Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Pursued
1947 · Raoul Walsh · Pursued on Sightlines
A boy is under a floor. Through the gaps in the boards there is gunfire, and a pair of spurs, turning, catching light. That is all he gets. For most of its running time it is all the film gives us either: the spurs, the muzzle flashes, three or four seconds at a stretch, dropped into scenes where they have no business being.
Everything in Pursued hangs on that fragment. Jeb Rand, played by Robert Mitchum a year before the RKO pictures locked his persona in place, is raised by the family whose patriarch means to see him dead, and he doesn't know why. Neither do we. Raoul Walsh and Niven Busch built a Western whose engine isn't revenge. It's ignorance. The man can't act because he can't remember.
Deleuze's name for the machine Walsh is quietly dismantling is the action-image: a situation presses on a character, the character takes it in, and at the decisive moment does something that changes the situation. The Western is its cleanest case. Deleuze calls the pressing situation the synsign, the encompasser — the land, the weather, the town, the family, gathered into one milieu that demands one act. Ride out, draw, and the world reorganizes around what you did.
Pursued keeps that shape and pulls the motor out of it. The encompasser is still there, and Howe photographs it magnificently: red-rock buttes around Gallup, real sky, shot on location when the backlot would have done. But James Wong Howe lights it like a city. Hard keys carving faces out of black, low setups, heavy foregrounds pressing in, deep focus holding the figure and the far ridge in the same sharp register. Bazin loved deep focus because it left the viewer free inside the shot, free to look and choose. Howe uses the same tool for the opposite result. Everything is legible and nothing is explained. The whole trap is in focus at once. Under an open sky, the characters are hemmed in, which means the milieu is no longer something you can answer with an act. There is nowhere the horse can take you.
That is precisely what Deleuze means by the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He dates the crisis to the postwar years and counts film noir among its first symptoms. Pursued is 1947, and it stages the crisis inside the genre least willing to admit it. Mitchum's performance is the crisis made flesh — weary, watchful, doomed and uncomprehending, a man whose stillness reads as stoicism and dread at the same time. He is halfway to what Deleuze calls the seer: someone who endures and looks rather than intervenes.
So what does the film do with memory? Formally, it's a long flashback, framed at the ruined homestead with Jeb telling Thorley how they arrived there. Deleuze's term for that is the recollection-image: a dated flashback, a former present retrieved and shown. The narrated flashback behaves itself. The spurs do not. Bergson, who Deleuze is following here, separates two kinds of recognition. In habitual recognition you see a thing and your body answers it, no thought required. In attentive recognition you stop, look again, and instead of acting you circle the object and call in memory to help. When that circuit fails to close, the image stops being a cue for action and becomes something you have to read. Deleuze calls such an image a lectosign. Christian Nyby's cutting withholds the full memory to the last reel, doling it out in intrusive, incompletely legible bursts made with optical printing, superimposition, distortion. This is a 1947 Warner Bros. Western training its audience to decipher an image rather than react to one.
Underneath the ranch drama there is something older and hungrier. Deleuze's impulse-image describes a cinema of drives, where beneath the social surface — property, marriage, inheritance — an originary world of appetite shows through. Dean Jagger plays Grant Callum's vendetta as quiet and implacable rather than operatic, which is exactly right: it isn't a motive, it's an appetite. The spurs are a fetish in Deleuze's sense, a part-object charged with the entire force of the drive, standing in for a cause nobody will name. And the burned homestead at Bear Paw Butte is the originary world showing through the derived milieu of the Callum ranch. Deleuze says such a world is beginning and end at once. Here that's literal. The film starts there and goes back there to finish.
The craft debts are traceable and specific. The engulfing chiaroscuro descends from Caligari's externalized psyche and Murnau's landscape-as-mood in Sunrise, but the direct rehearsal is Howe's own: Kings Row, five years earlier, deep focus and low key applied to small-town Freudian repression. Citizen Kane supplied the template of reconstructing a man from fragmentary, investigative flashbacks; Pursued turns it inward, so the investigator is also the suspect. Murder, My Sweet supplied the framed first-person confession with hallucinatory inserts, The Killers the shattered reconstruction of a doomed man's past. Busch and Walsh took noir's memory architecture and rode it into open country.
The invention is Walsh's, and it's a matter of tempo. He keeps his famous forward drive — the picture never dawdles — while the hero inside it stands still. The film moves; the man doesn't. And the structure does something narrative hadn't quite done: it makes the clue and the cure the same object. Solving the mystery and surviving it are one event, arriving together in the last minutes. That knot is the psychological Western's whole future, and the reason the film's reputation has kept climbing while flashier 1947 pictures have thinned out.
Watch it again and don't watch the gunfights. Watch the doorways. Walsh puts Mitchum in them constantly, under overhanging dark, at thresholds, and a man in a doorway is a man who hasn't decided which room he's in. Then ask the question the film leaves open: what is a Western hero supposed to do with a memory that only arrives in pieces? Pursued answers by sending him back to the place where it started, to wait.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Mitchum's Jeb is 'a man who senses he is doomed without understanding why' — hunted through a blood feud he cannot read, unable to react adequately to what he perceives, in a 1947 Western that keeps the genre's shape while removing its decisive act.
- the encompasser (synsign) — The New Mexico buttes and open sky are photographed in noir's low-key grammar, producing 'a persistent tension between the vastness of the New Mexico exteriors and the claustrophobia of the lighting' — the Western's encompassing milieu present but no longer answerable by an act.
- the seer (voyant) — Mitchum's performance is 'a study in weary, watchful passivity,' stillness reading as both stoicism and dread — a protagonist who endures and watches rather than driving the situation.
- the two recognitions (habitual / attentive) — The recurring nightmare of flashing spurs and muzzle flashes returns without resolving; Jeb recognizes the image and cannot place it, so recognition stalls and reaches for memory instead of action.
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The film is 'largely narrated in retrospect,' framed by Jeb and Thorley trapped at the ruined homestead while Jeb recounts his history — a dated flashback representing a former present.
- the readable image (lectosign) — Nyby's cutting breaks in with the nightmare as 'intrusive, incompletely legible bursts,' rendered by optical printing, superimposition and distortion rather than a clean flashback — an image that must be deciphered, not reacted to.
- fetish (part-object) — The pair of flashing spurs glimpsed by the child from under the floorboards: a part-object carrying the whole compulsive force of the murder and the vendetta.
- originary world — The burned-out homestead at Bear Paw Butte, 'a physical location that is also the site of the repressed memory,' where the framing story unfolds and the climax returns — a savage world of beginnings and endings showing through the derived milieu of the Callum ranch.
- impulse-image (naturalism) — Dean Jagger's Grant Callum plays the vendetta as 'quietly implacable rather than melodramatic,' and the Callum family is 'simultaneously refuge and threat' — drives erupting beneath the social surface of inheritance and marriage.
- expressionism — Howe's 'deep, engulfing shadows, hard key lights that carve faces out of black,' descending from Caligari's distorted high-contrast psyche and Sunrise's low-key landscape, and rehearsed in Howe's own Kings Row.