Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Daybreak
1939 · Marcel Carné · Daybreak on Sightlines
A plush bear sits on top of the wardrobe in a room where a man has just shot someone dead. It has nothing to do with the killing. It belongs to a girl who sells flowers, and it came up five flights of stairs one afternoon for no reason worth remembering. Now there are police on the landing and a crowd thickening in the street, and the bear is still up there in the lamplight, being a bear.
François can't do anything. The door is barricaded, the room is at the top of the building, and there is no version of the next few hours in which he walks out alive. So the room fills with objects instead of actions: the bear, a brooch, a mirror, a bicycle, the cigarettes. The objects start carrying the time.
Deleuze's two big categories are simpler than they sound. In the movement-image, which is most cinema, someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it; the cutting exists to carry that chain forward. In the time-image, the chain snaps. Action settles nothing, the character is reduced to looking and listening and waiting, and we stop experiencing time as the measure of somebody's movement and start experiencing it raw. Deleuze dated that break to Italy after the war, to bombed streets where nothing a character did could repair anything. The present tense of Le Jour se lève, shot on a Paris soundstage and released in June 1939, is already sitting in it. Deleuze even has a name for the halfway condition: the crisis of the action-image, a character who perceives perfectly well and can no longer react in any way that matters.
Which is strange, because nothing in this film is real. The Italians reached the time-image by walking outdoors into actual rubble, and Bazin would build a whole theory of cinema on that contact with the unfabricated world. Carné got to the same standstill by constructing every wall of it. Room, street, factory: all studio. Poetic realism's realism is a lighting decision.
Everything François does after the gunshot is a non-action. He smokes. He paces. He goes to the window and looks down at people who will not save him. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns: moments a character perceives with no motor response available, so the image goes quiet and slightly alien, because nothing can be done with it. The man inside them is the seer, a watcher and an endurer rather than an agent. Gabin's performance is engineered for exactly this. The famous granite stillness isn't restraint in the acting-class sense. It's a man with nowhere to put his hands.
And when perception can't run forward into action, it runs backward. Deleuze, after Bergson, separates two recognitions. Usually you recognise a thing by using it: you see a door, you open it, nothing in you has to stop. When the using is blocked, recognition stalls and goes looking in memory instead. That stall is this film's engine. François looks at the furniture of a life he can no longer live, and each object opens.
Three times the film dissolves out of his face into a former present. Deleuze's term is the recollection-image: a dated, locatable memory, a past that was once somebody's present, summoned back and represented. He's generally suspicious of flashbacks, because they're normally a convenience, a writer's way of delivering information on schedule. Carné earns his twice. The memories are motivated from inside the image, the dissolve beginning on Gabin's face so we watch him fall. And the structure is the point rather than the delivery system: open on the murder, then unwind it, and suspense converts into inevitability. We never ask whether. We watch a man walk toward something we have already seen happen, knowing more all night than his remembered self does. That is Carné's specific invention here, and it wasn't the flashback, which existed already. It was building an entire film as one man's night and letting the set do the remembering.
So the film sorts Deleuze's two regimes by floor plan. The past is where the movement-image still lives. People act there, and act on each other. Gabin's stillness against Jules Berry's fluent theatrical malice is a textbook binomial, Deleuze's name for the force-against-force structure that powers the action-image: two men, one girl, pressure and counter-pressure, the insinuating dog-trainer as corrupt principle and the worker as the thing it corrupts. Trauner gave those scenes a greenhouse and a workshop, rooms with air in them. The flashbacks breathe. The present suffocates.
The present is a closed set, Deleuze's cadre, a frame treated as a system where the composition is the information. Trauner built the tenement tall and narrow with François's room at the summit, and the verticality does the work of a plot point: the hero is above everyone, therefore unreachable, therefore finished. Then there's the window and what it admits. The street, the murmur, the massing police: that's the relative out-of-field, space you can't see but could walk to. Deleuze distinguishes it from something else, a sense of an outside that isn't anywhere in particular and can't be reached on foot. That is this film's dawn. Day is coming and it is not a place, it's a sentence. Audiences in June 1939 had their own word for the thing outside the frame, and the authorities agreed with them: the film was banned during mobilization as demoralising, which is an official way of conceding that the room was the country.
