Possession · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the corridor. Anna alone in a tiled Berlin underpass, a bag of groceries swinging, then dropped — and then her whole body turning against itself, slamming the walls, spilling milk and something darker, laughing and screaming inside the same breath, until she delivers, or aborts, a thing the film never names. Nothing in this scene advances a plot. No one is watching her; nothing she does will change her situation. She is not acting. She is undergoing. That is the first thing to understand about Possession: Żuławski has stopped filming people who perceive a situation and act to resolve it, and started filming bodies that can only endure what is happening to them.

Deleuze has a name for this. He calls it a cinema of the body — cinema that gives up the old sensory-motor deal (you see, you react, the world changes) and instead lets the body carry time directly, through its attitudes and postures, its exhaustions. Żuławski arrives there by method, not theory: he directed Adjani, as he had directed his actors since The Third Part of the Night and The Devil, to the edge of collapse, treating operatic hysteria not as excess but as a system. The convulsion is the content. When the body in the corridor keeps going past anything a story would need, you are watching duration itself — time made visible because no action will discharge it.

Underneath that body is a particular kind of world. The Berlin flats are cold, sparse, municipal — derived, ordinary, real. But the film keeps tunneling beneath them to a derelict apartment where Anna tends a growing creature, feeding it, coupling with it, a thing of pure appetite that Carlo Rambaldi built to evolve across the film toward a copy of Mark. This is what Deleuze, following Stroheim and Buñuel, calls naturalism: a recognizable milieu revealed as the thin skin over an originary world of raw drives. The creature is the originary world's emissary — fetish and symptom at once, an object charged with compulsive force. And the film moves along what Deleuze calls a line of slope: not toward resolution but toward degradation and death, each confrontation a worse version of the last, the marriage entropically running down.

Then the doubling. Adjani plays Anna and also Helen, Anna's green-eyed, serene schoolteacher double; the creature, meanwhile, ripens into a second Mark. Put a face beside its idealized inverse, a man beside the monster wearing his shape, and you get Deleuze's crystal-image — the moment when an actual figure and its virtual double become impossible to tell apart, like an object and its mirror where you can no longer say which is the reflection. The creature is the seed of that crystal: the inner world spontaneously taking on a body, the hidden marriage made flesh. This is the grammar Żuławski inherits from Persona's merging women, but he runs it through horror, so the doppelgänger doesn't just blur identity — it gives birth.

All of which makes the film's truth undecidable on purpose, and this is its deepest Deleuzian move: the powers of the false. Was the subway scene a miscarriage or a parturition? Is Mark an intelligence agent, and of what? The espionage frame never resolves; the editing refuses connective tissue, juxtaposing affair, double, and monster without telling you how they cause each other. Deleuze argues that once cinema breaks with the action-image, truth and falsity stop being the point — narration becomes falsifying, holding mutually exclusive versions as co-true, and that undecidability becomes a creative engine rather than a failure. Possession doesn't have a secret it's withholding. The undecidability is the subject.

You can feel the lineage in the walls themselves. Bruno Nuytten's wide-angle lens warps the Berlin apartment into a hostile, swelling box — the exact distortion Polanski used in Repulsion to track a woman's psychic collapse. The chamber-drama skeleton, the long escalating two-handers in domestic rooms, is Scenes from a Marriage detonated from inside. And the restless camera that chases declaiming actors through space, the stilted incantatory delivery, comes straight out of Żuławski's own On the Silver Globe and his early features. He took a recognizable European art-cinema vocabulary and pushed every element past the realism that had held it together.

What did that do to film? It proved that the marriage-breakdown drama — Bergman's most civilized form — could be turned into a direct image of the body and of the false without becoming nonsense. The cool blues, the recurring Wall, the depopulated streets turn private catastrophe into one of Deleuze's any-space-whatevers: deserted, fragmented spaces that no longer host action but radiate pure affect. Banned, butchered, dismissed for years as a video nasty, Possession survived because it had discovered something — that genre extremity and metaphysical seriousness are not opposites, that you can think with a convulsing body. Watch it again and try this: stop asking what is literally happening. Ask instead what the film knows that its characters can only suffer. The corridor has been telling you the whole time.