The Name of the Rose · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with a man holding a page to a candle. That is the image the film leaves you with — not a murder, not the great fire, but Sean Connery's William tilting a manuscript toward the only light in the room, reading. The Name of the Rose is sold as a medieval murder mystery, but what it is really about is reading: reading footprints, reading faces, reading the silence of an abbey that would rather its books stayed shut. Annaud built the largest set in Europe for this film — a fortified tower with an impossible library at its top — so we could watch a man try to read a building.

Deleuze has a name for the kind of image a detective film is made of. He calls it the relation-image, or the mental-image. In most action cinema a character sees a situation and acts on it; the circuit runs perception to action and closes. The detective breaks that circuit. William does not fight what he sees, he interprets it. He stands over a dead monk and holds the scene at arm's length, turning it into a set of relations that only make sense to a mind. That is Deleuze's point: with the detective the whole image becomes something the audience thinks rather than something the character does. We are made into a knowing third party, assembling the clues alongside — and usually a step behind — the man on screen.

Inside that mental-image Deleuze isolates finer parts, and the film lays them out almost like a lesson. First the mark: an object that means something because of the habitual chain it belongs to. Footprints mean a body passed; a stained hand means a trade. William reads the world as a weave of these customary links, the Holmes method his name — Baskerville — openly borrows. Then the demark: the anomaly that snaps the chain and forces thought. A death arranged in a way no habit explains, a pattern that refuses to be accident. The demark is the instant the mark stops being automatic and turns into a question. The plot is really a rhythm of marks settling into habit and demarks tearing habit back open.

Above both sits the symbol: the single object that condenses the film's organizing relation. Here it is the forbidden book — the lost volume of Aristotle on comedy — and the labyrinth built to hide it. This Church murders to keep laughter unread. Knowledge is staged as a maze meant to be impassable, and Ferretti's Escher geometry makes that literal: stairs that betray you, chambers with no outside. The symbol is not decoration. It is the relation the whole film turns on, that an institution will kill to prevent an interpretation.

Which is why Deleuze's later term fits so cleanly. He describes the lectosign, the readable image — an image that has lost its obviousness and asks to be deciphered instead of simply watched. Delli Colli lights the abbey so that seeing is labor. Amber pools in the scriptorium, black in the corridors, faces surfacing out of the dark. You lean in the way William leans in. The film's darkness is not mood for its own sake; it is an argument that truth is buried and reading costs something.

Then the faces. Annaud casts grotesques — Perlman's Salvatore, Chaliapin's blind Jorge, a gallery of the aged and deformed — and each is what Deleuze calls an affection-image: a face offered as pure quality before it becomes an action. Held in close-up, a face stops being a person and turns into an intensity. F. Murray Abraham's Bernardo Gui is the clearest case, an immobile reflecting face expressing one thing, serene fanaticism; it barely moves, and the stillness is the whole terror of it. Annaud treats physiognomy as a reading of the medieval world's strangeness, which is exactly what Deleuze says the close-up does — it lifts a quality out of the body and shows it to you raw.

None of this comes from nowhere. The candlelight-as-sole-source logic is Kubrick's, from Barry Lyndon; Delli Colli extends that motivated flame into the abbey. The weathered, grotesque faces are a method Delli Colli helped build on Pasolini's Decameron. The mud-and-stone monastery as lived material fact is Andrei Rublev's demystified Middle Ages. The chiaroscuro standoff between reason and dogma is inherited from The Seventh Seal, and the candlelit ecclesiastical persecution from Dreyer's Day of Wrath. Annaud's own Quest for Fire had already taught him to carry a story through bodies when words fall away. The film is a chapter written into that long conversation. Deleuze would add one word for the light itself: the German cinema he calls expressionist works by a gradient of shadow, things charged with a non-organic life, and the abbey's stone and fire have exactly that charge — the architecture broods, the dark seems to want something.

What Annaud and Eco managed was to take the most cerebral thing cinema can do, make an audience read, and make it popular. The opening card calling the film a "palimpsest" of the novel is itself a lesson in the lectosign — an image knowingly written over another text, asking to be read against it. The whodunit was always Deleuze's plainest case of the relation-image, and few films make the equation so bare: to solve is to read, and to read is dangerous.

Watch it again and notice how rarely William touches anything. He points, he tilts a page to the light, he reads. The real suspense is not who dies but whether a man will be allowed to finish a page. And the ending — the library in flames, the book lost — leaves the question open: does reading ever win, or is every interpretation just one candle held against a very large dark?