Four Days in September · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Somewhere in a rented house in Rio, a handful of students are arguing about Marx and revolution while, in a back room, the American ambassador sits and watches them — watches the way you'd watch children handle a loaded gun. That image is the whole film in miniature: an act of enormous historical seriousness carried out by people visibly out of their depth. Hold onto it, because it's the crack through which a Deleuzian reading slips in.

Start with what the film unmistakably is: a thriller. Deleuze gave the thriller its truest name — the action-image. In his account of classical cinema, the screen runs on a sensory-motor circuit: a character perceives a situation, feels its pressure, and acts to change it. Four Days in September is built in what he called the large form — the SAS arc, where a vast encompassing situation bears down until a single decisive act transforms it. The encompassing situation here (the synsign, Deleuze's word for the milieu that calls forth the deed) is the dictatorship itself: torture, censorship, the disappeared. The act is the kidnapping of Ambassador Elbrick, staked against fifteen prisoners. Force meets force — the cell against the security state — in the oldest action-image structure of all, the binomial: hunters and hunted, locked.

But watch the kids fumble the car, blow the timing, debate ideology while the logistics rot. Deleuze has a name for that too, and it's the more interesting one. He called it the crisis of the action-image: the moment when characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive, when the link between seeing and doing slackens. The militants perceive the entire weight of the regime and answer it with an improvised, amateur operation that — whatever its courage — transforms almost nothing structurally. Gabeira's memoir knows this; the film inherits its retrospective irony. So the picture sits on a hinge. Its genre machinery is pure movement-image, taut and resolving, while its honesty keeps whispering that these agents are smaller than their situation. That tension is the film's real subject, and Deleuze hands you the vocabulary to feel it.

Now the formal move that makes the film matter. Barreto cross-cuts relentlessly between the cell and the regime's police — and crucially, the torturers. This is organic-American montage, the grammar Griffith invented: convergent parallel editing, two lines racing toward a deadline, the ticking clock of four days. It's the suspense engine. But Deleuze would push further, to the relation-image. The meaning of this film is not in any single shot; it lives in the relations the viewer is made to hold across the cut. When the film carries you from a captor's frightened face to a state agent's domestic life and back, it installs you as what Deleuze calls the knowing third — the audience that completes a relation the characters cannot see. The film's notorious even-handedness, the thing that made it a scandal at home, is not a theme laid over the editing. It is the editing. The cut is the argument.

Inside the safe house, something else happens that the action-image can't account for. Ideology drains out of the room and bodies are left facing each other. Elbrick stops being a target and becomes a cultivated, watchful man; a young guerrilla stops being a soldier. Deleuze, late in his cinema books, turned to a cinema of the body and to the gest — a posture or attitude that exposes a social relation rather than advancing a plot. The enforced intimacy of captivity is staged exactly as gest: two human beings, thrown into a room, their shared gestures making visible the political gulf between them and, briefly, dissolving it. Nothing is done in these scenes, in the action sense. They are held. And the regime's most disturbing figure — the three-dimensional torturer — pulls the film toward Deleuze's impulse-image, that naturalist register where drives erupt beneath the social surface and an act reads as the symptom of something darker the bureaucratic offices can't quite contain.

Place it in the discourse. The even-handed docudrama Barreto adopts descends directly from The Battle of Algiers — newsreel naturalism that grants both the clandestine cell and the repressive apparatus their own procedural logic — and from Costa-Gavras's Z and State of Siege, the latter almost a template: a Latin American kidnapping of a U.S. official, built from cross-cut interrogation and the captor-captive dialectic. The chamber of enforced proximity is the lineage of Dog Day Afternoon and, further back, 12 Angry Men. And Félix Monti's grave, restrained light — carried over from The Official Story — keeps the whole thing in a register Bazin would recognize: realism as moral seriousness, the refusal to caricature.

So what did it do? It took the most reassuring machine in cinema, the resolving thriller, and used the action-image's own grammar — parallel montage, the deadline — to deliver something the action-image was never built to say: that everyone on both sides of the cut is a person. Watch it again for the cuts, not the plot. Notice the exact moment the film hands you a sympathy you didn't authorize. That's where it stops being a thriller and starts thinking.