Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Man from London
2008 · Béla Tarr · The Man from London on Sightlines
The film opens on a ship's hull. Not a face, not a body going into the water: wet iron, with the camera climbing it slowly enough that you start counting rivets. Men are moving on the deck above. The camera notices them about the way it noticed the rivets. Then it turns out over black water toward a lit glass box on a tower, and there is a man inside the box, and he is watching what we have just been made to watch.
That gesture holds the whole film. Iron given the same attention as a person. Information arriving late and from the side. A watcher sealed behind glass, thirty feet of night air between him and everything that happens.
The story is deliberately thin. Maloin works the night shift as a railway switchman above a foggy harbor. Two men quarrel on the quay below; one goes into the water; a suitcase stays on the stones. Maloin climbs down and takes it. It is full of money. He says nothing.
Georges Simenon wrote that in 1934 as a tight crime novel, and in almost anyone else's hands the suitcase is a trigger. Deleuze had a plain name for the ordinary logic of movies: the sensory-motor circuit. You perceive a situation, the situation charges you, you act, the act changes the situation. Perception runs into action like current down a wire, and the cutting exists to carry the charge. Tarr leaves the wire in plain sight and snips it.
What survives the cut is what Deleuze called a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign: a moment where what a character sees is too large or too irreversible to be answered by doing anything, so the seeing is all there is. The man it happens to becomes a voyant, a seer — not an agent but a witness who has to go on living in the same body, the same house, the same shift. Maloin is employed as one. Watching the harbor at night is literally his job. Miroslav Krobot plays him nearly mute; the secret shows up as weight in his shoulders and in the way he sits down, never as confession.
Without that lens the film looks like a thriller with a flat tire, two and a quarter hours of famous slowness. With it, the slowness is the content. When action can no longer resolve a situation, time stops being the thing we measure by movement and shows up bare. Deleuze's word for those stretches is dead time: passages that advance nothing and are not filler. Ágnes Hranitzky, who cut the film and shares the direction with Tarr, meters them so that you inhabit Maloin's waiting rather than watch it from outside. Dread here is not manufactured by cutting. It is manufactured by not cutting.
Deleuze also insisted that a shot is not a picture but a mobile section of duration, a moving slice of time that registers a change in the whole rather than a change of place. Tarr's crane and dolly work is about the clearest demonstration of that anyone has filmed. The opening ascent of the ship gets us nowhere. It alters what kind of world we think we are in. And because the cabin is glass, we are nearly always watching a man who is watching — through panes, past reflections, with Fred Kelemen's camera announcing its own position in the room. Deleuze called that a dicisign: perception framed as perception, so you feel the apparatus doing the looking.
The harbor town, shot in Bastia on Corsica, stops functioning as a setting. Fog, wet cobbles, the bloom of electric lamps on 35mm silver — this is Deleuze's any-space-whatever, a space that no longer exists in order to host an action. What fills it is the non-organic life of things, the expressionist inheritance: a hull, a misted pane, a scrubbed floor carry more presence than the dialogue does. Classic noir got its anxiety from hard angles and fast cutting. Tarr gets it from surfaces held past the point of usefulness. Worth putting Bazin beside him here: Bazin argued that the long take honors the ambiguity of the real and leaves the viewer free to decide what matters. Tarr keeps the duration and quietly withdraws the promise. You may look as long as you like. Nothing clarifies.
The money is never a motive in the thriller sense. It is an object with weight, carried into a poor house and hidden there — Deleuze's fetish, the part-object that concentrates a drive. Temptation in this film has handles. And then there is Henriette, Maloin's daughter, put to menial work in a butcher's shop. Deleuze's gest is the posture that exposes a social relation without anyone having to state it: a girl on her knees with a rag makes the family's poverty an observable fact about a body. Erika Bók, who plays her, was the small child in Sátántangó fourteen years earlier. Some of the lineage is in her.
