Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Duellists
1977 · Ridley Scott · The Duellists on Sightlines
A garden at first light, mist standing knee-high, two young officers removing their coats with the elaborate calm of men who have decided not to be frightened. Ridley Scott sets the camera down and lets the composition hold. Then the blades. What stays with you is the distance between how beautiful the shot is and how idiotic the event inside it is. Armand d'Hubert has been dragged out at dawn because Gabriel Feraud considers himself insulted. Feraud cannot say by what. Neither can anyone else, for the next fifteen years.
Begin with the beauty, since it is a choice with a history behind it. Deleuze, borrowing from Bergson, says cinema arrived as the art of the any-instant-whatever: the camera samples movement mechanically, at ordinary equidistant moments, indifferent to whether a given frame happens to be expressive. The older arts did the reverse. They worked in privileged instants, the arrested exemplary attitude, the pose in which an action becomes readable as an idea. Scott, coming off a decade of television commercials, reaches back and takes the pose. Frank Tidy's photography organises each encounter as a painting: figures against a luminous sky, a cellar modelled by a single flame in the manner of Georges de La Tour, a snowbound field that reduces two men to marks on white paper. Even the wounding is composed, almost frieze-like in its stillness. This is not prettiness applied over the drama. The pose is how honour understands itself. Feraud is not fighting to win. He is fighting to be in the picture.
The frames are dense, too. Weathered stone, cavalry tack, candle smoke, wool, the grain of period things, all marshalled into images you read as systems before you enter them as rooms. Deleuze calls that a closed set, and Scott's entire later career is in the habit. The light inside these closed sets never quite belongs to anyone. Magic hour, window light, hearths, haze, the amber rake at dusk: the ambition Barry Lyndon had made respectable two years earlier, pursued without Kubrick's specialised lenses. The feeling in this film sits in the weather rather than in the faces. Carradine gives you tiredness, Keitel a clenched jaw, and meanwhile the sublime is up in the Turner sky, entirely uninterested in either of them. Deleuze has a name for an intensity presented for itself like that, cut loose from anybody who could be said to feel it: a quality-power.
So what is actually driving these two? Between pure feeling and purposeful action Deleuze slots a third kind of image, the impulse-image, the territory of naturalism. Here conduct is powered by appetite rather than by aims, and the visible social world, the regiment and the salon and the seating plan, turns out to be a crust over an originary world of plain predation. Feraud is that world coming up through the floorboards. Keitel imports a modern, Method-hot intensity into powdered wigs, and the accent mismatch everyone argues about does real work: you can watch a drive wearing a uniform it does not fit. The founding insult is comically slight, and the slightness is the whole argument. In naturalism the stated cause is never the cause. The offence is a symptom, and something in Feraud requires a reason the way a fire requires air. Any reason will do.
Naturalism has a direction, and Deleuze calls it the line of slope: entropy, a world running down. Fifteen years pass. Both men are promoted. The duels get worse. The weapons rotate through sabre, small-sword, pistol and horseback as the code mutates around them, bodies thicken and tire, and William Hobbs's fight direction, the same unlovely school he brought to The Three Musketeers, insists on labour. Scraping metal, slipping feet, men too winded to raise an arm. Scaramouche had made the duel an architectural set piece. The Duellists keeps the architecture and strips out the exhilaration.
Now the striking absence. A Napoleonic film is the native habitat of what Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: an encompassing situation bears down on a man until he acts and changes it. Situation, action, altered situation, which is most of Hollywood. Scott had no budget for armies and turned the shortage into a principle. The Empire, the Russian catastrophe of 1812, the Bourbons coming back, all of it happens next door. What survives is the binomial alone, force against force, two men squared off with the encompasser subtracted. The film even keeps the genre's breathing rhythm, vast landscape alternating with the taut line of the fight, except that the landscape no longer summons the action out of anybody. It lies there being indifferent while Scott frames the pair very small inside it.
Which is why nothing is ever settled by anything anyone does. Pamela Power's cutting builds the film as a chronicle rather than an arc: discrete encounters, title cards, ellipses that jump years, a change of season or rank standing in for causation. Repetition with variation, the shape of a fable. Deleuze would recognise the crisis of the action-image arriving here in period costume. Not paralysis, though. These two react instantly and correctly. Their reactions are perfectly adequate to a code and completely inadequate to the world they are standing in, and the resolution, when it finally comes, turns on magnanimity rather than victory, on a man declining to complete the act the machine has spent fifteen years demanding.
