Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bāhubali: The Beginning
2015 · S. S. Rajamouli · Bāhubali: The Beginning on Sightlines
Start at the bottom of the waterfall. A young man stands in the spray, looking up at a wall of water so tall that its top disappears into mist. The first real question the film asks is whether he can get up there. He was found as an infant by the people who live below the falls. He tries the climb and falls. He tries again. Somewhere above him is a kingdom he has never seen. Rajamouli builds the whole first movement of Bāhubali: The Beginning out of that one vertical line, and it rewards close attention, because the line carries an argument about what cinema is for.
K. K. Senthil Kumar's camera treats the cliff as a stage with a top and a bottom, and the two mean different things. Below is exile. Above is origin. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema in the 1980s, had a name for the space a film makes you sense just past the edge of the frame: the out-of-field. In its simplest form, the relative out-of-field, it is the room next door, a place the character could walk into. Here it is the top of the falls. We never doubt that it exists. The mist hides it, the music leans toward it, and every attempt at the climb measures how far away it is. The film teaches us to want a place before it shows it to us.
That wanting belongs to what Deleuze called the movement-image, the classical cinema in which a character sees a situation and acts to change it. Its fullest version is the action-image in its large form. A whole world presses on a hero until he gathers himself into one decisive act that changes it. Deleuze called that pressing world the encompasser, and he modeled the idea on the American epic, from Griffith's histories to the western. Bringing a theory built on Ford and Griffith to a Telugu fantasy shot on Arri Alexas in Hyderabad might look strange. The fit is exact, and that is the point. In Deleuze's account, much serious cinema after the Second World War lost faith in this circuit, and its characters began to watch instead of act. Bāhubali refuses that loss outright. The waterfall is an encompasser in the purest sense: a world so total that simply standing beneath it is a dare. The climb is the hero's answer.
Notice how much of the film is about measurement. The cinematography works by what you could call scale legibility. A human figure is set against a waterfall, a statue, a gate or a line of soldiers. First comes the extreme wide shot to fix the ratio. Then the camera moves in fast, often along digitally assisted paths that no crane could follow. Deleuze described the large form as a kind of breathing between the huge space of the world and the taut line of the action. Rajamouli's framing breathes exactly that way: out to the enormous, then in to the body.
The clearest demonstration is the Kalakeya battle. Before a single soldier moves, the film stops for a sand-table briefing that lays out the battle plan. Then it carries the plan out, and we can follow the strategy as story. The debt is to Ben-Hur, whose chariot race shows the whole track in wide shots before cutting inside it, so every close-up stays anchored in space. The enemy speaks Kiliki, a real constructed language devised by Madhan Karky, and the fact that we can't understand it becomes menace. Deleuze called this structure the binomial: force against force, the hero against an opposing power. The Kalakeya are that opposing force, and they speak a language we cannot enter.
Then there is the held image. Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao edits in a repeating build: setup, escalation, climactic tableau, hold. The film pauses on an iconic image and lets it sit. The statue-raising sequence runs the pattern cleanly. First comes an engineering problem, then a physical solution, then a heroic image, in that order. Here Deleuze gives us a sharper tool. He argued that cinema's great novelty was the any-instant-whatever: the camera records motion at regular intervals, so no single moment counts for more than another. Older arts were built instead on privileged instants, the pose or climax a painter or sculptor would choose. Bāhubali, digital through and through, brings the privileged instant back. Its speed ramps, inherited from 300, slow a single shot down to isolate an impact and then let it go. Senthil Kumar's ramps follow the fight choreography instead of being scattered over it, so each slowdown lands on the pose the scene was built to reach. The film makes icons out of motion.
That habit has a long history. Film historians call early spectacle a cinema of attractions: images shown off to the audience instead of folded into the story. Telugu mythological cinema turned this into a grammar. Patala Bhairavi (1951) taught audiences the rules of each ordeal before it began, so every trial played as a separate set piece with its own rules. K. V. Reddy's Mayabazar (1957) built impossible palaces out of optical tricks and painted glass and showed them head-on, in held tableaux of unembarrassed divine iconography. Sabu Cyril's Mahishmati and Senthil Kumar's compositions carry that habit into digital tools. Mughal-e-Azam (1960) gave permission for invented antiquity, since its Sheesh Mahal was a set made to be photographed, not a copy of a real palace. Mahishmati makes the same move, taking a name from the Puranas for a capital that is entirely made up. From Conan the Barbarian comes the hero's built physique as evidence of who he is, scored with choir and drums instead of melody, which Keeravani's massed chant echoes. From The Return of the King come the tiered siege city and the virtual camera that dives down its levels, which here plunges over the falls.
Rajamouli's own invention was the synthesis, and the nerve to treat it as one thing. He plans every shot in advance, so the green-screen footage was filmed to a design instead of discovered on set. That planning let a film this heavy with effects be finished in Indian VFX houses at Indian cost, on a scale that holds up on an IMAX screen. He also changed the shape of the story. This is openly half of a two-part story, released two years before its conclusion and sold as a complete event, on the bet that audiences would come back.
They did. The film won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film. Its Hindi dub, presented by Dharma Productions, broke the old assumption that Hindi cinema was India's national cinema by default and that South Indian films traveled north only as remakes. Within a few years, Telugu and Kannada films were being greenlit with a national release planned from the start.
So this is what Bāhubali did to film as an art. At a time when art cinema had long treated the heroic action-image as exhausted, a whole film industry went back to it and found it still worked. When you watch, look for the ratio in each wide shot. Watch for the hold. Each time the film stops on an image, ask what the image is asking you to believe. Then watch the man at the foot of the water look up.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — The foundling below the colossal waterfall repeatedly tries to climb it to reach the kingdom above; the world presses until the hero answers it with action.
- the encompasser — The waterfall and the vertically imagined kingdom (waterfall, gate, palace, throne) form a total milieu that calls the hero's action into being.
- relative out-of-field — The top of the falls, hidden in mist, is an implied space above the frame: the cliff is staged with a top and a bottom, origin above and exile below.
- respiration-space — Scale legibility: extreme wide shots set a human figure against a waterfall, statue, gate or rank of soldiers, then the camera moves in fast on digitally assisted paths.
- binomial — The Kalakeya battle, laid out on a sand table and then carried out, sets force against force; the enemy speaks Kiliki, a constructed language whose unintelligibility becomes menace.
- privileged instants — The editing builds through setup, escalation, climactic tableau and hold, pausing on iconic images; speed ramps inherited from 300 isolate a single impact; the statue-raising sequence ends on a heroic image.
- the closed set (cadre) — Compositions organized as systems of scale and color-coded factions, with the tribal world below and the court above separated by texture and hue.