The light is German, literally. Curt Courant had shot for Lang and Hitchcock before this; the lamp-pool with darkness packed around it, the cigarette glow, smoke taking the beam, is the expressionist gradient Deleuze describes as a non-organic life in things, light and shadow doing what faces do. M supplied the hunted man ringed by a closing crowd. Der letzte Mann and Sunrise gave Trauner the principle that an entire world can be built indoors and lit into meaning. From Carné's own recent past came the rest: Le Quai des brumes a year earlier, same team, same star, the fog-and-fatalism vernacular; Pépé le Moko for Gabin as an animal in a labyrinth, which Carné compresses from a whole Casbah down to one room; La Bête humaine for the decent laborer with something in him that will kill.
What it seeded is clearest from the fact that Hollywood tried to smother it. RKO bought remake rights, made The Long Night in 1947, and reportedly went after prints of the original to protect the copy. That is the most eloquent review this film ever received. The émigré chiaroscuro, the trapped man narrating his own trap, the flashback that functions as a verdict rather than an explanation: American noir ran on all of it, and the structural move of beginning at the end so that the telling itself becomes the sentence turned into one of the form's default settings.
Then the props. Deleuze has a small useful idea he calls the mark, an object that signifies through the habitual chain it belongs to, so seeing it makes you expect what normally follows. Carné loads the room by repetition until the bear and the brooch and the mirror stop being furniture and become the register of what's gone. And over the ending he puts an alarm clock. It rings. It is summoning a factory worker to a shift that will not happen, and it condenses the entire relation the film is built on: clock time, wage time, the ordinary morning, arriving punctually for a man it has stopped meaning anything to. Tear gas is coming through the window. The alarm goes off anyway.
Which leaves the question the film declines to close. François remembers all night and it rescues nothing. There was no exit back there; that's why he's up here. So what is the remembering for? Not for him. Memory in this film isn't a tool, it's the last free thing in a room where nothing else is free, and Carné hands it to us instead of to his hero. Watch it again and watch the objects rather than the plot. The bear, the brooch, the cigarettes, the window. The plot was over before the film began. The room is what's still happening.
Concepts in play
- mnemosign / image-souvenir (recollection-image) — Three principal flashbacks, each entered and exited through a dissolve that begins on François's face — the film's 'defining formal gesture' per the editing; a past that was once a present, dated and locatable.
- pure optical and sound situations — The besieged room: François smokes, paces, stands at the window watching the crowd and listening to its murmur, with no action available to him — the camera makes the room 'simultaneously a refuge and a trap.'
- the seer (voyant) — Gabin's 'contained, weary' stillness across the single sleepless night; a man who will die at dawn and can only watch and endure until it comes.
- the two recognitions (attentive recognition) — Perception blocked from discharging into action turns back into memory: the ordinary props of a working life — mirror, wardrobe, bicycle, teddy bear, brooch, cigarettes — trigger the flashbacks rather than being used.
- crisis of the action-image — The whole present tense of the film: a man who perceives his situation with total clarity (police massing below, dawn coming) and has no adequate reaction available — 'suspense converted into inevitability.'
- binomial (force against force) — 'Gabin's stillness against Berry's slipperiness is the engine of the drama' — the worker versus Valentin as 'the corrupt principle that destroys him,' with Françoise between them, in the flashback world where action still operates.
- the closed set (cadre) — Trauner's tall narrow tenement with François's room at the summit, staged through 'thresholds and enclosures constantly: doorways, the window, the barricaded door'; verticality itself becomes destiny.
- out-of-field (relative) — The hostile street below the window — crowd murmur, massing police — an adjacent space constantly felt and never available; 'the man framed at his window, caught between the private cell and the hostile street.'
- out-of-field (absolute) — The dawn the title promises, which is not a location but a verdict; released weeks before the war and banned during mobilization as demoralizing, the film's outside being a national predicament with no place in the frame.
- expressionism (the light–shadow gradient) — Curt Courant's émigré chiaroscuro after Lang and Hitchcock: the room as 'a pool of lamplight surrounded by darkness,' smoke, the cigarette's glow, searchlight-like intrusions from outside.
- mark — 'Carné stages the drama so that these props accrue emotional weight through repetition' — the teddy bear, brooch, mirror and bicycle become legible by their customary chain rather than by anything said about them.
- symbol — The alarm clock ringing over the ending, 'a mechanical summons to a working day the hero will not live to see,' colliding with the tear gas and the dawn — one object condensing labor time against death.