Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Kingdom of Heaven
2005 · Ridley Scott · Kingdom of Heaven on Sightlines
A silver face in a shuttered room, amber light lying in pools on the floor, everything outside the pools black. Behind the mask is Baldwin IV, king of Jerusalem, a leper in his twenties, played under the metal and uncredited by Edward Norton. He is the most clear-sighted person in Ridley Scott's film about the Crusades. He is also the only one whose face cannot move.
Start there. The mask is where the film tells you what kind of film it intends to be.
Deleuze spends a long stretch of his first Cinema book on the close-up, and his claim is smaller and stranger than it sounds: a close-up is not a picture of a face, it is a face — a surface where something is felt and not yet spent on doing. He sorts faces into two kinds. One holds still and reflects a single steady quality; he calls that image a qualisign, an icon of quality. The other twitches and gathers, micro-movement piling on micro-movement toward a threshold. Scott gives his king the first kind and then pushes it past anywhere an actor could take it: a literal reflecting surface, silver, worn. Everything Baldwin feels has to arrive by posture, by stillness, by a voice coming through a hole in metal. The odd thing is how well it works, and the Deleuzian reason is worth having. A face that cannot discharge its feeling into an expression keeps that feeling suspended. Nothing leaks. You lean in. The quietest passages in the film, a masked man receiving a visitor in a dark room, carry more charge than several of its cavalry charges.
Around that still center the picture runs on the oldest engine cinema has. Deleuze's name for it is the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, feels it, acts to change it, and the act makes a new situation. Its grandest version, the large form, begins with a milieu so big it presses on everybody inside it and waits for the act that will transform it. Jerusalem is that milieu, and Deleuze's term for a milieu with that much gravity is the encompasser. Arthur Max builds it as a hybrid civilization rather than a European outpost, Frankish military architecture grafted onto Levantine streets, multi-faith market life running as background business in almost every exterior, so the thing at stake is visible before anyone argues for it. Janty Yates draws the fault line in cloth: the Templars' hard-edged white and red against the softer, sun-bleached, locally adapted dress of the resident nobility. Force against force — Deleuze calls that pairing the binomial — and here the live one is inside Christendom, legible off the weave.
The large form breathes. Deleuze noticed these films alternating a vast open space with the thin taut line of action running through it, and called the alternation respiration. John Mathieson shoots the desert horizon-heavy, a single figure small against ground that does not care, then compresses the approaches with a long lens until the dust-loaded air between camera and riders becomes the subject of the shot. That is a specific debt. Freddie Young did it first in Lawrence of Arabia, holding a figure inside shimmering heat until the squeezed distance was what you were watching. Scott and Mathieson filter everything: smoke, candle haze, backlit particulate, heat shimmer. Light stops being a means of exposure and shows up as a substance, a pure quality offered for its own sake. The grading gives each world one absorbing color — cold blue-gray France, bleached ochre Outremer, smoke-black siege.
Balian reaches his inherited barony and the first thing the film watches him do is study the problem of water. He digs a well. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, uses gest for a posture that exposes a whole social relation, and a blacksmith answering a theological question with hydrology is one. It sets the terms for the siege, which Scott stages as labor: men carrying, digging, tipping, burning, exhausted. The grammar comes from Kurosawa. Seven Samurai taught filmmakers to map a defensive perimeter as worked geography before any assault, so an audience reads the battle spatially, and the Jerusalem siege stays rampart-by-rampart legible because of it. The first night assault borrows from Ran too: heraldic blocks of color you can track, and the diegetic sound dropping out under score as the arrows fall. Dody Dorn's cutting accelerates at impact and slows for consequence; Scott holds on the field after Hattin longer than on what produced it.
