Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of City Girl
1930 · F. W. Murnau · City Girl on Sightlines
They run into the wheat and the wheat closes behind them.
Lem has brought his wife home from Chicago, and the last of the journey is on foot through his father's crop. Murnau's camera doesn't wait at the house for them to arrive. It goes with them, riding level in the grain, and the field stops being scenery. It becomes weather on the skin. Speed, wind, the give of stalks. It's the passage every writer on this film reaches for, and it's worth asking why, because in dramatic terms nothing whatsoever occurs in it. Two people run. The plot doesn't move an inch.
That's the problem City Girl poses to ordinary film talk. Plot, character, theme: the standard tools have nothing to say about the best thing in the movie. Deleuze earns his place here for an unglamorous reason. His vocabulary was built to describe the parts of a film that have no dramatic job.
Start with what he calls a mobile section. Deleuze separates the frame, a closed set of information you read like a box, from the shot, which he treats as a slice cut out of movement, a section that is itself moving. A frame divides the world. A shot, by moving, registers a change in the whole. Hold the wheat sequence against that. What changes across it isn't the situation; it's the scale of these two lives. The world gets larger while they're inside it. Deleuze calls that larger unfinished thing the Open, the sense that the set in front of you belongs to something still changing, that the field has no edge. Murnau gets it without one symbolic gesture. He just refuses to stand still.
There's a finer name for the texture of that perception. Deleuze, following the French silent directors, separates solid perception from liquid perception, the reume: perception unanchored, carried in a current instead of planted on the bank. His examples are all water. Rivers, harbors, boats. Murnau, in Minnesota, has no water. He has ripe wheat under wind, which moves like a sea and photographs like one, and he puts Ernest Palmer's camera inside it rather than above it. That's why the harvest later reads as menace instead of postcard. We have already been in there at body height.
Then they reach the house, and the film changes tools.
The interiors are low and compressed. The father is at the table. The compositions are deep, deliberate, and everyone's place in them is assigned. This is Deleuze's frame in the strict sense: a closed set, saturated with information, to be read as a system. Where the old man sits, where Kate is permitted to stand, which doorway a body has to pass through. His authority is in the architecture before it's in anything he does.
Deleuze has a name for the alternation the film now settles into. In the large-form action film the image breathes: a vast encompassing milieu, then the taut narrow line of the action drawn inside it, then the milieu again. City Girl breathes on a two-stroke. Field. Table. Field. Table. Horizontal freedom, then vertical pressure and a ceiling six inches above the drama. That respiration is the drama. You could follow this film with the titles removed.
Underneath it sits a large-form action-image at full power: an encompassing situation, the harvest with its prices and its deadline and its hired crew, presses on the people until somebody must act, and the act changes the situation. The duel inside it is the one the genre expects. Kate against the father, force against force, Deleuze's binomial. Murnau honors the structure completely. What he does with it is move the weight off the villain and into the milieu.
Two finer things. The working title was Our Daily Bread, and bread does what Deleuze means by a symbol, a single object that condenses the film's organizing relation. Wheat is labor is money is the meal is the family. Set the table one way and it's communion; set it another and it's a hierarchy. Murnau had been teaching furniture to act since Faust, with its sculpted foreground and its charged props. Here he does it in a plain kitchen with a loaf.
Then the harvest crew. Seasonal labor, rough and hungry, crowding a new marriage. That's a current of pure appetite running under the pastoral, which is Deleuze's impulse-image: behavior that reads as the symptom of a drive rather than a choice. Stroheim's Greed is where Deleuze finds that world in full savagery, and Greed is also, not coincidentally, the film that taught City Girl to shoot on real ground. Murnau takes Stroheim's locations and declines Stroheim's appetite. He lets the drive press on the marriage and never lets it become the whole world. That restraint is a decision, and it's the whole distance between naturalism and this.
The theory history lines up almost too neatly. Bazin split directors into those who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality, and he filed Murnau with Stroheim and Flaherty in the second camp, arguing that Murnau's originality lay in the reality of his dramatic space rather than in the plastics of his pictures. Murnau then walked off the Fox lot and made Tabu with Flaherty. The taxonomy turned out to be a biography.
Name the invention plainly. The unchained camera came from The Last Laugh, and in Weimar it moved because a man was drunk, or humiliated, or dreaming; Freund's swinging rig in Variety moved because a mind was coming apart. Camera movement meant interiority. City Girl unhooks it. The camera moves because two people are happy in a field, and lyric isn't psychology. To get that, Murnau had to abandon the built sets of Sunrise, because that kind of joy needs real wind. He inverted Sunrise on his way out, too. There the city corrupts and the country heals. Here the city girl is the moral center and the countryside supplies the cruelty. That one reversal cuts melodrama's morality loose from its postcard geography, and the American rural film has been living off it since.
Watch it for the doorways. Then watch the wheat run again and notice that the only thing at stake in it is happiness. Fox demanded dialogue, other hands reshot pieces of the picture, the camera across the industry got bolted down so audiences could hear people talk, and Murnau left. He died in March 1931, days before Tabu opened, which leaves the question he never got to answer: what would this man have done with sound and his freedom at the same time? Put the harvest reels of Days of Heaven beside these and you get somebody else's partial answer, fifty years late.
Concepts in play
- the mobile section (plan) — The arrival at the farm: a fluid tracking shot that moves with the newlyweds as they run through the ripe wheat, so the field becomes a sensation of speed and wind rather than scenery — the 'unchained camera' redeployed for lyric rather than psychological effect.
- the Open — The wheat-field run changes no situation; what it changes is scale. The open, horizontal freedom of the wheat country is staged so the framed set reads as having no edge, against the enclosed vertical pressure of the farmhouse.
- reume (liquid perception) — Ernest Palmer's camera photographs wind moving through ripe grain from inside the crop at body height, making the field a current the bodies are carried in rather than a landscape observed from outside it.
- the closed set (cadre) — The compressed, low-ceilinged farmhouse interiors, where tensions are staged in deep, deliberate compositions and the father's domination is expressed through blocking and the architecture of rooms rather than through action.
- respiration-space — The film alternates the vast open wheat country with the taut, oppressive stillness of scenes around the father's table; tempo is used as a dramatic instrument, exhilarated acceleration against slow enclosure.
- action-image-large-form — An encompassing situation — the harvest season, its economic pressures and its rough seasonal laborers — presses on the couple until the strain on the marriage forces action that changes the situation.
- binomial — The central duel of force against force: Kate against the stern, distrustful father (David Torrence) who reads her as a scheming city woman, with the fragile new marriage as the ground contested.
- symbol — Shot under the working title 'Our Daily Bread': bread, the setting of the table and the doorway carry moral and emotional weight, the communal disorder of the harvest crew set against the rigid hierarchy of the family meal.
- impulse-image — The rough seasonal laborers of the harvest crew, whose appetite and communal disorder strain the marriage nearly to breaking — naturalism inherited from 'Greed', the same ancestor that supplied the commitment to real locations.