Before the Rain · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A figure crossing open hillside in flat, bleaching sun. Rock and scrub, a sky that presses down on everything under it. Manolo Teijeiro's camera doesn't move in to protect anybody; it lets the figure stay small, which means visible for a mile, which means available for a mile to anyone holding a rifle. Everything the film knows is already in that composition. In Macedonia you can see it coming and can't stop it. In London, later, you can't see anything and are implicated anyway.

Then the image everyone carries out of the film: a young monk and an Albanian girl in a stone cell, armed men on the other side of the wall. Manchevski stages the men as kin rather than soldiers. Cousins, neighbours, somebody's uncle. No uniforms, no front line, no war. Not yet.

That "yet" is where Deleuze earns his keep here, and it's worth saying why, because the arguments about this film have mostly been about its message — the aphorisms too on-the-nose, the blame handed out too evenly between Orthodox and Muslim. Deleuze lets us talk about the machine instead of the moral. He split cinema in two. In the older regime, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves things; that circuit is what makes a story feel like a story. In the newer one the circuit slackens: perception no longer converts into effective action, the character becomes a watcher, and time stops being the measure of movement and starts being the thing you're looking at. Before the Rain sits on the fault line in a peculiar way. Its people do act. They act bravely, and every act of protection kills the protector. Nobody is punished for cruelty. They are destroyed for interrupting a cycle that doesn't tolerate interruption.

Kiril has taken a vow of silence, which converts an entire performance into listening. Deleuze has a name for what the film does with him: the pure optical and sound situation, the moment when there is nothing to do but look and hear. Because Grégoire Colin can't speak, the sound design has to carry what dialogue normally would — wind, bells, footsteps, the specific noise of men approaching a building. Kiril is what Deleuze calls a voyant, a seer: not a passive character but one whose whole activity is attention. Aleksandar is the same figure worn down thirty years further. Rade Šerbedžija plays him as weariness rather than anguish, a man who has professionalized his distance from suffering and can't hold it any more, walking into a room he already knows the shape of. Anne, in London, sees the war for a living, on a light box, and can't touch it.

The structure is where the film becomes properly strange. A character we have seen dead is alive in a later panel. An event spoken of as finished in one panel hasn't happened in another. This is not flashback. A flashback is polite: it says this happened earlier, and here it is. What Manchevski builds is what Deleuze called peaks of present — two or more presents that both insist on being now, incompatible, coexisting anyway, so that before and after stop being positions on a line and become something you feel as pressure. "Words," "Faces," "Pictures": three panels, each a self-contained novella with its own protagonist and its own killing, and their arrangement is chronologically impossible.

And there's no key. The film offers nothing that reconciles the versions, which puts it in the territory Deleuze called the powers of the false — mutually exclusive accounts held as co-true, not as a trick but as a principle. This is not the puzzle-box that 1990s cinema was about to fill multiplexes with, where the pleasure is in solving. Manchevski's actual invention is smaller and cleverer than a twist: he says the flaw out loud before he commits it. Time doesn't die. The circle is not round. Announce the imperfect geometry and the impossible chronology reads as an argument; leave it unannounced and it reads as a continuity error. That is a craft decision, and it's his.

Nicolas Gaster's cutting inside the scenes is patient and classical, which is precisely why the seams draw blood. The joins between panels are what Deleuze called irrational cuts: they connect across a gap rather than through continuity, and the gap stays. Turtles, the never-arriving rain, a photograph, the phrase about the circle — these come back as rhymes, not clues. Nothing adds up. That refusal is the film's proposition about violence: the order of events matters less than the reliability of the pattern, and your own itch to repair the timeline is the film handing you the characters' futility to hold for a minute.

The photograph is the sharpest thing in the film. A photograph normally arrives with a habit attached — it means this happened, and I was merely there. Bazin built a whole theory of cinema's dignity on that transfer of evidence from world to emulsion. Aleksandar's confession breaks the habit: the picture required the death, the camera's presence was causal rather than observational. Deleuze's term for the object that snaps its customary chain and forces you to interpret instead of recognize is the demark. The film sets it up with real technical precision — the light box, the contact sheet, the editorial judgment in a London agency that turns a killing into a saleable image. The debt runs straight to Under Fire, where a faked photograph of a dead rebel leader alters a war, and further back to La Jetée, where a man is present at his own killing and an image precedes the event it records. Manchevski rebuilds Marker's paradox engine in live action, at feature length, with bodies.

The village square is the other invention. A crowd of relatives forms, hardens, and becomes an executioner without any single person deciding to be one. Deleuze's word for a crowd rendered as one affective body is the dividual, and the mob geometry here is learned from Come and See, which choreographs atrocity as social procedure: the herding, the shouted orders, the loose gathering tightening into a formation around a target. Weapons are staged as household objects, held at family tables. That is Ashes and Diamonds' template — political killing conducted inside domesticated interiors by a gunman whose crisis is decency rather than ideology.

And the rain never arrives. Neither does the war, exactly: Bosnia is offscreen throughout, present as pictures and news and as the thing that made Aleksandar what he is. The pressure comes from outside the frame and can't be located in it. Deleuze called that the absolute out-of-field, the beyond that isn't merely the next room. It's why the film is best described not as a war film but as a film about the antechamber to one, a small category it largely defined for the region.

The ancestry is legible and specific. Andrei Rublev supplies the exact device — a monk silenced after a killing, broken out of his silence by an innocent — and the monastery as porous stone where weather, whitewash and icon-light do the moral work the dialogue declines. Angelopoulos's The Suspended Step of the Stork supplies the regional grammar: the border as a painted line one step crosses, shot in wide unhurried takes across bare highland, with a journalist looking for a man who has vanished.

Forward, the influence is easy to trace and usually mis-traced. The fractured multi-strand chronology that ran through Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel and Crash is this film's descendant, but those loops close, and the closing is the payoff. Manchevski's contribution is the loop that doesn't — coverage of interconnection without the consolation of design. Industrially it did something no criticism can undo: the first feature of a two-million-person state with no production infrastructure took the Golden Lion at Venice and an Academy nomination, and drew the co-production map that later work from the region, up through Honeyland, has followed.

What it did to the art is one sentence long. It proved a film's shape can be its thesis rather than a box the thesis travels in, and that an imperfection can be load-bearing. Watch it again for the seams, not the aphorisms. Notice that every person who offers shelter across the line pays for it, in three registers, in two countries. Then ask the harder question the film leaves open: if the pattern holds no matter which order you put it in, is the decency that keeps interrupting it futile, or is it the only thing in the film that isn't part of the circle?