Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of When Father Was Away on Business
1985 · Emir Kusturica · When Father Was Away on Business on Sightlines
Malik walks in his sleep. He gets up in the night and moves through the rooms with his eyes open and nobody home behind them, and Kusturica neither explains it nor turns it into a symbol. It is one more thing the household absorbs, like the relatives at the table, like the radio, like the sentence everyone has agreed to say out loud: father is away on business.
Mehmed is not away on business. He made a remark about a cartoon in the newspaper, his mistress passed it along, his brother-in-law finished the paperwork, and he is in a labour camp. Every adult in the film knows this. The sentence gets said anyway, to the boy, to the neighbours, eventually to nobody in particular, and it does what a working euphemism does. It builds a small habitable world, and everyone moves in.
Deleuze published the second of his cinema books the same year this film took the Palme d'Or, and he offers a way to treat that sentence as the film's form rather than its plot device. Most movies run on what he calls the movement-image: someone takes in a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. Fights, rescues, decisions. Malik has no move. He is six. What he can do is look, and listen, and stand at the edge of rooms while adults arrange their faces. Deleuze's name for a character like this is the seer — a watcher who has been relieved of the ability to act, and who therefore sees more sharply than any agent could. He was thinking of the children the Italian neorealists kept putting at the centre of ruined cities, and it is worth insisting on the point, because without it you file this film under gentle nostalgia and miss the argument. The passivity is not softness. It is the thesis. In a state that punishes speech, being a witness is the only available position, and Kusturica gives that position to the one person in the house who cannot understand what he is witnessing.
The grown-ups are barely better off. Mehmed is charming and weak and in no condition to act against anything; Senija's whole heroism is endurance. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image — people who perceive perfectly well and have no adequate response available. Here it is not a modernist mood. It is 1950s Yugoslavia after the split with Stalin.
Which returns us to the sentence. Deleuze has a term for a description that stops pointing at something in the world and starts standing in for it: crystalline description, a description that composes its object and then quietly replaces it. Away on business has no referent. Said often enough, in a warm kitchen, by people who love each other, it hardens into the only version of the father available in the house. And because nobody will name where he actually is, the camp never acquires a location. It is not the next room or the next town. It is an out-of-field that cannot be placed anywhere at all, and Kusturica's refusal to cut to it does more damage than a barracks scene ever would. That refusal is his specific invention here: he makes the film obey the euphemism it is describing. The movie tells you the same lie the family tells the boy, and trusts you to feel the shape of what is missing.
Deleuze also has a word for people caught in the act of telling a story about themselves in order to go on living — fabulation, legending. It is usually applied to colonised peoples inventing a future. It fits a Sarajevo family inventing a business trip. Note who does the work: the lie belongs to the state, but the labour of maintaining it is domestic, unpaid, and performed by a wife and a grandmother and some neighbours. The credits call this a historical film. That is the joke, and also the sharpest thing in it.
Watch how the arrests are staged. A man is taken away as though he were being offered a lift; an interrogation is conducted in entirely reasonable tones. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this the gest — a posture that exposes an entire social relation without anyone having to explain it. Mustafa Nadarević's Zijo is the purest case: the Party functionary whose jealousy and whose duty are executed in the same gesture, so that you cannot separate the politics from the grudge.
Vilko Filač shoots it in deep focus, warm and burnished, foreground and background both legible. Bazin argued that deep focus restores ambiguity to the image and hands the viewer the job of choosing where to look. Kusturica uses that freedom for comedy and dread simultaneously: the joke plays up front while something you should not be seeing carries on behind it. The frames are crowded with relatives and objects, several small dramas at once and no one carrying the plot — Deleuze's dispersive situation. This is inherited craft, absorbed at FAMU: Forman's people-first comedies and the way The Firemen's Ball smuggles a regime critique inside a communal farce. Forman presided over the Cannes jury that gave Kusturica the Palme, which is as clean a picture of film as an ongoing conversation as you will find.
Andrija Zafranović's cutting keeps the mood and lets the years pass softly. Chapters, not chases: a circumcision, a move, a homecoming, an illness. Whole stretches hold the everyday without advancing anything, which Deleuze calls dead time and which is where this film actually lives. And the sleepwalking, the one place the pressure escapes, belongs to no memory and explains nothing — a dream circuit, and also simply a body doing what the household will not say. The boy's legs know before he does.
The ancestors are audible. Amarcord gave the structure, a provincial memoir under a regime, sensuality and menace in one tonal register. Closely Watched Trains gave the elliptical restraint exactly at catastrophe. The Spirit of the Beehive is the sibling, the same uncomprehending child and the same deep-focus omission of adult horror. What Kusturica adds to Erice is noise. Beehive is hushed and cold; this house is loud, funny, ribald, full of food and music, and the warmth is not decoration — it is the medium the terror is dissolved in. Forward, it is where his later magical realism begins, where the Manojlović partnership begins, where Filač's look is set for a decade.
What it did to film: it proved a political film can leave the atrocity entirely off-screen and stay in the kitchen, and be more damning for it. Next time, watch the adults when the sentence gets said. Watch who says it first, and what the others do with their hands. Then ask the question the film leaves open: the boy is its conscience and also its dupe, and one day he will stop needing the sentence. The film hands you that sentence and lets you listen to it set.
Concepts in play
- the seer (voyant) — Six-year-old Malik as the film's 'organizing consciousness' — watchful innocence, apprehending adult events 'partially, from below, at the edges of rooms,' with no capacity to act on what he sees.
- pure optical and sound situations — Denunciation, arrest, internment and betrayal 'refracted through a child who does not, and largely cannot, understand them'; the audience grasps what Malik does not, so he can only look and listen.
- crisis of the action-image — Mehmed played by Manojlović as 'charming, weak, philandering,' human-scaled rather than villainous, with no adequate response to the security apparatus; Senija's heroism is endurance under humiliation and absence.
- crystalline description — The euphemism 'away on business' — a description with no referent that the family and neighbours maintain until it replaces the fact of the labour camp; 'to his young son Malik, and to the neighbors, the euphemism holds.'
- out-of-field-absolute — 'The film withholds the labor-camp brutality from direct view, and the edit keeps the emphasis on the household' — the camp is never located anywhere, only felt as absence and silence.
- fabulation / legending — 'The gap between the family's performed normalcy and the truth they are all managing around the boy'; the credits' subtitle 'a historical film' as gentle irony — history recovered as a private story the household tells to survive.
- the gest — 'The intrusions of the state are staged with pointed ordinariness: an arrest that looks like a courtesy, an interrogation conducted in reasonable tones'; Nadarević's Zijo, whose personal and political motives are the same gesture.
- dispersive situation — Kusturica's crowded frame: 'domestic spaces teem with relatives, neighbors, and objects; family gatherings, meals, and rituals are staged as dense ensembles in which several small dramas unfold simultaneously.'
- dead time (temps mort) — Zafranović's episodic, novelistic cutting across chapters of family life — a circumcision, a move, a return, an illness — privileging 'continuity of mood and character over propulsive plotting,' with soft transitions that make time feel remembered.
- dream-image (onirosign) — 'The film's recurring motif of Malik sleepwalking gives Kusturica his one sustained lyrical-surreal register, a foreshadowing of the fuller magical realism of his later work' — a circuit tied to no datable memory.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — The sleepwalking child's body moving through the apartment at night, carrying the household's unspoken knowledge that no one in the film will put into words.