Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Cycle of Love
2026 · Orlando von Einsiedel · The Cycle of Love on Sightlines
A man sits on the pavement at Connaught Place with a sheet of paper on his knees, drawing whoever will pay him. That was PK Mahanandia's living in Delhi in the mid-1970s, and in 1977 it became his method of funding a bicycle ride from India to Sweden: draw a face, take the money, ride on. The drawings survive. On that journey they were the only camera running.
Start there, because it tells you what film The Cycle of Love was forced to become. Orlando von Einsiedel made his name inside emergencies, with the rangers of Virunga and the White Helmets in Syria, where the craft problem is getting a camera near something happening now. Here it is reversed. The event ended half a century before anyone arrived with equipment, and the route cannot be driven today. PK's line ran through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran before Turkey, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Austria, West Germany, Denmark. A British crew cannot film most of that. Some of those countries have stopped existing. So the journey, which is the subject, appears in none of the film's own footage. It has to be built from substitution, archive and absence.
Deleuze separated two kinds of off-screen space. One is relative: the next room, the thing just past the edge, a place you could reach by panning. The other is absolute, a beyond that the frame opens onto without being able to locate. Normally that second kind is an atmospheric effect, something a filmmaker conjures. Here it's a logistical fact. Afghanistan in 1977 is not a place a camera can reach, in space or in time, and the heart of the ride happened there and on roads like it. Every present-day shot in this film has a hole in it.
Now think about what the ride was as a story. Deleuze called the cinema that dominated up to the war the movement-image, and its engine the action-image in its large form: a situation presses on someone until they act, and the act remakes the situation. A Swedish woman he married in a tribal ceremony goes home. He buys a second-hand bicycle and rides six thousand miles. He arrives, and they stay married for fifty years. You could not design a purer specimen. Most of the grammar of narrative film exists to deliver that shape.
The film can use almost none of it. The road is gone. And the outcome is on the poster: the title gives it away, the first minute gives it away, nobody is watching to find out. Suspense was dead before the lights went down.
This is where Deleuze earns a seat next to the film rather than on top of it. He isn't vocabulary to sprinkle; he supplies the question the film is actually answering. What do you do when the story you hold is an action-image and every image available to you is a time-image? After the war, filmmakers began building around people who could see but not act, and what they made were pure optical situations: images you can only look at, with nothing to do about them. The 1977 photographs are exactly that. The overland hippie trail was one of the most heavily photographed migrations of its century, held in Kodachrome slides and Instamatic prints and Super 8 across thousands of households. Herzog worked out in Grizzly Man what such footage does once an audience knows the ending, with the narrator standing between us and a bequeathed archive. Nobody in a 1977 slide knows anything. We know everything.
Deleuze's word for an image that has lost its obviousness and has to be deciphered is the lectosign, the readable image. This film is thick with them, and they are mostly paper: passports, visas, border stamps, letters, the drawings. A visa stamp is a country compressed into a date and a mark, and you have to read the country back out of it. The gift in this material is that its primary record was made by hand. PK drew his way across Asia, so the archive of the trip is already an interpretation, already someone's looking, and the film can adopt that logic instead of imposing one. The debt to Bicycle Thieves sits here too. De Sica made the bicycle an instrument rather than a prop, keeping the camera at the machine's speed and height so its presence or absence set the film's geography. The object testifies.
Then there is the road as it is now, filmed in the knowledge that a viewer will read absence into it. Writing about Straub and Huillet, Deleuze described the stratigraphic image: an emptied landscape carrying a buried history no picture of the ground can show, so a voice has to put it there. Any 2026 shot of that route is stratigraphic whether the film intends it or not. Which makes altitude the real question. Action cinema breathes by alternating a vast encompassing space with the thin taut line of the act inside it. The drone gives you the vastness for free and has become the default grammar of the journey documentary. It is also the fastest way to lose the line. Six thousand miles seen from four hundred feet is scenery. At road height it's a man's legs, for four months.
