From What Is Before · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A figure enters at the left edge of a wide gray frame, walks the road, and leaves at the right. The shot stays. Rain keeps landing on the same leaves. No cut, no music, no reason given for holding. Somewhere in the following minute you stop waiting for the film to move and start noticing the mud, the light, the sound of water on tin roofing. Deleuze had a name for the emptied ground the walker leaves behind: an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped functioning as the setting for an action. From What Is Before is 338 minutes long and it makes this transaction with you hundreds of times. It is the whole film. It is also the argument.

Most movies use a shot to carry a chain Deleuze called the movement-image: a person perceives a situation, acts to change it, and the cutting exists to serve the act. Diaz keeps the perceiving and deletes the acting. His villagers perceive constantly. Cows found opened at the belly. A man bleeding out at the crossroad. Houses burning. Wailing carried out of the treeline at night. Nothing they do touches any of it, so there is nothing for the cut to serve, and the shot simply continues. What replaces the chain is the time-image, where time stops being the measure of movement and becomes the thing you are watching.

Deleuze called the person produced by this arrangement a seer: someone who watches and endures, because the situation has grown too large or too illegible to be answered by doing anything. The images themselves he called pure optical and sound situations, where looking and listening are all that is on offer. This film is built almost entirely from them. Barrio life keeps its shape — meals, errands, the chapel, the wine-tapper's rounds. Atrocity arrives at the same unhurried tempo. That equivalence is the horror, and only editing at this scale can produce it, because it takes hours of things arriving before you understand that nothing is going to accelerate. Deleuze's term for the long stretches where nothing advances is dead time. Diaz doesn't insert dead time between the events. He makes it the ground the events land on.

Then there is the forest. Sounds come out of it, people go into it, and the camera almost never follows. Deleuze split offscreen space in two, and the distinction pays off here better than almost anywhere. There is the relative out-of-field: the room next door, the space you could pan to. And there is the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that cannot be located in space at all. Joselina's cries belong to the second kind. The film never grants the reverse shot that would settle what is out there, and the barrio, having no reverse shot either, has to decide for itself.

That is where the real subject sits. Deleuze, borrowing from Peirce, uses demark for a sign that breaks its customary chain: you see smoke, you expect fire, and that habit is what makes a world readable. A cow hacked open in the night is a demark. It wrecks the habit and forces interpretation, and interpretation is what the barrio has no good instruments for. It reaches for spirits, curses, the sins of neighbors, the sisters' seizures read as a healing gift. Deleuze's word for a community telling itself into existence this way is fabulation, and he meant it as a power — how a people invents itself when it has been denied one. Diaz films the same power working as a trap. The stories the barrio makes about its affliction are exactly the stories that make an arriving military detachment look like protection. No plot summary delivers this. You have to sit inside the interpretive vacuum long enough to feel how badly it wants filling.

Then it gets filled, by a voice. Martial law enters the film as broadcast: Proclamation 1081, 21 September 1972, spoken from Manila into a barrio that cannot answer. Deleuze tracked this split, sound and image telling different stories, speech detached from any visible body, as a regime of its own. Here it stages one fabulation beating another. The state's version wins because it has a transmitter. That the most consequential event in a five-and-a-half-hour film is heard rather than seen isn't restraint; it's the thesis put into the grammar.

By then the barrio is nearly empty, and Diaz has been building that emptiness since the first hour with a technique he inherited. Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman established the repeated fixed station: return the camera to an identical frontal setup across days, and duration plus micro-deviation carries the drama. Diaz films the same hut doorway, the same path, the same well, until the frames work like a map. An emptied house registers. A burn scar where a structure stood registers. Nobody has to mention either. This is a chronosign in an unusually literal form, a direct image of time, legible only because the frame refused to move.

The other debts are Philippine and precise. Brocka's Maynila gave him location shooting in real working-class spaces, non-star faces, direct sound; he keeps all of it and throws out Brocka's cutting rhythm and his climaxes. Bernal's Manila by Night gave him the braided ensemble: a dozen unranked characters in short returning strands, no protagonist, no resolving arc. It becomes the rotation among the foundling's guardian, the sisters, the wine-tapper, the priest, the soldiers. Deleuze names this shape the dispersive situation, held together by weak links — slackened causality, threads that disappear for an hour and come back changed. He pairs it with the condemnation of the plot, a diffuse plot-behind-the-plot no character can locate. The Marcos apparatus is that plot. It is never dramatized. It is only ratified.

Bernal's Himala supplied the most exact inheritance of all: extreme wides of figures crossing barren ground, mass hysteria carried by unseen offscreen wailing instead of score. Diaz takes the staging and the sound and removes the miracle, the device that let Bernal's hysteria resolve into a story. Kidlat Tahimik's Perfumed Nightmare supplied the production model, total single-person authorship on scavenged means over years, which Diaz literalizes as writer, cameraman, editor and producer with a crew small enough to walk. And his own Batang West Side taught him that braided testimony could stand in for plot. Here he applies that architecture to a whole barrio instead of one death.

The theory placement sharpens the stakes. Bazin defended the long take and deep focus because cutting decides for you what an event means, while an unbroken shot preserves the ambiguity of the real. Deleuze's history begins where Bazin's ends: postwar neorealism produced characters who could see but not act, and the time-image came out of that. Diaz sits at the far end of the line and pushes it past what Bazin imagined. Ambiguity is no longer preserved inside a shot. It is preserved across five and a half hours, long enough that your own patience, boredom and adjustment become part of the evidence. It helps that faces are almost never close. Diaz reads people at a distance, through posture and gait held across an unbroken wide — Deleuze's cinema of the body, where the everyday body carries the duration that dialogue and close-ups would otherwise carry.

Deleuze argued that modern political cinema starts from an absence: the people are missing. He didn't mean oppressed. He meant dispersed, dissolved, not yet constituted. That is literally what Diaz films. The barrio is hollowed from within before the decree, and the decree signs off on a dispossession already complete. Diaz was fourteen in 1972, the son of public school teachers in a Mindanao resettlement community, and this is his most autobiographical film. Its claim is that the dictatorship was not an interruption of Philippine life but a condition the country had been rehearsing.

His specific invention is the locked-off wide used as a measuring instrument: not a style for showing atrocity but a rate at which atrocity can be shown to be ordinary. He also proved that duration can carry a historical argument, and that the argument is available to anyone with a cheap sensor and nobody's permission. The Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2014, the first for a Filipino feature, ratified something structural. A self-shot black-and-white film in Tagalog, financed out of prizes and teaching, could be a major event in world cinema with no industrial partner anywhere in it.

Watch it for the moment you stop waiting. Everything the film knows is on the far side of that moment. Then look at the title again. Before is not a date in it, and the question Diaz leaves open is whether anyone can recognize a before while they are still standing in one.