Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Sound of Music
1965 · Robert Wise · The Sound of Music on Sightlines
A helicopter comes down out of the Alps. For the better part of a minute there is no one in the picture: peaks, a lake, cloud shadow crossing grass, all of it in 70mm Todd-AO, a frame wide enough that your eye has to travel across it. Then the camera finds a woman alone in a meadow, and she turns with her arms out, and she sings. Between takes the rotor wash kept flattening Julie Andrews into the grass. She has told that story for sixty years and it is worth holding onto, because it means the machine that produced that serene descent was violent and hanging a few dozen feet above her head.
That shot is the film's whole argument, made before a line of dialogue.
Deleuze, following Bergson, called a shot a mobile section. A shot is a slice cut out of movement, so when the camera itself moves, what it registers is a change in the whole rather than a change of angle. The opening of "The Sound of Music" is not establishing a location. It travels from a world with nothing human in it down to one human point, and that passage states the premise. There is a whole — Deleuze's Open, the sense that what you are shown is a piece of something larger and still changing — and inside it there is a single living center. His name for such a center is a centre of indetermination: a creature that takes in more than it can immediately act on, and hesitates in the gap. The film's first hour is that hesitation given a plot. A postulant who doesn't fit the abbey is sent out to a house.
Why bring this vocabulary to a film everyone assumes they already understand? Because the standing charge against it is softness, and the vocabulary shows you the hardness. Deleuze's first volume describes the movement-image: a form in which someone perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. He thought it broke after the war, that European cinema had stopped believing action could resolve anything. Nobody told Robert Wise. In 1965, with Antonioni and Resnais already working on the far side of that break, Wise built one of the most rigorously engineered movement-images Hollywood ever produced and put a governess at the center of it.
The structure is what Deleuze called the large form: a situation so big it surrounds everyone (he named the surrounding milieu the encompasser), a character who absorbs its pressure, and finally one act that transforms it. Here the encompasser has two faces and one geography. First the Alps, the abbey, the villa on the lake, a milieu that presses on Maria as beauty and as rule. Then, after the Anschluss, the same country under the Reich, pressing as threat. The decisive act that resolves a three-hour film is a family walking over a mountain. Situation and person mark each other along the way — Deleuze called this the imprint, the bond by which a milieu and a character leave their shape on one another. The house loosens. She stops spinning in meadows.
William Reynolds won the Oscar for cutting it, and his cut is where the theory becomes craft. Deleuze noticed that large-form films breathe: a vast milieu-space, then the taut narrow line of the confrontation, then the vast space again. Reynolds paces nearly three hours by alternating expansive musical set-pieces with tighter dramatic scenes. That is respiration in exactly Deleuze's sense, and it is why a long film about a nun and seven children does not feel long.
Two montage forms do the heavy lifting, and both are inherited. "Do-Re-Mi" moves Maria and the children across Salzburg locations and through changing costumes, compressing implied weeks into one euphoric arc. That is organic montage, the kind that grows by accumulation, a spiral rather than a line. Wise learned it from the inside: he was the editor of "Citizen Kane," where the same technique compresses a marriage into a breakfast table over years. The cheeriest sequence in the American musical is built with the tool invented for the coldest. The climax uses the other form, Griffith's convergent parallel montage, cross-cutting the family's concert against the pursuit closing in — the last-minute rescue, with an orchestra in it. And the concert is the film's shrewdest single figure: the same performance is a farewell recital and the mechanism of an escape. Deleuze had a term for an act that belongs legibly to two situations at once, the index of equivocity. Here it is, sung in harmony in front of the men who are looking for them.
Set it against Bazin and the film gets stranger. Wise had just made "West Side Story," which pried a stage musical open by abstracting it. Here he did the opposite and put the songs in real places: the abbey, the grounds, the gazebo, the mountains, the rain-delayed Salzburg summer of 1964 sitting visibly in the frame. Bazin's wager was that the photographed world carries a credibility no design can counterfeit. Wise made that wager inside the one genre built to deny it. A number usually asks you to suspend the world for three minutes. These ask you to accept it.
What it did to narrative is the graft. Ernest Lehman took a family musical and welded thriller mechanics to its second half: the hiding in the abbey, the concert as cover, the crossing. That is why the sweetness holds. It has a shadow behind it, and the shadow is dated 1938.
The lineage runs both ways, and it is specific. "Oklahoma!" (1955) supplied the Todd-AO camera and the model of a pastoral opening number sung in an actual field. "Carousel" (1956) prototyped the wide-gauge-plus-six-track roadshow package. "The King and I" (1956) normalized the ghost singer, which is why Christopher Plummer's Captain is sung by Bill Lee: the film's most important conversion, a hard man rejoining his children through music, is carried by a voice that isn't his, and the film survives it. "Die Trapp-Familie" (1956) first shaped the memoir into choir-and-flight. "West Side Story" gave it Wise, Lehman, and the helicopter. Downstream the debt is darker. The imitators it licensed, among them "Doctor Dolittle," "Star!" and "Hello, Dolly!," helped bankrupt the studios chasing them. The roadshow apparatus of overture, intermission and entr'acte was the industrial form of the organic whole, an evening shaped like a symphony, and this film both perfected it and used it up. The crisis of the action-image reached Hollywood not through the avant-garde but through the box office.
Watch the first ninety seconds and the last ninety together. Both are mountains. The film descends out of the whole to find a person, and ends by handing a family back to it. Whether that is an escape or an absorption it does not say, and the not-saying is the best thing in it.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — Maria perceives the Captain's disciplined household and acts on it through song; the songs change the situation. A 1965 film built entirely on the sensory-motor chain Deleuze said postwar European cinema had abandoned.
- action-image-large-form — The dossier's bipartite structure: a milieu (abbey, villa, Alps) presses on Maria, and after the Anschluss on the whole family, until one decisive act — the mountain crossing — transforms it.
- the encompasser — The Todd-AO exteriors — the meadows, the Untersberg massif, the lake behind the villa — 'keeping human figures legible within the vastness': landscape staged as an encompassing milieu that calls forth action rather than as backdrop.
- the mobile section (plan) — The opening helicopter shot, a descending aerial sweeping mountains and lakes before closing on Maria spinning in the meadow: camera movement expressing a change in the whole, not a change of view.
- the Open — The same descent, and its reversal in the climax's mountain crossing: the frame repeatedly opens onto an Alpine whole larger than any scene, which the film enters and exits rather than merely photographs.
- the interval — The aerial descent terminates on a single figure — a postulant who fits neither abbey nor household, hired out as governess — the living center the acentered landscape shot resolves into.
- respiration-space — William Reynolds's Oscar-winning cut paces the near-three-hour film 'by alternating expansive musical set-pieces with tighter dramatic scenes' — the large form's alternation of vast milieu-space and the taut line of the action.
- montage-organic — The 'Do-Re-Mi' sequence, cutting across Salzburg locations and changing costumes to compress implied weeks into one euphoric arc — growth by accumulation, the technique Wise learned cutting the breakfast-table montage in Citizen Kane.
- montage-organic-american — The escape climax sustains tension 'through cross-cutting between performance and pursuit' — Griffith's convergent parallel montage and last-minute rescue, transposed to a concert hall and a manhunt.
- index-of-equivocity — Lehman's 'concert-as-cover': the family's performance is simultaneously a farewell recital and the mechanism of the escape, one act legible in two incompatible situations at once.
- empreinte — The first movement's 'domestic and romantic transformation of the von Trapp household under Maria's influence' runs both ways — Plummer's astringent reserve tempers her exuberance as her music loosens his house.