Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of A Short Film About Love
1988 · Krzysztof Kieślowski · A Short Film About Love on Sightlines
A circle of light in the dark. Inside it, a woman crossing her own living room, not knowing she has been composed. The black around the circle is the inside of a telescope barrel. The boy at the eyepiece has come to the window at the hour he always comes, the way other people clock in.
Everything in the film is in that circle. Magda's window is a frame. The telescope's mask is a frame drawn inside it. Witold Adamek's camera, unshowy on purpose, plainer than the green-filtered companion film about killing, is the frame around both. Deleuze made a lot of the French word for this, cadre: a frame is a closed set, a decision about what to include, and some films press on that decision until you feel it as a system rather than a window. Kieślowski does something simpler and stranger. He hands the frame to a character. Tomek does not just see Magda; he composes her, nightly, at the same hour, in the same round aperture. The dossier's phrase for Adamek's staging is exact: she is framed in her window as if within a screen. Nineteen years old, alone in a Warsaw housing block, and the boy has invented cinema in his bedroom.
Deleuze has a name for what we are doing while he does it. The dicisign is his term for an image in which the camera perceives someone who is perceiving. Not quite a subjective shot. We are not sealed inside Tomek's eye; we watch him have an eye, then we look through it, and the film keeps moving us between the two. The camera aligns us with his optic and then withdraws that alignment as its sympathies migrate. That withdrawal is the film's moral weather changing. You are let into the crime and then quietly asked to stand somewhere else.
The machine is borrowed and the film knows it. Rear Window built a whole picture from a housebound man with a long lens and a courtyard, and gave Kieślowski the watcher/watched shot-reverse grammar he takes over wholesale. Deleuze read Hitchcock as the last full flowering of the movement-image: cinema where someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves that chain. Hitchcock pushed it to its limit by making relations themselves the subject, so that the person really holding the film together is the audience, the knowing third party. But Jeff still acts. There is a murder; the looking turns out to have been justified; sight converts into deed. Kieślowski keeps the apparatus and removes the crime. Nothing is happening across that courtyard except a woman's life.
What Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image is precisely this: people who perceive far more than they can do anything about. The circuit from perception to action stops closing, and what is left is a pure optical situation, an opsign, where looking is the only thing available. Tomek does things, certainly. He steals an astronomical telescope, takes the milk round to reach her door, works the post office counter she comes to. None of these acts on a situation. They are maintenance of a view.
Which is why the cutting, by Ewa Smal, is built on the interval. That word is Deleuze's too, by way of Bergson, and it is worth having plainly. A living thing is a gap in the universe's chain of causes: perception comes in, action goes out, and between them sits a delay in which nothing is settled. Hesitation lives there. So does feeling. In most films the gap closes, and that closing is the plot. Here the gap is the boy. He is the pause between seeing and doing, held open for the length of the film. Deleuze's name for the stretches that advance nothing is temps mort, dead time, and this film is largely made of it: mail sorted, milk carried, the appointed hour arriving again.
Then Magda finds out, and the second half is her proof. She brings him in and demonstrates, with a cruelty the film does not soften, that what he calls love is what she calls sex. It works. He is destroyed by it. Grażyna Szapołowska has to be merciless and wounded inside the same scene, and she is. And then Kieślowski makes his own small invention, which is not a plot twist at all: he moves the eyepiece. Magda goes to Tomek's window and takes up the telescope. One exchange does the work another film would need a third act and a chase to do.
She becomes the seer, Deleuze's voyant, the one who can only look and endure. What the instrument gives her at the end is not a report. The television version, Dekalog VI, closes bleakly; for the feature Kieślowski re-cut the ending and granted Magda a vision of comfort, ambiguous by design, an imagined consolation rather than an outcome. You cannot decide whether you are shown something that happened, something remembered, or something wished. Deleuze calls that undecidability the crystal-image: an actual image and its virtual double swapping places too fast to separate. Two windows facing each other across a void were already a mirror. The coda completes the figure.