The code is a ruin they are living inside. Honour in this form belonged to an aristocracy the Revolution had just finished abolishing; d'Hubert and Feraud are officers of a bourgeois army, one of them class-resentful to the bone, both carrying a protocol whose owners have left. Deleuze's word for an ordered aristocratic world rotting from within while its forms keep running is decomposition, and this film gives you the schedule of it. Ranks rise, regimes fall, the code keeps sending its seconds round at dawn. The duel becomes a gest in his sense, a posture that exposes the social relation propping it up, and it is the bodies that carry the exposure. Breath, boot-fall, the small ceremony of taking off a coat. Conrad's irony survives intact: nobody can stop it because nobody can say who started it.
The debts are precise. Barry Lyndon had already fused available light, painted composition, a decades-long episodic chronicle and formal rule-bound duels; Scott takes the programme and removes Kubrick's cosmic narrator, so the irony has to be carried by two faces instead of a voice. Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV supplied the anti-theatrical method, letting costume, texture and room-light do the work usually handed to dialogue and psychology. Hobbs supplied the dirt. Looking the other way: Days of Heaven arrives the following year with Almendros chasing the same magic hour, which tells you this was a movement and not a fluke; Chariots of Fire runs the identical David Puttnam pipeline, another commercials director's painterly debut; and two years on, the haze, backlight and layered planes invented here are installed in a spaceship corridor and become Alien.
What The Duellists did to film was to prove that atmosphere could be structure. Gorgeous period light had been a prestige finish. After this, a generation understood that you could build a picture's meaning out of exposure, weather and composition, and let the plot recede to a rumour in the next valley. That is also its risk, and the question worth taking into a rewatch. Scott's tableau is so beautiful it can read as an endorsement of the thing it is describing. So watch the light while they fight. It is on nobody's side. The film has quietly handed the sublime to the sky and left the two men down in the mud with their reasons, and the test is how long it takes you, against your better judgement, to start wanting one of them to win.
Concepts in play
- privileged-instants — "The camera favors the elegance of the tableau over kinetic coverage, so that even violence is framed with a composed, almost frieze-like stillness"; compositions organized after Turner, Constable, Vermeer and Georges de La Tour.
- impulse-image — Keitel's Feraud as a "coiled, class-resentful fanatic" whose feud runs on appetite rather than aim, with Method intensity erupting inside the powdered-wig setting.
- symptom — "The originating insult is almost comically slight, and the film preserves Conrad's central irony: neither man can fully articulate why the feud must continue" — the offence reads as a symptom of the drive, not its cause.
- originary-world — The regiment, the salons and the honor code are shown as a social surface over a predatory world that keeps breaking through in the duels.
- entropy / degradation — Fifteen years of "repetition with variation" as ranks rise and the men degrade; weapons change across the years (saber, small-sword, pistols, mounted) and Hobbs's "grubby, exhausting, physically plausible swordplay" registers the wear.
- attitudes & postures — Sound design weighted to "the labored breath and boot-fall of exhausted men"; duel staging choreographed to the evolving ceremony of the honor code.
- the-gest — The duel staged as codified ceremony whose weapons and rules shift with the regime — a posture that exposes the social relation holding it up.
- binomial — The whole film is force against force, d'Hubert vs Feraud, "the same two men, the same unresolved grievance, meeting again and again."
- action-image-large-form — The genre's encompassing situation is deliberately withheld: "the screenplay keeps the vast historical canvas mostly offscreen," the Napoleonic battles never staged, leaving the duel without a situation it could transform.
- respiration-space — "The framing repeatedly isolates the two antagonists within larger indifferent landscapes and social gatherings" — the alternation of vast milieu and taut action line survives, but the milieu no longer calls the action out.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — An episodic chronicle where "the resolution turns on a gesture of magnanimity rather than a decisive victory"; the men respond correctly to the code and change nothing in the world.
- crystal-decomposition — An aristocratic honor code outliving its owners as "the Empire crumbles around them" through the fall of the Empire and the Bourbon restoration, its forms still operating on schedule.
- the closed set (cadre) — "Costume, weathered architecture, cavalry tack, candle smoke and the grain of period materials are marshaled into densely furnished images" — composition treated as an information system.
- qualité-puissance — The available-light program — "natural daylight, window light, firelight and the long amber rakes of 'magic hour'" — presents light as an intensity for itself, independent of the characters it falls on.