Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Fabulous World of Jules Verne
1958 · Karel Zeman · The Fabulous World of Jules Verne on Sightlines
Start with the sea. In Karel Zeman's film the water is made of lines: rows of fine horizontal strokes, the kind a nineteenth-century engraver cut into a steel plate to say "ocean" without painting a single wave. Then the lines move. They swell and roll, a ship rides over them, and smoke rises from its funnel in more hatching that drifts. You are watching a picture from an old Jules Verne edition that has started, quietly, to breathe.
That is Zeman's invention, and the rest of the film follows from it. He did not shoot a Verne adventure and then dress it up as an illustration. He built the whole frame as an engraving. Actors, marionettes, cut-out animation, miniatures and painted backdrops all carry the same ruled and cross-hatched surface. The sets have it, and so do the costumes, the diving suits, the cannons and the professor's laboratory. Lighting is kept flat so that no modeling shadow gives away which things are solid and which are drawn. The hatching does the work light would normally do. In the finished image you cannot reliably tell a photographed object from an illustrated one, and that is the point.
Gilles Deleuze is useful here, though not in the way he is usually used. His cinema books open with a distinction from the philosopher Henri Bergson. Older arts, he says, understood movement through privileged instants: the poses, the decisive moments, the climax a painter or engraver chooses to fix. Cinema did something new. It records movement as a run of any-instants-whatever, ordinary moments spaced evenly by a machine, none more important than the next. The camera does not choose the best pose. It takes them all.
Zeman's film sits right on that fault line, which is why the lens helps. Every frame is composed like a privileged instant. The actors stand as if posing for an engraver, their gestures broad and legible, like figures in a tableau vivant. Yet the frame keeps moving, and its smallest parts (the ruled water, the hatched smoke) move frame by frame, mechanically, the way only cinema can. The film takes the oldest way of picturing movement and runs it through the newest. Watch it with this in mind and the strange pleasure of the thing gets a name: you are seeing the illustrator's chosen instant dissolve into the camera's continuous one, over and over, for the whole film.
It also explains why each shot feels so full. Deleuze calls the frame a closed set, a system of everything included in it, and he notes that some filmmakers saturate it with information. Zeman is one of them. He layers the image in planes, a silhouette in the foreground, action in the middle, an engraved backdrop behind, the way book illustrations build depth. Human figures are dwarfed by machines and machines by seascapes. Drawn crowds and model vehicles busy themselves at the edges. The editing respects this. Cuts present each set-piece, the submarine, the undersea sequences, the island fortress, as an unveiling, and they hold long enough for you to read the plate. Some transitions even behave like a page being turned.
The story itself is plain Movement-Image storytelling, and it is meant to be. Deleuze's action-image in its large form describes a situation that bears down on everyone until a decisive act transforms it. Here a would-be dictator kidnaps a professor who is studying the nature of matter and pushes him into building a super-explosive. A young hero and a woman rescued from the sea try to warn him. Everything drives toward that weapon. The conflict is what Deleuze calls a binomial, force against force, earnest youth against imperious villain, and the performers play their types cleanly. Zeman doesn't undermine any of this. He does something odder: he lets the plot serve as a frame for looking. The narrative works like the text in an illustrated book. It's there, it matters, and you keep glancing past it at the pictures.
This is where film theory sharpens the case. André Bazin, the great champion of realism, grounded cinema in photography's bond with the real: the image as a trace the world leaves of itself. Zeman goes the other way, deliberately. His method is anti-illusionist. The frame declares itself a picture. That puts him in the other founding line of cinema, the one that begins with Georges Méliès. In A Trip to the Moon (1902) Méliès staged fantastic machines in a shallow, hand-built proscenium, and in The Impossible Voyage (1904) he sent absurd vehicles across scrolling painted backdrops, illustrations set into motion. Zeman inherits both directly and makes a system of them. From Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) comes the idea of stacked, flat picture-planes with no illusionistic depth. And his own Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) was the rehearsal, the first time he put live actors inside animated, illustration-derived worlds.
The chain runs forward too. In The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962) Zeman carried the same technique into Gustave Doré-style engraved and hand-tinted backdrops. Beside him in Czech animation stood Jiří Trnka, whose The Emperor's Nightingale (1949) shared the handcraft and the book-illustration feeling but worked in dimensional puppets instead of engraved flatness. Put the films side by side and you can see a small national school asking one question: what happens when the cinema stops pretending it is a window?
There is a sting in this too. The film is about an invention for destruction, a scientist seduced into making a weapon to end the world, made in 1958 at the height of the Cold War. Zeman dresses that fear in steel-plate hatching and Verne's brass-and-rivet optimism, so the menace arrives looking quaint. The charm is real, and so is the dread under it.
The film's lasting gift is that it never dated. Effects that chase photographic illusion age with every improvement in technology, while Zeman's living engraving was never chasing anything. So when you watch it, don't only follow the plot. Look at the edges of the frame, at the lines of the water. Find the instant an engraver would have chosen, and then watch Zeman refuse to let it stay still.
Concepts in play
- privileged instants — Actors staged frontally and planar, 'positioned as if posed for an engraver,' performing like 'figures in a tableau vivant'; the whole film modeled on the chosen, fixed moments of nineteenth-century Verne illustrations.
- any-instant-whatever — The engraved hatching itself (ruled water, hatched smoke) animated frame by frame, so the illustrator's posed instant is resampled as continuous mechanical movement.
- the frame as closed set — Information-dense, layered planes (foreground silhouette, mid-ground action, engraved backdrop), with marionettes, models and drawn crowds teeming at the edges; editing holds set-pieces so 'the spectator has time to register the density of visual detail.'
- action-image (large form) — A global threat (a would-be dictator coercing a professor into building a super-explosive to dominate the world) presses on every character until a decisive act must answer it.
- binomial — Typed force-against-force duel: the earnest young hero and rescued woman against the imperious villain, performed with 'a clarity of type appropriate to nineteenth-century adventure fiction.'