Richard III · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man steps up to a microphone at a victory party and tells the room that the winter of their discontent is over, made glorious summer by this son of York. Polite applause. Then he excuses himself, finds a urinal, and finishes the same sentence — to the lens, to you, mid-stream and grinning. The verse hasn't changed a syllable. The audience has. That swivel, from the nation he is lying to toward the one listener he tells the truth, is the engine of Loncraine's film, and it is also a small, delicious scandal in the history of what a movie is permitted to do.

Cinema came with a contract. André Bazin built a whole realist faith on it: the photographed thing was there, the camera is a witness, the image doesn't lie. Deleuze spent the back half of his cinema books on the rival tradition that detonates this — what he called the powers of the false: truth and falsity made undecidable, not as a defect but as a creative principle. Its hero is le faussaire, the forger — a man of serial, shifting identity who does not report the truth but manufactures it on the spot, and is most himself in the act of deceiving. Ian McKellen's Richard is the forger in laboratory-pure form. He grieves to Lady Anne over the corpse of the husband he killed, in the sterile chill of a hospital mortuary, and wins her — then turns to us and marvels that the lie worked. He swears brotherhood and signs death warrants in the same breath. Nothing he says is reliable, and that unreliability is precisely the source of his power. He doesn't have a true self under the performances; the performing is the self.

What makes the film more than a clever transposition is where it points all this falseness: at us. Deleuze's relation-image is the image whose meaning lives in a relation the viewer is asked to hold — the audience installed as a knowing third party. Richard's direct address recruits you into exactly that seat. You laugh with him before you recoil from him; you are made the one person in England who knows, which means you are also the one person who could have warned the others and didn't. The camera is his confederate. This is the inheritance the film consciously claims — Olivier's 1955 Richard, peering into the lens with relish, is the camera-as-confidant template McKellen answers and updates. But Loncraine and Biziou sharpen the betrayal: the lens holds on McKellen's face in glossy, controlled close-up while he confides, so that the apparatus itself — Deleuze's free-indirect-discourse, the camera fused with a character's vision until it speaks for him — becomes complicit in the coup. The movie sees the way Richard sees. That is why the killings land as they do; we were charmed into the conspiracy's point of view.

Then there is the body. Deleuze gives a name to a posture that exposes a social relation rather than advancing a plot: the gest. Richard's deformity is pure gest. The withered arm, the dragging limp, above all the small theatre of lighting a cigarette one-handed — these are not medical facts, they are performances of grievance, and McKellen plays them as both wound and weapon. Watch how the labour of that cigarette buys him sympathy, time, the lowered guard of whoever is watching. The body that the court reads as pitiable is the instrument by which the court is gutted. The attitude carries the meaning the dialogue has been cut too short to carry.

And it is cut savagely short. Richard III is one of Shakespeare's longest plays; Paul Green's editing strips it to a propulsive thriller, excising Queen Margaret entirely, transposing set-pieces into modern equivalents — the precedent here is Welles's Chimes at Midnight, that aggressive conflation of text into the pure momentum of a power story. What the verse no longer explains, the design explains instead. The film's argument is its production design. When Richard's coronation arrives, it arrives as a Nuremberg rally — banners, podium framing, massed geometry quoted straight from Triumph of the Will. This is Deleuze's attraction-image, the moment action stops being acted and becomes staged, spectacle figuring power rather than exercising it. The fascist iconography grafted onto art-deco Britain (the lineage runs through Cabaret's glossy creeping menace and The Damned's aristocracy devouring itself) does the work the soliloquies used to do: it tells you what tyranny feels like from inside its own seductive surfaces.

So what did this film do? It took the oldest charge against cinema — that performance is a lie — and made the lie the whole subject, then handed the lie a microphone and pointed it at the audience. It proved that a Shakespeare film could think with its costume department, that the powers of the false could be played for black comedy without losing their menace. Trevor Jones lets Al Jolson's "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" grin over Richard's fiery fall, and the joke is exact: the forger believed his own forgery to the end.

Watch it again for the swivels. Every time the speech turns toward the camera, ask who is being lied to in the room he just left — and notice that the moment you become the only one who knows, you've already agreed to keep his secret.