Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Welcome Mr. Marshall!
1953 · Luis García Berlanga · Welcome Mr. Marshall! on Sightlines
Start with a square in Castile. Dust, a church, a town hall, a road heading out of town. Now fill the square with its own people in frilled Andalusian dresses and short wide-brimmed hats, practicing a flamenco none of them knows, to a song from the other end of Spain. This is Villar del Río getting ready for the Americans.
Word has come that officials of the Marshall Plan may pass through. The town's leading men meet, argue and arrive at a plan. Foreigners, they reason, already know what Spain looks like, because they have seen it in the movies. So the town will become that movie. Facades go up over the plain walls. A visiting singer and her fast-talking manager, Manolo, join in. Then the waiting starts.
Before we meet anyone, a voice introduces us to the place. Berlanga's narrator is calm and knowing, like a guide showing visitors around a minor museum. He presents the mayor, the priest, the schoolteacher and the penniless hidalgo with such courtesy that the irony takes a moment to sting. The voice has a clear ancestor in Buñuel's Land Without Bread, which laid a mock-official commentary over images of Spanish rural poverty and let the gap between them do the cutting. Berlanga keeps Buñuel's deadpan and adds affection. His narrator likes these people. He just doesn't believe a word they tell themselves.
Why bring Deleuze to a village comedy? Because he gives us words for exactly what makes this film strange. Deleuze sorts cinema into two broad kinds of image. In the first, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the editing serves that chain of seeing and doing. In the second, the time-image, which he dates to Italian neorealism after the war, characters can no longer act on what they see. They watch. They wait. Between the two, he describes a crisis of the action-image: films where people still move and plan, but their actions no longer connect to anything that could change their situation.
Villar del Río lives in that crisis, and plays it for laughs. Nobody in the film is idle. They hold meetings, hang decorations, sew costumes and rehearse the welcome until the whole town moves in step. But none of this is action in the old sense. The town cannot fix its own poverty. It has no say over the Americans either. All it can do is prepare, and preparation becomes the whole of life. Every effort points at an event that belongs to someone else.
Deleuze has a phrase for what fills a world like this: the consciousness of clichés. In the crisis films, he says, people drift among ready-made images, secondhand pictures that hold the world together once real action has stopped working. Most films reveal those clichés to us. Berlanga has his characters put them on. The Andalusian costume, borrowed from folkloric musicals like Morena Clara, is a cliché you can button up. That's the film's central joke, and it never lets up, because Manuel Berenguer's photography keeps the real village in view underneath. The everyday Castile is shot in flat, documentary daylight. The fake Andalusia is staged like theater. You can always see the plaster wall behind the painted one.
That layering is also an argument with film theory. André Bazin praised neorealism, Bicycle Thieves above all, for letting the real world appear on screen: real locations, poor people filmed without decoration. Berlanga shot his village in a real Castilian town and treats its people with the same plainness. Then he builds a stage set on top of that Bazinian ground floor and makes the distance between the two his subject. This is a neorealist film about people trying very hard to stop looking like a neorealist film.
The welcome itself is what Deleuze calls a reflection-image, or more exactly an attraction-image. Action stops being done and is staged as a figure instead, a spectacle that stands in for the deed. The mass rehearsal is the clearest case. The town is not doing anything to the Americans. It is acting out what it hopes the Americans will want to see.
Then the dreams. Four times the film cuts suddenly into a character's sleep: the mayor's, the priest's, the hidalgo's, the farmer's. Deleuze's dream-image names what happens when perception can't go on into action and goes into fantasy instead. The model is Miracle in Milan, where De Sica and Zavattini let fables break out of a poor neighborhood. Berlanga's sharper idea is that even these private fantasies are imported. The mayor dreams himself into an American Western. The priest dreams in the visual language of Inquisition spectacle. Each dream mocks a genre, and the deeper point is that these people can't even dream without borrowing. The film quietly asks a question it never answers. What would a Spanish dream look like if nobody had lent it?
The body of power gets the same treatment. José Isbert's mayor is deaf, kind and lost, and his attempts at an official speech fall apart in hesitation and garbled phrases. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. Under Franco, a public official who can't get through his own rhetoric is a gest with consequences, and the comedy let it slip past the censors.
The structure is choral. Deleuze would call it a dispersive situation: many characters, loosely linked, none a true hero. Berlanga's camera moves through crowds and holds the whole community in one deep, busy frame, which is the first sign of the long, crowded takes he would push much further later in his career. The engine is Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero, where a whole town builds an ever more elaborate welcome on a misunderstanding. Berlanga swaps a returning son for a superpower, and the stakes get national.
The film was made with modest means for UNINCI, a production company that gathered filmmakers of opposition sympathies. It was written with Juan Antonio Bardem, who took its social anger into melodrama in Death of a Cyclist, and with the comic playwright Miguel Mihura, who brought its timing. It was recognized at Cannes in 1953 and gave modern Spanish comedy its founding text. Its images became shorthand for a country performing itself for foreign eyes.
When you watch it, keep an eye on the walls. Every time the town puts on its costume, the real Castile is still there behind it, and that view is where Berlanga's comedy does its quiet political work.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The whole town organizes itself around an arrival it cannot bring about. Meetings, decorations and rehearsals pile up, but none of them can change the village's situation.
- consciousness of clichés — Castilian villagers put on Andalusian costumes and touristic flamenco borrowed from the españolada, wearing the foreign cliché of Spain over their real village.
- dream-image (onirosign) — Four sudden cuts into dreams (the mayor's, the priest's, the hidalgo's, the farmer's), each parodying an imported genre such as the American Western or Inquisitorial spectacle.
- attraction-image — The mass rehearsal of the welcome and the Andalusian facade: the town stages a spectacle in place of acting, figuring what it hopes the Americans want to see.
- dispersive situation — A choral ensemble with no single hero. Deep, crowded group shots and a roving camera move through the community at the town meeting and the rehearsals.
- the gest — José Isbert's deaf mayor, whose hesitations and garbled attempts at an official speech expose the hollowness of public rhetoric under the regime.