One more thing the frame is doing. Deleuze separates the out-of-field that is merely next door from the out-of-field that cannot be placed anywhere in space, the sense that the closed set opens onto something not in any room. Dekalog is ten films in one apartment block, each keyed to a commandment, and no commandment is ever visible in the building. Preisner's score, entering rarely with something liturgical in it, is where you hear it. Tomek's telescope is a small, illicit, human copy of a gaze the whole cycle assumes and never shows.
And the space itself. His flat bare, hers full of men and wine and the spilled milk soaking the table: two opposed moral atmospheres with a courtyard between them the film almost never crosses on foot. The link is a sightline, not a path. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has stopped serving as the setting for an action and become disconnected pieces; the blokowisko, thrown up by a state in a decade of scarcity and martial law, supplies it ready-made. In a country where being watched was an instrument of power, Kieślowski made watching an instrument of love, and refused to let that be comfortable.
The debts are specific. From Vertigo, the gaze that idealizes and remakes the beloved: Tomek is in love with a Magda he assembled. From Blow-Up, magnification as failure of knowledge; he sees everything and understands nothing. From The Conversation, the operator whose professional distance collapses into feeling. From Peeping Tom, the lens as the moral subject, an accusation that includes the person in the seat. From Kieślowski's own Camera Buff, the man whose compulsion to record corrodes what he loves; this film is that self-criticism turned from documentary toward love. What he added was the reversal, and it changed what the form could carry. Before this, the watcher film ends in exposure or punishment. Kieślowski found that if you take the thriller's optics and remove its motive, the grammar does not collapse. It starts asking an ethical question instead of a suspense one: not what will happen, but what the difference is between looking at someone and loving them.
He does not answer it. He makes it optical, which is why the film is not finished with you after one viewing. Watch for the moment the camera stops standing behind Tomek. It comes earlier than you remember. By the end you are looking with nobody, at two people who cannot see each other, in adjacent rectangles of light, and the instrument that was supposed to close the distance turns out to be the distance.
Concepts in play
- the closed set (cadre) — Adamek frames Magda within her window 'as if within a screen,' and the telescope's circular masked view is called the film's signature visual figure — a frame drawn inside the camera's frame and handed to a character.
- dicisign — The camera 'repeatedly aligns the spectator with Tomek's optic so that we are made complicit in the surveillance, then, crucially, withdrawing that alignment as the film's sympathies migrate.'
- crisis of the action-image — The film adopts Rear Window's watcher/watched grammar wholesale and drains it of suspense and menace; it 'advances less by event than by the accretion of small acts of watching,' with 'suspense' that is entirely ethical.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — Nearly the whole drama is generated by the distance between two windows, which Tomek can only look across; the purloined astronomical telescope and the milk round are contrivances to keep looking rather than acts upon a situation.
- the seer (voyant) — The chiasmus of the exchanged gaze: 'the positions then reverse, and the one who scorned love is left looking through the same telescope for the one she has broken.'
- the interval (centre of indetermination) — Ewa Smal's editing 'rhythm is built on the interval — the waiting, the watching, the small rituals of Tomek's day (sorting mail, delivering milk, returning to the window at the appointed hour).'
- temps mort (dead time) — Editing is 'patient and observational rather than propulsive,' built from Tomek's daily rituals rather than from advancing incident.
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — The re-cut feature coda: Magda now at the telescope is 'granted a vision of comfort,' 'calculatedly ambiguous, a gesture of imagined consolation rather than a plot outcome' — undecidable between event, memory and wish, across two windows staged as mutual mirrors in shot/reverse-shot.
- out-of-field (absolute) — The film is the sixth panel of a ten-part cycle keyed to the Ten Commandments and set in a single Warsaw apartment block, with Preisner's music entering 'sparingly but decisively' to lend a 'quasi-liturgical gravity' — an unlocatable gaze the cycle assumes and never shows.
- any-space-whatever (disconnection) — 'The shot/reverse-shot across the void of the courtyard that stands in for the whole relationship'; the blokowisko staged 'as both prison and observatory,' with Tomek's ascetic room and Magda's flat read as opposed moral atmospheres joined by a sightline rather than a path.