Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Children of Heaven
1997 · Majid Majidi · Children of Heaven on Sightlines
The shoes change feet in an alley at noon. Zahra comes running from her morning shift and kicks them off before she has stopped moving. Ali is already stepping in, laces loose, and then he is gone down the lane with the camera scrambling to hold him. The sneakers are too big for her and coming apart on him, and they are wet most of the time. That handoff is the whole film: two children, one pair of shoes, a bell about to ring at the other end of the neighborhood.
Majidi's invention is the relay. By 1997 the lost-object film was almost a genre, and he had two great versions of it behind him. De Sica's man searches Rome for a bicycle. Kiarostami's boy walks between two villages to return a borrowed notebook. Both are built on a search. Majidi swapped the search for a handoff and put a clock on it. That single move turns destitution into suspense without cheapening it, and it is why a film about a nine-year-old's sneakers is unbearably tense.
Which is where Deleuze becomes useful, and not in the way you'd expect. Writing two books on cinema in the 1980s, he cut film roughly in half. In the first kind, the movement-image, someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts, and the act changes the situation or fails in a way that counts. He called this the sensory-motor circuit, a clinical phrase for something you already know: a person who can do something about their problem. In the second kind, the time-image, that circuit snaps. The character can only look and endure, and we sit there in time alongside them. Deleuze thought this second cinema was born in Italian neorealism, in the rubble, where the situations had grown too large for anyone to act on.
So here is the oddity worth looking at closely. Children of Heaven is assembled entirely from neorealist parts, and it runs the first engine at full power.
Deleuze gave the action-image two shapes. The large form starts with an encompassing situation that presses down until a decisive act transforms it, which is the western and the gangster picture. The small form runs backwards: a minor act comes first, and from it a hidden situation is disclosed. Majidi works almost exclusively in the small form. Nobody sits us down and explains the family's debts or the unpaid rent. We learn them from a shoe changing feet, and from the fact that these two children would rather run themselves to ruin for weeks than say one sentence to their father. The missing shoes, meanwhile, are what Deleuze calls an index of lack: everything visible is organized around an object that is not there. The sprinting, the lying, the arithmetic of minutes, all of it is the shape of an absence.
The handoff itself is cut as convergent parallel montage, the thing Deleuze traced back to Griffith and the last-minute rescue. Two lines closing on one instant. Will he make it. What Griffith rescued was a life; here it is a tardy mark. Majidi's nerve is to run that machinery at full voltage over stakes that low, and it works, because the alternative the children have decided on is unspeakable to them.
The race is where the mechanism turns on itself. Ali enters a citywide footrace because third prize is a pair of sneakers. He is not trying to win. His legs win anyway. Deleuze distinguishes the index of lack from the index of equivocity, a gesture that fits two incompatible situations at once with no way to decide between them. Ali's finishing kick may be the purest one in movies. To the crowd and the coach and the camera at the tape, a boy is winning. To Ali, that exact motion is the loss of the shoes. The cutting accelerates while his intention reverses, and the film's whole irony lives in the gap.
Then home, the courtyard, his feet lowered into the pond. Deleuze uses the word empreinte, the imprint, for the way a milieu and a body mark each other. Majidi makes it literal. The blisters are the shoes' signature, the receipt for every alley crossing. The goldfish come and circle and nose at the raw skin, red on red. The film has been careful with colour all along, saving its pinks and deep reds for Zahra's wanting, and it spends everything it has saved here.
Nothing happens in that shot. Nobody can do anything. Ali does not act and the film does not cut away to tell us what he is thinking. The other regime arrives for the last ninety seconds of a film that spent eighty minutes refusing it: a pure optical situation, an image you can only look at, with no action available to discharge it. Ali becomes what Deleuze calls a voyant, a seer, demoted from doing to watching. The time in that shot is not the time it takes to get somewhere. It is just time, and it lands on you.
Why does the lens earn its keep here? Because it tells you what the machine was for. All the crosscutting, all the Griffith pressure, built a boy who could act, so that the last image could take the action away and leave him sitting in water. That is the film's real argument about poverty: not an absence of drama, but a condition in which enormous effort produces no change in the situation. Structure says it. Nobody has to.
