Polytechnique · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A camera moves down a school hallway and, as it moves, it turns over. Lockers climb the frame. The fluorescent ceiling arrives where the floor should be. The building keeps every one of its right angles and loses its ground anyway. Nothing happens in the shot. Nobody is killed in it. Hold onto that, because Denis Villeneuve's whole method is in the movement: the camera is in the right place at the wrong time, and hands you architecture instead of atrocity.

Polytechnique runs seventy-seven minutes and is subtracted all the way down. No colour. Barely any score, and none at all during the killings. The man who on December 6, 1989 separated the women from the men in an engineering classroom, announced that he was fighting feminism, shot fourteen women and then himself, is never named. Neither are the women. No motive scene, no investigation, no trial. Karine Vanasse carried the project for years before bringing it to Villeneuve, who hesitated a long time before agreeing. The film reads like the argument he built during that hesitation: an answer, made in advance, to the charge that dramatizing this would be theft.

The first thing he and editor Richard Comeau removed was chronology. The same span of minutes is restaged from Valérie's position, then Jean-François's, then the killer's, so information arrives out of order and you keep being returned to a minute you have already survived once. Gilles Deleuze has an exact name for this, and it isn't flashback. A flashback is a postcard from a present that has finished. Comeau gives you the same present more than once, from positions that will not resolve into one, so before and after stop holding still. Deleuze calls these peaks of present: contradictory presents coexisting rather than queuing up. That matters for a reason which isn't formal at all. Once a corridor has three presents, the event cannot be over — which is what survivors describe, and why the structure never plays as puzzle-box cleverness.

Then the classroom. Villeneuve stages the separation as a procedure rather than a frenzy: an instruction, a division, women on one side, men on the other. And the men leave. He shoots their compliance with no nudge at all, no reaction shot telling you what to think. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that lays bare a social relation a gest. Not a gesture with a meaning attached, but a bodily attitude in which a whole arrangement becomes visible, because the body is doing precisely what the arrangement asks. The men walking out is the gest of this film, and it becomes its second subject. A smaller one is planted early: Valérie in a job interview, asked whether she intends to have children. Photocopiers, mimeographed handouts, a classroom presentation, that question. The ordinary texture of the faculty goes down first, casual sexism included, so that when the door opens the film owes you no account of where this came from.

Which sets up the hardest move. Most movies run on what Deleuze calls the action-image: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the act changes the situation. Sheriff sees outlaw, draws, town saved. That engine has a famous high gear, the last-minute rescue built from convergent cross-cutting, and the parts are right there. Three people, one building, minutes. Villeneuve assembles them and refuses to fire them. Jean-François perceives everything correctly and does nothing adequate; he is what Deleuze calls a seer, a voyant, someone whose capacity to see has outrun any action available to him. Spread across a whole film, that condition is the crisis of the action-image, Deleuze's account of cinema after 1945, when characters stopped being able to answer what they saw. Villeneuve reactivates it deliberately in 2009, and the coda enforces it: Jean-François cannot metabolize his survival and kills himself. There is no third act, because motive, investigation and justice would all have been lies about this material.

Notice where the camera is when the shooting happens. Frequently, not there. Comeau cuts away with discipline, killings elided outright, the cut landing on an emptied corridor. Sound arrives instead: the reverberant crack of a rifle in a tiled room, screaming muffled through a fire door, ventilation. The mix is built for spatial accuracy, not assault. Deleuze's word for the space a frame implies without showing is the out-of-field, and usually it is just the next room. Villeneuve turns it into an ethical instrument. The dead are allowed to stay in it. In 1961 Jacques Rivette wrote a short, furious essay about a tracking shot in Pontecorvo's Kapò — a camera that moved in to compose a dead woman on the wire and, in moving, made her beautiful. He called it abject, and everyone filming an atrocity since has worked in that shadow. Villeneuve's answer is a camera that keeps arriving late, or rolls the room over rather than look.

Pierre Gill shoots the school as architecture first and setting second, figures small in level wides against lockers and stairwells, and he follows people from behind the shoulder. Deleuze calls an image that shows someone in the act of perceiving, with the camera's own position palpable, a dicisign. It makes you a trailing presence instead of an eyewitness, and withholds faces so long that the few close-ups land enormous. The corridors become an any-space-whatever: space that no longer serves as a stage for action and starts registering feeling on its own account. The rotating hallway is that pushed to its limit.

The deepest decision looks at first like screenwriting convenience. Valérie and Jean-François never existed. Deleuze uses the word fabulation for what a political cinema does when a people cannot simply be represented and characters have to be invented to carry a truth testimony can't be asked to carry again. Quebec had found the device already: Michel Brault's Les Ordres (1974) reconstructed the October Crisis detentions through composites assembled from real testimony, monochrome doing moral rather than decorative work. Villeneuve inherits it and sharpens the reason. The real fourteen are not made to perform their deaths a second time. Jean-François's suicide is invented, and not arbitrarily: survivors of the massacre did die by suicide in the years after. Valérie's pregnancy is the one gesture toward continuance, offered flat, with no uplift attached.

One last subtraction, in the sound. The killer's suicide letter is heard in voiceover; the real document named prominent Quebec women and became public when it was leaked to a journalist who was on the list. So the film gives him language while giving the image nothing that accounts for him. Maxim Gaudette plays him affectless, no origin scene, no diagnosis. Voice and image are telling different stories, which Deleuze calls audiovisual disjunction, and the split here is a refusal: no charismatic movie psychopath, no consoling pathology. The film takes his stated reason at his word. Released while the gun registry created after the massacre was under attack in Parliament, that was not neutral.

The craft debts are all about how a camera walks. Alan Clarke's Elephant (1989) invented the grammar: near-wordless Steadicam walk-ups to killing after killing, each shot held on the emptied space after the body drops. Gus Van Sant carried it into a school in 2003, where Harris Savides trailed students down corridors and the structure looped the same minutes along different paths, the device Villeneuve converts into his three-way mosaic. Kubrick and Garrett Brown supplied the other half: Steadicam gliding through symmetrical wides in The Shining, the building itself as the agent of dread. From Greengrass's Bloody Sunday and United 93 come the procedural compression and the anonymity rule, unknown faces and no music over the event. Downstream, Utøya 22 July, 22 July and Nitram work the same problem: how to film a massacre without becoming its publicist. It also made Villeneuve. Architecture as dread, information withheld, sound as the primary emotional instrument, violence more felt than shown, all set here and running through Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival and the Dune films.

What it did to the art is easy to state and very hard to do. It showed that you can rebuild an atrocity out of images that deny an audience every mechanism for consuming it, and have the result be more unbearable rather than less. Watch it again for the men. They are on screen for seconds, doing what they were told, and Villeneuve never once tells you how to feel about them. That is the shot the whole film is engineered to make you see.