than error. A photograph of a real fake outlasts a simulation of a real thing.

None of it comes from nowhere, and Gilliam pays every debt in lumber. Le Voyage dans la Lune set the terms in 1902: painted flats read frontally from a fixed seat in the stalls, and a leering man in the moon that Munchausen restages not as a knowing citation but as a full-scale set you could walk on. The hinged cut-out silhouettes of The Adventures of Prince Achmed are the exact technique behind Gilliam's Python animations, and here that flat, jointed, frankly two-dimensional logic runs at production scale in Pescucci's costumes and Ferretti's décor. Vincent Korda's The Thief of Bagdad supplies the in-camera compositing playbook — forced perspective, hanging miniatures, traveling mattes — for the court and the balloon ascent. The 1943 Münchhausen fixed the episode architecture Gilliam inherits: cannonball ride, Turkish court, lunar excursion. Beauty and the Beast established the governing rule, that the marvelous must be physically present in front of the lens. And Baron Prášil composited live actors against Doré-style hatched engravings so the frame read as an illustrated page in motion, which is Gilliam's sensibility exactly, moved out of the optical printer and into built sets.

Gilliam's own invention is to make the proscenium a production rule rather than a motif, and to spend forty-six million dollars enforcing it. Every image announces that it was made. The wide-angle lenses bow the edges of the frame, the low camera monumentalizes architecture and shrinks the people under it, and the composition is packed edge to edge with incident. Brazil used that vocabulary for claustrophobia. Here it's for plenitude, and for exhibition: whole sequences advance nothing and are simply presented, like the plates of a picture book, which is also how Rotunno's palette is organized — burnished gold for the theatre and the court, chalky silver for the moon, sulfurous orange for Etna. Deleuze took the term for images that figure rather than act from Eisenstein: attractions.

The rule has a bill attached, and the film's romance about imagination against accountancy doesn't get to skip it. If the marvelous has to physically exist, then somebody physically stood in the cold water and near the explosives. Sarah Polley was about nine, and has since written about what the shoot cost her. That is part of what the film is now.

What it did to narrative is simple to state and hard to pull off: it let a teller's authority do the structural work that causality usually does, at epic scale, without collapsing. Watch it again for where the painted void begins, and for Sally Salt, who has to decide what to do with a man like this. The Baron's answer to a siege is a story, and the story works. The film hands her the question of what to make of that, and then hands it to you.