Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Wind
1928 · Victor Sjöström · The Wind on Sightlines
Sand comes in under the door. That is the image to carry into The Wind. It isn't the storm at full roar. It's a thin, patient stream of grit finding the gap at the bottom of a wooden shack and spreading across the floor while a young woman watches it come. Lillian Gish plays Letty Mason, a fragile Virginian who has traveled west to her cousin's ranch on the Texas plains. She expected a home. What she finds is a cold welcome from her cousin's wife, Cora, three men who want her, and a wind that never stops.
Victor Sjöström had a problem few directors had faced on this scale. His subject is a sound, a howling that wears people down, and he was making a silent film. So he made the wind visible. On location in the California desert, aircraft propellers and smoke pots threw sand, cinders and sawdust through the air, and the cinematographer John Arnold photographed the air itself. Grit streams across nearly every frame. Light rakes through it. Dust presses at the windows of the shack as if the outside wanted in. You never hear the wind, but you see what it does to wood, to cloth and to a face, until you would swear you could hear it.
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on cinema, gives us useful words for what is going on here. Most classic films, he argues, run on what he calls the action-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it. The western is its home ground. The world surrounds the hero (Deleuze calls this enveloping milieu the synsign, "the encompasser") and presses on him until he answers with a deed. It's man against milieu, force against force. The Wind is set where westerns are set, and it builds that pressure perfectly. Then it takes the answer away. You can't do anything to a wind. You can't outdraw it or fence it in. Letty can shut the door, and the sand comes in under it.
This is why the film keeps going back to Gish's face. For Deleuze the close-up creates an affection-image, a feeling registered on a face before it has turned into action, or in place of action altogether. He separates two kinds of face. One reflects, holding a single quality the way a portrait holds wonder. The other is intensive: a series of small movements that build toward a threshold, which he calls a potisign, the face as a gathering power. Gish gives us the second kind, and she gives it to us in stages. The film cuts between the wide plain, where her figure is dwarfed against an empty horizon, and her face up close, which is where the storm actually lands. Each time we come back to her, she is a notch further along, from displacement to fear to revulsion. Gish had refined this vocabulary of cornered terror in Broken Blossoms, where Griffith trapped her in a single room. Here the room is a shack, and the thing in the doorway is the weather.
The editor, Conrad A. Nervig, turns that escalation into rhythm. The same shots keep coming back: the shack shuddering, sand sifting through cracks, Letty's agitation climbing. Each return is tighter and faster than the last. The wind acts like a character because the cutting gives it a beat, and the beat speeds up.
There is a second Deleuzian idea underneath this one, and it explains why the film feels heavier than a melodrama about bad suitors. Between feeling and action, Deleuze places what he calls the impulse-image, the image of naturalism. In naturalism a concrete setting, a ranch with its household jealousies and its marriage market, turns out to be the thin surface of an older, savage "originary world" of raw forces that wear everything down. Sjöström shows you that older world directly. Over the realistic plains he superimposes a ghostly white stallion galloping through the clouds, taken from a Native American legend about the norther, the demon wind. For a moment myth and weather share one frame. The social drama goes on, but you now know what it is built on.
Sjöström had been working toward this for fifteen years. In Ingeborg Holm he staged an environment as an impersonal fate crushing a woman, without melodramatic underlining. In The Outlaw and His Wife he shot real landscape and real weather as a dramatic antagonist instead of a backdrop. In The Phantom Carriage he used double exposures to put the intangible on screen, and that same layering lets the wind take shape here. From Griffith's Way Down East came the practice of putting Gish herself in genuinely dangerous elements, and the desert shoot, in brutal summer heat, repeated it. The Scarlet Letter brought together the unit (Gish, the screenwriter Frances Marion, Sjöström and Lars Hanson) that made this film possible at MGM. The Wind is where all of these threads pull tight.
There's a lesson for narrative here. The story has a clear melodramatic shape: an innocent in a hostile place, unwanted men, pressure to marry. Sjöström keeps steering it inward, so the real plot is the slow erosion of a mind. Even the film's critics can't settle whether the wind is out there, the indifferent destroyer of literary naturalism, or in Letty, an expressionist picture of her dread. Deleuze's account of expressionism, with its light-and-shadow gradients and the strange "non-organic life" of things, gives that second reading a name. A door that won't stay shut and sand that won't stay put have that life. The film never makes you choose, and the question stays open after you've seen it.
It came out in 1928, just as sound was taking over, and it closed the Gish–Sjöström cycle at MGM. That timing gives it extra weight. It is one of the strongest arguments ever made for what silent images could do: it shows a deafening sound through pictures alone, and it shows the limit of the action hero by setting him against something that can't be fought.
When you watch it, keep an eye on the edges of the frame and on the floor. Notice where the sand is getting in. The wind sets the film's pace, and Gish's face shows you what it costs.
Concepts in play
- the encompasser (synsign) — The western's encompassing milieu, the wind-scoured plain that is never fully offstage and always the dominant element in the frame, presses on Letty but leaves her no action that could answer it.
- binomial (man vs milieu) — The film sets up the western's force-against-force duel with the environment as antagonist, but the opponent is a wind that can't be fought: the door that won't stay shut, the sand sifting through the gaps.
- affection-image — The camera keeps returning to Gish's face in close-up as the place where the storm's psychological toll is read, cut against wide shots that dwarf her figure.
- icon of power (intensive face) — Gish shows an inner disintegration in stages (displacement, fear, revulsion) through face, posture and endurance, each return escalating the intensity.
- originary world — The superimposed white stallion galloping in the clouds, from the legend of the norther, lays a savage mythic world directly over the realistic plains and the social drama of the ranch.
- naturalism — The wind works as the indifferent, destructive environment of literary naturalism, wearing down a mind beneath the surface of the household jealousies and suitors.
- expressionism (non-organic life of things) — Light raking through blowing grit, and the door and sand that seem to act on their own, make the wind double as an expressionist projection of Letty's dread.