Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Funny Girl
1968 · William Wyler · Funny Girl on Sightlines
Picture the number: a Ziegfeld staircase, a procession of brides in white, every one of them arranged to be looked at. Then one bride turns and she is visibly, comically pregnant. It is Fanny Brice, hired to be beautiful, doing the job and wrecking it in the same motion. Funny Girl has an overture, an intermission, two and a half hours, 70mm prints and a symphony orchestra, and the thing it is actually about takes about ten seconds of screen time right there.
Deleuze has a name for a moment like that, borrowed from Brecht: the gest. Not a gesture in the everyday sense, but a posture a body takes that makes a social arrangement visible for a second. The chorus line is the arrangement. It works by making many women into one: one walk, one costume, one smile, no separate inside. Deleuze calls a collective built that way a dividual, a crowd handled as a single unit of feeling. Fanny joins it, obeys every rule of it, then adds one fact about her own body. The unit breaks. You learn the rule by watching it fail.
Why reach for that vocabulary in a Ray Stark production of a Broadway property? Because the screenplay hands Fanny remarkably little to do. The plot is the oldest one the genre owns: a girl from the Lower East Side climbs through vaudeville to the Follies while her marriage to a gambler goes under. Public success, private ruin. As plot it is inert, and it was never going to be otherwise — the picture was produced by Brice's own son-in-law, out of the estate that owned her. What is alive in Funny Girl is not at the level of story. It is in faces, bodies and songs, which is exactly the level Deleuze's categories are cut for.
Start with the face, since Harry Stradling's camera does. Stradling had shot My Fair Lady, and the glamour apparatus of the prestige musical arrives here intact, now organized around a face the studios of 1968 did not classify as beautiful. Deleuze splits the filmed face in two. There is the reflecting face, nearly still, expressing a single quality such as wonder, where the power is in the outline. And there is the intensive face, a run of small movements climbing toward a threshold, a face caught in the act of wanting. He calls that second kind a potisign, an icon of power, power in the sense of potential: something is building and has not broken yet. Streisand runs both and switches between them inside a single scene, clowning one moment, yearning the next, with no visible seam. Sharif's Nick Arnstein is the other kind by design, smooth and reserved, a contour. He is the surface she registers against.
Now the songs. Classical Hollywood runs on what Deleuze calls the action-image: a situation presses on someone until they act, and the act changes the situation. The big version, the large form, goes situation, action, altered situation, and it is the shape of nearly every studio picture ever made. Funny Girl keeps the shape and moves the act. Fanny's decisive gestures are not decisions. They are numbers. The pregnant bride is how she takes the Follies. 'Don't Rain on My Parade' is how she takes Nick. Jule Styne had already invented the move in Gypsy, where 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' does the same structural work: the belted anthem as the event itself, not a comment on one.
Then Wyler does something the stage could not. 'Don't Rain on My Parade' leaves the theater. Fanny goes into the street, into a taxi, onto a train, finally onto a tugboat in New York harbor with real water under her. Writing about musicals, Deleuze noticed that the genre's best moments come when a person's own movement is taken over by a movement of the world: the dancer stops driving the dance and the world starts carrying them, and the number becomes a passage into a place with its own physics. He files this beside the dream-image, a circuit that is neither memory nor plot but a world briefly running on different laws. There is a realist dividend too. Out on harbor water the camera has to accept the boat's actual motion; the song loses the protection of the proscenium and meets the world on the world's terms. That is close to Bazin's bargain, put the fiction in a real place and let the place push back, struck in the least likely genre by a partially deaf director in his mid-sixties making his only musical.
All of it is framed as retrospect, Fanny in the present looking back. Deleuze would call that a recollection-image: a dated flashback, a past behaving like a former present, labeled and filed. Worth saying what it is not. In the postwar cinema Deleuze cared most about, memory stops being orderly, past and present become impossible to sort, and time shows up on screen directly. Funny Girl never goes near that and does not want to. Its memory is a picture frame, not a fog. Seeing the difference is the useful thing: this is a movement-image film all the way down, made in the year the ground under that kind of filmmaking began to give.
The debts are specific. The Great Ziegfeld built the staircase revue and the Follies backstage-biopic frame this film recreates almost as a restoration. A Star Is Born supplied the spine, one career rising while a marriage sinks, told through performance numbers. Love Me or Leave Me had already welded the female-singer biopic to a ruinous partner. My Fair Lady set the hard-ticket roadshow package, anamorphic Technicolor with overture and intermission, and lent its cinematographer. The Sound of Music set the appetite and the 70mm format everyone was chasing. Funny Girl was engineered to fit all of it, then turned out to be one of the last of them to work: Doctor Dolittle, Star! and Hello, Dolly! ran the same machinery on the same money and helped bring the studios to the crisis that opened the door for New Hollywood.
So the line forward does not run through the genre. It runs through the star. Hollywood's habit was to replace the Broadway originator with a screen name, which is how Audrey Hepburn got Eliza Doolittle. Streisand kept the part, made her film debut in it, and won Best Actress in a tie with the other Hepburn. The picture proved that the whole prestige apparatus, orchestra and Technicolor and 70mm, could be built around one performer the industry's beauty rules had no slot for. That lesson outlived the form that carried it.
Which leaves the question the film keeps asking without stating: what is the funny girl's joke for? She gets to the punchline about her own body before the room can. That is a comedian's defense, and it is not free. Watch it again for the seam that is not there, the place in a scene where the clowning turns into wanting, and try to find the frame where it happens. You cannot. That is the performance. Deleuze supplies the words for what she is doing. She did it first.
Concepts in play
- The gest — Fanny's pregnant-bride gag inside a Ziegfeld 'beautiful girls' number: a posture of the body that exposes the Follies' idealized-showgirl arrangement by obeying and wrecking it at once.
- Dividual — The Follies chorus line staged in the Great Ziegfeld staircase-revue manner — many women rendered as one interchangeable unit of glamour, the unit Brice's comic subversion breaks.
- Potisign (icon of power) — Streisand pivoting between aggressive comic clowning and romantic yearning within a single scene, photographed by Harry Stradling in close, attentive glamour lighting — a face crossing thresholds rather than holding one quality.
- Reflexive vs intensive face — Sharif's Nick Arnstein as an elegant, reserved, smooth surface set against Streisand's volatility — the contour face opposite the intensive one, by the film's own design.
- Action-image, large form — The rise-and-cost arc (Lower East Side to vaudeville to Follies stardom, braided with the Arnstein marriage) in which the decisive transforming acts are delivered as numbers — 'Don't Rain on My Parade' as the declaration that launches her toward Nick.
- Movement of world — 'Don't Rain on My Parade' breaking free of the stage to follow Fanny across the city and onto a tugboat in New York harbor, real locations and real motion taking over the number's forward drive.
- Dream-image (onirosign) — The Follies numbers and the harbor finale as circuits that leave the dramatic scene for a world running on its own laws, tied to no localizable memory.
- Recollection-image (mnemosign) — The framing device presenting Fanny in reflective retrospect, ordering the whole biography as a dated past recalled from a present.