The rest of it is precise. The grammar was built in Damnation (1988): rain, found locations, a betrayal plot, Mihály Víg's circling accordion as the pulse. Sátántangó codified the pre-choreographed minutes-long take that walks bodies through real space, cut by Hranitzky, and that method arrives here wholesale. Werckmeister Harmonies supplies the virtuoso choreographed overture that the harbor crane answers. Behind Tarr stand Jancsó's The Round-Up, where the gliding Hungarian long take across found architecture became the primary formal device; Tarkovsky's Stalker, his avowed model for making duration and material texture the subject instead of the vehicle; and Antonioni's L'Eclisse, which first dissolved a plot into architecture and empty time. That last debt is the theoretical one. Antonioni is where this break was first described. The Man from London is what it looks like taken to the end of the line.
Which is the case for the film's importance. Until now, the Tarr grammar came bundled with Krasznahorkai's apocalyptic metaphysics, and you could believe the duration was being carried by the subject matter. Apply it to a pulp French crime novel and the bundle comes apart. The plot survives in outline — a death, a suitcase, an inspector named Morrison, a resolution — and generates no momentum whatsoever, and the film does not collapse. Duration turns out to be a general instrument rather than a mood. If the slow films of the following decade feel licensed to hold a shot long after its information has landed, a good part of that license comes from here. It is his penultimate feature; the method had one more film in it.
Two textures came from outside the design, and Tarr kept them. Víg's score turns in place instead of developing, so the music is recurrence rather than progress. And the cast was assembled across languages, so Tilda Swinton's Camélia was post-synchronized into Hungarian — a voice not quite belonging to the body it comes out of, which is as close as this film gets to the supernatural. The production itself stalled for two years after the French producer Humbert Balsan died in 2005. A film about a man who cannot move was made by a production that could not move.
Watch it again for the hands. Watch how long each shot stays after its information has arrived; that residue is the film. And carry one question through it: does Maloin choose his silence, or does he only fail to move — and would he know the difference?
Concepts in play
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns) — Maloin, sealed in the glass cabin above the quay, watches two men quarrel and one fall into the water; the film gives him nothing to do with what he has seen and does not report it — the seeing is the entire event.
- the seer (voyant) — Maloin is literally employed as a watcher on the night shift; Miroslav Krobot plays him with near-mute stillness, guilt registering in posture and gaze rather than speech or action.
- crisis of the action-image — Tarr retains Simenon's thriller engine in outline — a witnessed death, stolen money, Inspector Morrison, a resolution — while stripping out suspense, ratcheting tension, reveals and chase, so that perception no longer discharges into adequate action.
- dead time (temps mort) — Hranitzky's editing meters roughly two and a quarter hours into comparatively few shots, shaping long stretches of waiting and sleeplessness in which nothing advances the plot; the drama advances in the gaps between observational scenes.
- the mobile section (plan) — The opening crane shot climbs the flank of the moored ship, studying rivets and railings and the figures on deck before drifting across the water to Maloin's cabin — camera movement that changes the whole rather than covering a space.
- dicisign — The elevated glass switchman's cabin lets Kelemen's camera observe the harbor through and past panes of glass, holding on Maloin's watchful face — we perceive a perceiver, and feel the camera's own position.
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The Bastia harbor at night — fog, wet stone, isolated practical lamps blooming in monochrome — is rendered simultaneously specific and dreamlike, no longer a setting that hosts an action.
- expressionism (non-organic life of things) — High-contrast 35mm monochrome gives the ship's corrugated hull, misted glass and wet cobbles more charge and presence than the sparse dialogue; anxiety comes from surfaces held in unbroken duration rather than from cutting and chiaroscuro.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Staging privileges bodies in real space and real time — a woman scrubbing a floor, a man drinking, a slow walk down a cobbled street — with performance rejecting psychological explication for behavior observed at length.
- the gest — Henriette (Erika Bók, the child from Sátántangó) at demeaning labor in the butcher's shop: a posture that states the family's poverty as a social relation without a word of explanation.
- fetish (part-object) — Temptation arrives as a physical object — the suitcase of money retrieved from the quay and lodged in Maloin's cramped home — rather than as a thriller motive.
- audiovisual disjunction — Tilda Swinton's Camélia is post-synchronized into Hungarian across an international cast, producing the estranged, dreamlike vocal texture often noted in discussion of the film — a voice that does not sit in the body onscreen.