The editing problem follows, and the material keeps pointing at a braid: 1977 cut against the fifty years of marriage it produced, so the ride is continually reframed by its consequence and the subject quietly becomes duration rather than distance. Deleuze would call that sheets of past. A flashback is a former present, dated and filed and fetched. Sheets of past are regions of a life that coexist, so a film can move between the man of 27 on a road and the same man old in a kitchen with neither subordinate to the other. The marriage is what makes them simultaneous. Masahiro Hirakubo's Trainspotting cutting is the technical debt, an ellipsis locked to a musical downbeat with whole days dropped between two shots of one face, which is how you compress a continent without a map dissolve. But von Einsiedel's own Evelyn is the closer model, cut to the rhythm of walking and talking, with long tolerances for silence and the unfinished sentence. Touching the Void had already found the prize: when everyone knows the outcome, suspense migrates to how the teller can bear to say it.
Which brings us to the horoscope. A chart cast in PK's childhood said he would marry a woman born under Taurus, from a distant land, a musician, an owner of forest. Charlotte von Schedvin is Swedish, from a family with land. Film that reverently and the marriage is fate. Film it sceptically and you have a man who read his own life as a text and then rode a bicycle across Asia to make the text true. Deleuze's powers of the false is built for this. The false, for him, isn't lying; it's the creative force in narration, a story's capacity to bring about what it asserts. And he had a word for someone caught in the act of turning themselves into a legend: fabulation. PK has been telling this for fifty years, and the distances have drifted between tellings, six thousand miles in one account, nearer seven thousand kilometres in another, the daily mileage sliding. That drift isn't sloppiness. It's what happens to a life that becomes a story people keep asking for. Errol Morris licensed the fix long ago: The Thin Blue Line staged one event repeatedly and never identically, until reconstruction read as the shape of testimony rather than as evidence.
So here is the stake. The journey documentary has run on a single recipe since The Endless Summer: narration laid over footage shot in transit, borders as act breaks, the destination withheld as the only suspense. Every ingredient is unavailable here. No transit footage. Borders that no longer exist in the shape he crossed them. An ending announced in the title. What's left is a journey film with no journey in it, and the discovery is that the genre survives the subtraction. A trip can be rebuilt entirely out of what it left behind. That's a harder accuracy than footage.
The question worth carrying in is the one the film can't dodge: which way it films that horoscope. The thing to watch for is faces. Every drawing PK made bought a day's food and a few more miles, so the record of his distance is kept almost entirely in other people. He reached Sweden carrying a portrait gallery of everyone who let him keep going. The action-image gives you the arrival. It takes a time-image to show what it cost, and who paid.
Concepts in play
- out-of-field-absolute — The 1977 route through Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran cannot be filmed in 2026 and several of the political entities crossed no longer exist, so the journey itself appears in no shot: a beyond the frame opens onto but cannot locate.
- action-image-large-form — The lived story is the purest large form: separation across continents presses until a single decisive act — a second-hand bicycle ridden six thousand miles from Delhi in January 1977 — transforms the situation into a fifty-year marriage.
- pure optical & sound situations — The dispersed amateur archive of the hippie trail (Kodachrome slides, Instamatic prints, Super 8) viewed with the outcome already conceded by the title and first minute — the Grizzly Man debt, footage that can only be looked at, never acted on.
- the readable image — Passports, visas, border stamps, letters and PK's own portrait drawings — 'the paper residue of a border regime' — images stripped of sensory-motor obviousness that must be deciphered to yield back the places they stand for.
- the archaeological image — The present-tense landscape layer: the road as it is now, in countries changed beyond recognition, 'filmed knowing the viewer will read absence into it,' with testimony supplying the buried past no shot of the ground can show.
- respiration-space — The drone shot as 'the standard grammar of the journey documentary,' giving the vast encompassing milieu but threatening to flatten the taut line of the ride into travelogue — the alternation that action cinema breathes by, here at risk of losing its line.
- order of time / coexistence — The braided construction the material demands: the 1977 ride cross-cut against the fifty years of marriage that followed, so the journey is continually reframed by its consequence and the subject becomes duration rather than distance.
- puissances du faux — The childhood horoscope (Taurus, distant land, musician, owner of forest) which Charlotte's biography appears to satisfy: filmed reverently it makes the marriage fated, filmed sceptically it makes PK a man who read his life as a text and then enacted it.
- story-telling / legending — Fifty years of retelling have left the figures drifting between accounts — six thousand miles in some, nearer seven thousand kilometres in others, daily mileage and duration varying — a subject caught in the act of legending himself.