Which brings up what makes this film unusually useful for learning these ideas: there are two of it. Fox released 144 minutes. Scott's 194-minute cut restores the child king Baldwin V, Sibylla's discovery of his leprosy and her decision to end his life, and the political machinery that makes Guy de Lusignan's rise make sense. Remove that and the causal chain goes with it. Motives that were dramatized become assertions, Balian's refusal of Sibylla loses its stakes, and Jeremy Irons's Tiberias drops from political actor to commentator. Deleuze describes the postwar break as a crisis of the action-image: causality slackens, links between events weaken, characters can no longer act adequately on what they see. A studio manufactured a counterfeit of that with scissors. Say it plainly, because the difference matters: the theatrical cut is not a time-image. Antonioni's people stop acting because the film has concluded that action will not help. Balian's motives vanish because a reel is missing. Watching both cuts teaches you, from the wrong side, exactly what the real break was for.
The large form is supposed to close on a decisive act. This one closes on a negotiation. Deleuze has a category for an image that poses a problem it cannot settle, the discourse-image, and the film's governing exchange is precisely that: what is Jerusalem worth? Nothing. Everything. Both are said, neither is withdrawn. Three ancestors make that ending available. El Cid established the frontier epic where the Christian hero's authority runs through alliance with Muslim rulers and the siege ends in settlement rather than conversion. The Seventh Seal gave a knight permission to say out loud that he had lost his faith, which is the license under which Monahan writes Balian's refusal of Church authority. And The Message had already proved an English-language epic could be staged from the Muslim side with Arab actors in authoritative, non-caricatured roles. Ghassan Massoud's Saladin, speaking Arabic and handed the moral high ground, is that line carried into a $130 million studio picture.
In 2005 this was received as the exhausted last gasp of the epic revival Scott himself had started with Gladiator. The reputation turned on an object, a DVD, and critics and historians now count the director's cut among his strongest work. What it left behind is less a style than a precedent: the release print may not be the film, and the argument over which version is real can be won years after the theatrical run is over.
So watch it again, and watch for what actually changes the situation. Not the charge, not the towers. A well dug on bad land, and a negotiation outside the walls between two men who have both decided the city is not worth what destroying it would cost. And watch the mask. While Baldwin sits there saying almost nothing, ask where all that feeling is going.
Concepts in play
- icon of quality (qualisign) — Baldwin IV's silver mask: an immobile reflecting face expressing a single steady quality, with authority conveyed entirely through posture, stillness and voice (Edward Norton, masked and uncredited).
- reflexive vs intensive face — The film's most morally lucid character is given a literal reflecting surface instead of a feature-bearing face, so feeling registers as contour and never as micro-movement toward a threshold.
- action-image, large form — The director's cut's two-movement design — a long political first half building Jerusalem's fragile equilibrium, a second dismantling it — with acts (the well, the defense, the surrender) that transform a milieu-wide situation.
- the encompasser (synsign) — Arthur Max's Outremer built as a hybrid civilization, Frankish military architecture grafted onto Levantine urban texture, with multi-faith market life staged as background business in almost every exterior.
- binomial (force against force) — Janty Yates's costumes distinguish factions by weave and wear — the Templars' hard-edged white and red against the softer, sun-bleached, locally adapted dress of the resident nobility — making the political opposition visible before anyone states it.
- respiration-space — Horizon-heavy desert wides placing a solitary figure against an indifferent landscape, alternating with long-lens compression of the Kerak and Hattin approaches and the taut line of the siege.
- the gest — Balian's inherited barony introduced through the problem of water and answered by digging a well; the siege then staged as labor — men carrying, digging, tipping, burning, exhausted — rather than as duels.
- qualité-puissance (pure quality) — Mathieson's atmospheric materialism: dust, smoke, backlit particulate, heat shimmer and candle haze make light visible as a substance rather than merely a means of exposure.
- affective colour — The digital-intermediate grading gives each world one absorbing tonality: cold blue-gray France, bleached ochre Outremer, smoke-black siege.
- weak links / slackened causality — The 144-minute theatrical cut removes Baldwin V, Sibylla's discovery of his leprosy and her decision to end his life, and the machinery of Guy's ascent, so dramatized motives become assertions and Tiberias drops from political actor to commentator.
- discourse-image — The film's central proposition that Jerusalem is worth nothing and everything, and a siege that resolves by negotiated surrender rather than by a decisive duel.