The Fallen Idol · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy lies on the landing carpet with his face against the banister rails, watching the hall below. Reed keeps the camera down there with him for most of the film, at roughly the height of an eight-year-old's eyes, so that adults arrive as shoes and hands and voices before they become faces. The rails cut the picture into vertical bars. It works as a joke and as a diagram at the same time: Phile is watching a world he isn't admitted to, and the thing he watches through is the thing keeping him out.

Everything the film does comes out of that position, and Deleuze happens to have unusually exact names for what it does.

Start with the simplest. Deleuze calls a shot that shows us someone in the act of perceiving a dicisign — not the character's view substituted for ours, but the sight of a person seeing, with the camera's own angle quietly felt. The Fallen Idol is built almost entirely out of these. We rarely borrow Phile's eyeline. We get Phile, small and sharp in the foreground, while adult business continues thirty feet behind him, in focus and unexplained. Périnal could hold that depth because 1948 stocks and coated lenses finally allowed it at light levels a studio could deliver. It is the technique Toland and Welles had made famous on Citizen Kane, borrowed for a purpose Welles never needed. Deep focus normally gives a hero a world with more in it than he can manage. Reed uses it to give a child more than he can read.

What the frame withholds, the house supplies badly. Conversations begin before we arrive and continue after we leave. Doors close several rooms away, footsteps cross marble, and the boy catches the wrong words at the wrong volume through wood and distance. Deleuze's term for this is the out-of-field: what the image excludes but keeps pointing at, the next room made present by being audible. Périnal had worked it out nearly twenty years earlier with Clair, craning down through the stacked floors of one Paris building and letting sound arrive as an event heard through a ceiling. Reed's embassy is that building with a class system installed. Basement: warmth, food, Baines's invented Africa. Upstairs: dust sheets and protocol. The staircase joins them and nearly every important thing happens on it, which is a debt running back to Hintertreppe and The Last Laugh, where a man's standing is legible from where he is allowed to stand.

Then Mrs. Baines falls.

Deleuze, describing the compact form of the action-image where a small act discloses a hidden situation, gives it a finest node: the index of equivocity, a gesture that could belong to two entirely different situations. The fall is the purest one in cinema. The audience is given enough to know it is an accident. The boy, whose sightline is partial and whose position is wrong, is given exactly enough to conclude murder. We usually call this dramatic irony and move on. The Deleuzian name is worth having because it puts the ambiguity in the act rather than in anyone's psychology. Both readings are fully constructed out of real footage; the entire difference is a sightline and a cut. Hafenrichter and Reed distribute the evidence unevenly on purpose, and the whole second half is generated by that distribution rather than by anything anyone says.

Deleuze's category for images that mean by relation is the relation-image, and its small currency is the mark and the demark: an object meaning what it customarily means, and an object that refuses to fit and so sets interpretation running. In the Bloomsbury tea shop, Baines introduces Julie as his niece. For Phile, "niece" is a mark, slotting neatly into the chain a child already has for uncles and cake. For us it is a demark. Same word, same shot, two circuits. The film runs its plot through props this way — a paper dart, a housekeeper's ring of keys — and the boy misreads all of them, correctly, the way a child would. Deleuze argued that Hitchcock pushed the movement-image to its limit by making the relation itself the subject, which drags the audience into the film as its knowing third party. Reed is working directly downstream: Sabotage had built suspense from a boy carrying a bomb he didn't understand, and here the bomb is a lie, with an hour of fuse.

Bergson, whom Deleuze is rebuilding cinema out of, defines a living centre as an interval — a gap between a perception coming in and an action going out. He calls it a centre of indetermination, and it is where a character lives. Phile is that gap held open past bearing. Everything reaches him through the balustrade. Almost nothing can be discharged. The one act available to an eight-year-old with a secret is to lie, and he lies with the full force of his love, and each lie tightens the rope around the man he is protecting. Richardson gives the mirror image: Baines invents Africa with just enough private amusement that we catch it and the boy doesn't, then tells the plain truth about the landing and is disbelieved. Earlier, Mrs. Baines has found MacGregor, the boy's pet snake, and burned it in the boiler. It is his only possession and his only secret, and Dresdel needs no other characterisation. In Deleuze's strict sense it is the film's symbol: the object with the organizing relation folded up inside it. This is a house where keeping something to yourself is punishable and telling is worse.

Reed's specific invention was to make point of view structural instead of optical. Vincent Korda built the hall as a real multi-storey set with a working staircase and gallery, so the camera could climb it and shoot down the stairwell through the railings. The boy's place in the story is a fact of carpentry. And Bobby Henrey, an untrained eight-year-old with a short attention span, was never directed in any usual sense: Reed fed him reactions from beside the lens, shot far more than the scenes needed, and assembled him in the cutting room. The most closely watched consciousness in British cinema of the late forties was built after the fact, and none of it shows.

What the film did to narrative is simple to state and was not obvious then. It proved that a whole feature could be carried by the distance between seeing and understanding, with that distance installed in a character who has no power to narrate and no standing to be believed. The police are tired, decent and ordinary, which is the harder choice; the danger isn't a corrupt system but the everyday machinery of taking a child's word. A year later Hafenrichter cut The Third Man, and the low, vertical, staircase-bound grammar worked out in Belgravia went to Vienna and collected the reputation.

Watch it again with the camera height in mind. Notice how often Phile is behind something. Notice that the one time he escapes the house, into wet pavement and arc light, the film's whole texture changes and he is more lost outside than in. And keep one question open, because Reed does: the title says the idol fell, but the film never quite shows you what a child puts in the empty place.