Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
1945 · Elia Kazan · A Tree Grows in Brooklyn on Sightlines
Out the Nolans' window there is one tree. It comes up through the courtyard pavement, an ailanthus, the kind people call a tree of heaven because it will grow in a crack with nothing to recommend it. Partway through the film the tree is taken out. The window stays. It now looks onto a courtyard instead of onto the one green thing a poor family could own by looking at it.
Hold that window, because it tells you what kind of movie this is. Nobody in it can fix anything. Francie Nolan wants to transfer to a better school, and the route runs through her father, Johnny, a singing waiter who is charming, tender, genuinely loving, and a drunk. Her mother Katie holds the money and cannot make it into more money. Aunt Sissy supplies warmth, a scandalous run of “husbands,” and no leverage at all. There is no antagonist to beat. The conflict is between aspiration and circumstance, which is not a thing you can punch.
That is a strange engine for a 1945 studio picture. Gilles Deleuze's scheme for classical cinema states in a sentence: a person perceives a situation, feels something, acts, and the act changes the situation. He called the arrangement the movement-image, and it is the contract nearly every Hollywood film of the period signed. Kazan's first feature keeps that contract's manners (Dorothy Spencer's continuity cutting, legible scenes, no montage showing off) and quietly disconnects the engine. When the failure became general after the war, Deleuze named it the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He found the decisive break in Italy, in rubble. Here it is on a Fox soundstage, in a tenement kitchen, early.
What takes the actor's place is the seer. Deleuze's word is voyant, a character who stops doing and starts seeing, whose seeing becomes the film's real event; his examples are a boy loose in ruined Berlin and a maid in a kitchen with nothing to do but chores. Francie is one of these. The film makes her its center of consciousness and gives her the one job a child in that flat can hold: watch your father be wonderful and be lost.
Which is why Shamroy's camera keeps arriving at Peggy Ann Garner's face. Deleuze calls the close-up the affection-image, a feeling that has registered with nowhere to be spent; its purest form is the qualisign, a face nearly still, giving off a single quality. Garner's Academy Award was a special one, for a performance the record describes as unusually inward for a child actor of the era. The cutting protects it. Spencer holds reactions past the moment the information has arrived, which is a decision about what the film is for.
Around those held faces the picture spends time on things carrying no plot. Deleuze's term is temps mort, dead time: the everyday allowed to sit there, unhurried by the story. Bazin, arguing at that same moment for neorealism, wanted such time earned by photographing an actual world and leaving its duration alone. This film flunks half his test. The Brooklyn here is built, the exteriors are standing sets, the famous sense of place is manufactured. The duration is real anyway. You can give an audience time without giving them a street.
Kazan's specific invention is where people stand. He came from the Group Theatre with a stage director's discipline about how bodies occupy a room, and he used it as camera information: who is nearest the stove, who has drifted to the edge of a group, how the geography of a small flat states a relationship nobody says out loud. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls that a gest, a posture that exposes a social relation rather than an inner mood. Being excluded from a group in a cramped room is a fact about money and shame before it is a feeling. Kazan filmed the fact.
He also filmed what circumstance does to a person over years. Deleuze's word for that two-way stamp is the imprint, and Dorothy McGuire's Katie is all imprint: her flintiness isn't temperament, it's the shape poverty pressed into her because one parent had to be practical and Johnny could not be. Johnny is on a different curve. The impulse-image, in Deleuze, belongs to naturalism, Stroheim and Buñuel, where a drive under the social surface consumes whoever carries it, and its signature is the line of slope, a descent with no return leg. Johnny's drinking is that line. The remarkable thing is Kazan's refusal of the naturalist's appetite for it. James Dunn plays self-deception without inviting us to watch a man rot, and the film declines the sermon and the handkerchief both. The Production Code forbade frankness; Kazan got tact out of the restriction instead of evasion, a harder trick.
The tree does the rest of the work. In the image built from relations, a symbol is an object that condenses what a film is about, and this one is placed and returned to with obvious deliberation. It also works on the frame. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set and asks what it opens onto: the out-of-field. Before the removal, the tenement's out-of-field is a tree. After, the closed set has one exit fewer.
None of this arrives from nowhere. How Green Was My Valley (1941) built the Fox template Kazan was handed: a working-class family remembered from a child's vantage, staged in deep-focus interiors that make the household the crucible. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) set the house naturalism for photographing the poor without prettifying them, the discipline behind Shamroy's refusal of chiaroscuro. Dead End (1937) put a tenement block on a set and blocked it like a stage, exactly the proscenium craft Kazan carried west from Broadway. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) is the tonal debt: family ruin played straight, no tidy ending. The Crowd (1928) made the anonymous apartment a pressure chamber. Our Town (1940) showed how to adapt an episodic memory-play about plain lives with reverence rather than condescension.
What it seeded runs through Kazan and then through everyone he trained. The balance here, an ensemble in which nobody tips into melodrama and feeling is carried by held attention rather than by incident, became the American method for the next two decades. The larger consequence is structural: this debut moved the center of a studio drama from decision to regard, and made the performer, not the plot, the place where truth is kept.
Watch it again for the stretches when nobody is doing anything. That is where Kazan is working hardest. Then put the film's own question to it. The tree is removed, and the title still insists it grows. Consolation, or evidence? The camera goes back to Francie's face and does not say.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — "There is no conventional antagonist; the conflict is between aspiration and circumstance" — Francie's goal (transferring schools) is routed entirely through Johnny, who cannot be relied on, while the film retains classical continuity cutting.
- the seer (voyant) — Francie is "the film's center of consciousness," a child whose position in the family gives her nothing to do but watch her father's decline; the mode is "closely observed and interior" rather than goal-driven.
- qualisign (icon of quality) — Shamroy's "framing of Francie's face" and Spencer's cutting "holding on reactions long enough to let feeling register"; Peggy Ann Garner's "performance of unusual inwardness and gravity," given a special Academy Award.
- dead time (temps mort) — An episodic, memory-like structure of "big and little troubles" that "privileg[es] the texture of ordinary life" over incident, with editing that holds past the informational beat.
- the gest — Kazan's theatrical staging in the tenement: "who stands where, who is excluded from a group, how a room's geography expresses a relationship."
- imprint (empreinte) — Dorothy McGuire's Katie as "the parent who must be practical because Johnny cannot be" — hardness as the shape the milieu pressed into her; the tenement as pressure-chamber inherited from The Crowd.
- line of slope (entropy/degradation) — Johnny's arc of alcoholic decline, "a portrait of alcoholic failure that refuses both condemnation and sentimentality" — the irreversible descent without the naturalist's relish for it.
- symbol — The ailanthus "tree of heaven" pushing up through pavement, "the film's governing metaphor for growth against odds," "placed and returned to with deliberate weight" — then removed.
- out-of-field (relative) — "The view from a tenement window toward the single tree that gives the story its title"; the cramped flat is a closed set whose one opening is emptied when the tree is taken out.