The adults are already living in the second regime. The father's trip north, to the walled villas and the intercom gates, sets him in front of a situation he perceives perfectly and cannot touch. He presses a button and talks into a grille and the house never appears, a frame opening onto a space next door that stays unavailable. The boy does the talking. Deleuze dated the historical collapse of the action-image to the postwar decades; Majidi restages it as the difference between being nine and being forty.
The debts are precise. From Where Is the Friend's House? comes the template: a child on an urgent moral errand over a misplaced school object, shot at the boy's height, moving through thresholds and adult deafness. Kiarostami's zigzag between villages is what Deleuze calls a vector, a broken line stitching together places with nothing else in common, and Majidi doubles it into two children on opposite shifts with a stopwatch running. Bicycle Thieves supplies the engine, one lost necessity reorganizing a poor family's entire day on location with non-professionals, except that De Sica's search dissolves into wandering, and Deleuze read that dissolution as the start of modern cinema. Majidi rebuilds the circuit De Sica broke. Umberto D., from which Deleuze drew his own founding example of the everyday held until it becomes visible, teaches him that shame travels through small transactions: a bar of soap in a gutter, a pencil, a debt at the shop. Pather Panchali shows him how a child's senses find beauty inside deprivation, with siblings and natural light and water. The Runner gives him the Iranian body in perpetual motion and running as endurance. And The 400 Blows gives him the closing run, Antoine going nowhere and stopped in a freeze-frame. Majidi's boy also arrives nowhere. Majidi replaces the freeze with water and two fish.
What it did: a Kanoon-funded children's film, shot cheaply in south Tehran, became the first Iranian feature nominated for the Academy Award, and reset what Western audiences thought Iranian cinema could be. More than that, it disproved a piece of received wisdom. The movement-image was not used up in 1945. It had only been relocated. Find people for whom action still closes the circuit, which in this world means children, and the oldest machinery in cinema works again at full strength, on a pair of sneakers.
Watch the race again and notice something uncomfortable: you want him to lose. The film has arranged your desire to run against his own legs. Then ask which ending is the true one, the tape or the pond, and see whether the film lets you choose.
Concepts in play
- action-image-small-form — The family's finances, debts and rent are never stated; they are disclosed by the midday shoe handoff in the alley and by the children's refusal to tell their father — a small act revealing a hidden situation.
- montage-organic-american — Crosscutting Zahra's morning class against Ali waiting on the corner, then the frantic exchange, then his late arrival — Griffith's convergent parallel montage and last-minute rescue applied to a school bell.
- index-of-equivocity — Ali's finishing kick in the citywide race: the same motion reads as victory to the crowd and as the loss of the third-place sneakers to him; the editing accelerates as his intention reverses.
- index-of-lack — The lost shoes are never recovered and never mentioned to the parents; every visible action — the sprinting, the secret, the arithmetic of minutes — takes its shape from the absent object.
- vector (line of the universe) — The daily zig-zag relay through the labyrinth of south Tehran alleys between Zahra's morning school and Ali's afternoon one, plus the father-son excursion to the northern hills.
- imprint (empreinte) — Ali's blistered feet at the end: the milieu's daily crossings written physically on the body, lowered into the courtyard pond.
- pure optical & sound situations — The closing shot of the feet in the pond — no action is available, nothing advances, the image can only be looked at.
- voyant (the seer) — After the race Ali stops acting entirely; the film holds him at the pond without cutting away, a runner demoted to a watcher.
- temps mort — The film's patient register — courtyard light, the surface of the goldfish pond, holding on faces and small gestures — set against the tightly cut bursts of the chase and race.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The father in the affluent north, facing walled villas and intercom gates looking for gardening work: he perceives the situation exactly and can act on none of it; the boy has to do the talking.
- out-of-field-relative — The mechanical intercom of the rich household — a voice and a gate opening onto an adjacent villa interior that remains unavailable to father and son.
- affective colour — The deep pinks and reds gathered around Zahra's longing, paying off in the closing image of red goldfish nosing Ali's raw feet.
- symbol — Objects staged as narrative agents loaded with moral weight — the shoes above all, but also the pencil, the bar of soap in the gutter, the pair of goldfish — the sneakers condensing the sibling debt the film is built on.