49th Parallel · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The first thing the film gives you is a map. A line runs across it, and a phrase runs with the line: the longest undefended border in the world. Then an aerial view, and the country lying under it. A war picture has opened by pointing at the one thing in it that cannot be photographed. Out in the muskeg there is nothing to see. Six shipwrecked Germans are going to walk across a continent toward a legal fact.

Deleuze has a use for that. He separates two kinds of offscreen space. There is the relative kind, the room next door, the thing that would come into view if the camera panned. And there is the absolute kind: something the frame can gesture toward but never contain, because it does not sit anywhere in particular. The 49th parallel is the second kind. The film's destination has no image, which is why Powell has to draw it. Everything after the map is a search for a body to give that line, and the body it finds is a country.

Freddie Young photographs Canada as scale and emptiness, high wide compositions with the six men as specks against water, muskeg, wheat and rock. Deleuze calls this the encompasser: the milieu large enough to call an action out of a person, the situation that presses. In the classical action film the hero has to grow adequate to it. The milieu marks him and he marks it back, a bond Deleuze names the imprint. Now watch the costumes. Everyone in Canada wears specific, local, weathered clothing, the sort that records the place that made it. The Germans wear uniforms. And Powell keeps reapplying the U-boat's visual grammar to them wherever they go: pinched framings, low ceilings, hard raking light. That grammar is borrowed. Pabst had codified it in Kameradschaft, where sealed low-roofed sets and untranslated bilingual dialogue turned language itself into a physical obstruction, and Pressburger knew its Ufa version from the submarine picture Morgenrot, rivets and gauges and a crew tallied by berth. The point is what Powell does with it: his Germans carry the submarine out onto the prairie. Eric Portman's Hirth, who has replaced interiority with doctrine, cannot take an imprint from anything. Inside the logic of the action-image that is not a moral failing but a structural one. A man no milieu can mark cannot act adequately within it. The film's argument is made with lenses and wardrobe before anyone opens their mouth.

Deleuze also notices that the big action films breathe: vast milieu, then the taut line of the pursuit, then vast milieu again. This one breathes asymmetrically, and wartime scarcity is the reason. Real geography for Canada, controlled artifice for the Germans, with the models and process work and built interiors concentrated in the steel tube. Rationing forced that division of labour. Powell made it argue.

The film is a relay of self-contained novellas, and structurally it declines the shape you expect. Deleuze distinguishes two forms of the action-image. In the large form a global situation presses until one decisive act transforms it. In the small form an act discloses a situation you could not otherwise see. Powell runs the small form, six times over. The Germans arrive somewhere, they do something, and the place reveals what it is by how it answers. The trading post, a single room holding Cree and Inuit people, French and English speakers, is never explained to us; it is disclosed by what happens in it, and what happens in it is a massacre. David Lean's cutting is the instrument. Exposition is tightened to almost nothing, so we enter each new world already mid-conversation. Deleuze calls that kind of ellipsis an index of lack: a gesture that implies the situation it withholds and makes you supply the rest. Between episodes there are no dissolves, only hard geographical cuts, map and train and aerial and water. What they trace is what Deleuze calls a line of the universe. Not a plot. A trajectory, zig-zagging across spaces that have nothing to do with one another.

The staging carries the thesis. Deleuze's word for a group filmed as one feeling body is the dividual, and Powell puts two of them in the same rooms. The Germans move as a bloc, in formation, facing outward. Every community they walk into is arranged as a circle: the communal table, the shared meal, the congregation. Hirth stands in front of the Hutterites and addresses them. He cannot sit down into them. And the scene does something almost nothing else in British cinema of 1941 was doing. It lets German be spoken sympathetically, at length, by Peter, the Hutterite leader, answering him in it. Deleuze's term for this is the demark: the anomaly that breaks a habit of association, German equals enemy, and forces interpretation where recognition used to be enough. Powell turns the enemy's own language into evidence against him.

Powell's real invention is in the arithmetic of the duel. The action film runs on a binomial, force braced against force. He keeps the villain and replaces the hero every reel. The trapper, the Hutterite, the aesthete, the soldier: each appears, argues, and dies or wins or escapes, while Hirth walks on. (The star roster of Olivier, Howard, Massey and Walbrook was affordable precisely because the structure asked each of them for days rather than months.) We travel with the hunted, and the hunted are Nazis, so every stranger is not a chance to escape but a chance to argue. The chassis is Hitchcock's, the fugitive's chain of discrete regional encounters from The 39 Steps, with the wronged innocent swapped out for a war criminal. The rhetoric is Lang's: M gave its cornered killer a great self-defending speech before a kangaroo tribunal, and Powell hands Hirth the meeting hall.

Which makes this a chase film whose climaxes are speeches. Deleuze has a name for an image that poses a problem it cannot settle from inside: the discourse-image. The film was commissioned to move American opinion. It could argue, but the conclusion was not in its gift. Pearl Harbor supplied that. Which is exactly why the American release could lose a fifth of its running time and lose mostly the discursive scenes. The argument had become a confirmation, and confirmations do not need reasons.

One image condenses the whole relation, what Deleuze would call the symbol. The aesthete's tepee-study in the Rockies, hung with modern paintings and stacked with books, a private circle of one, burns. The most beautiful footage in the film is spent on the most ironic use of beauty in it.

Powell had already proved the method on The Edge of the World: park a small unit in genuinely hostile terrain and let rock and weather dictate coverage, until landscape becomes the argument rather than the backdrop. From Night Mail he took the GPO recipe, shoot the real place and the real regional voices, rebuild the interior in studio for sync, cap the reel with a scored set piece. That is why the accents here, Québécois and Scots and German-Canadian and Oxford English, do so much of the thematic work, and why Vaughan Williams, sixty-eight and writing for the screen for the first time, could get away with a prelude that is modal, hymn-like and entirely unmartial. The music simply declines to meet the Germans on their own rhetorical ground.

What it seeded is a matter of record. Its success let Powell and Pressburger formalise The Archers on the next picture, under the shared "Written, Produced and Directed by" card. Lean was directing within a year. Young was two decades from Lawrence of Arabia. Vaughan Williams went on to Coastal Command and Scott of the Antarctic.

Watch it again for the blocking. Who sits and who stands, how low the ceiling is, what the clothes remember. Deleuze thought modern political cinema begins at the point where a people is missing. This is a film made on the opposite faith, that a people can be assembled out of accents and one crowded room at a trading post, and it is honest enough to do the assembling in front of you, one seating arrangement at a time. Whether the assembly holds is the question it leaves open.