Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Bāhubali 2: The Conclusion
2017 · S. S. Rajamouli · Bāhubali 2: The Conclusion on Sightlines
A woman draws a bow. A man steps in behind her, closes his hands over hers, and lays three arrows on the string at once. They fire together, in a unison no archer could manage. Then the film slows almost to a stop, so we can see the shape of the thing they've just done.
That stop is the heartbeat of Bāhubali 2: The Conclusion. The editor, Kotagiri Venkateswara Rao, cuts in one pattern from start to finish. Shots pile up fast, building pressure, until a single image is held in slow motion at the moment it is easiest to read. Then everything releases and the pile-up starts again. You could tap your foot to it.
Gilles Deleuze opens his books on cinema with an idea from the philosopher Henri Bergson, and it helps explain why this rhythm feels the way it does. Bergson said there are two ways to think about motion. The ancient way picks out privileged instants: the poses where a movement reaches its ideal form, like a statue of an athlete caught at full stretch. The modern way, the way of science and of the movie camera, samples motion at equal intervals. Every instant counts the same. Deleuze calls this the any-instant-whatever, and cinema was born from it: twenty-four even frames a second, none more important than another.
S. S. Rajamouli takes that machine and makes it serve the older way of seeing. Slow-motion ramping lands on almost every action beat and freezes the gesture at its peak. K. K. Senthil Kumar's camera borrows the low-angle "elevation" shot that Telugu mass cinema has long used to sanctify its stars, then inflates it until the hero fills the frame the way an icon fills a temple sanctum. This film doesn't record motion. It poses it. Seen through Bergson's distinction, the film's excess stops looking like bad taste and starts to look like a choice about how a body should appear to the people watching it.
The story is built for those poses. Deleuze calls the classic shape of heroic cinema the large form of the action-image. A situation presses on everyone, a hero gathers himself, and a decisive act changes the situation. He traces it through Griffith and Ford, and its keystone is what he calls the encompasser: a world big and coherent enough to demand action. Sabu Cyril's Mahishmati is exactly that. The kingdom is designed as a single legible machine of throne room, plaza, walls, gates and waterworks, painted in burnished gold and bronze. Against it sits the forest kingdom of Kuntala in saturated green. You always know where you are, and you always know what the place is asking of the people in it.
That clarity carries into the politics. Rajamouli stages his court with the sovereign raised up, petitioners below and the crowd as a chorus, so a shift in power reads as a shift in blocking. The arrangement comes straight from Mughal-e-Azam (1960): throne on the axis, courtiers ranked in depth, the accused woman held in the center of the frame while the ruler is shot from below. When Devasena answers an assault with a blade in open session, and the queen mother Sivagami is pushed to choose between her own word and her son, the scene plays almost entirely through who stands where and who looks at whom. Deleuze's term for this force-against-force structure is the binomial. Here it is a duel fought with positions in a room.
Now look at how the film handles time. Most of The Conclusion is a flashback: Kattappa, the loyal slave-general, telling Mahendra what happened before the first film's cliffhanger. Deleuze calls this a recollection-image, a past that comes back as an old present with a date on it, there to explain and complete the action. In the European modernism Deleuze loved, the past turns into a fog that characters wander in. Here it's a debt, and it gets paid. The architecture belongs to Sholay (1975), with its interval hinge and its withheld flashback, but Rajamouli stretched that hinge across two years between releases. "Why did Kattappa kill Bāhubali?" became a meme, a T-shirt slogan and a parlor game across the country. The gap in the story turned into a public event.
Kattappa himself comes from an older template. The oath-bound warrior, shot in low-angle mid-shot, is NTR's staging in Daana Veera Soora Karna (1977).
The songs work differently. Deleuze, following Eisenstein's "montage of attractions," describes images that stage action as spectacle instead of simply carrying it out. "Saahore Bāhubali" is cut as spectacle-montage, the hero turned into a figure for the crowd. "Dandaalayyaa" is a hymn, set where a triumph cue would normally go. M. M. Keeravani's massed choirs and chant tie the film's emotional high points to devotion rather than war. Then there is the swan-boat of "Hamsa Naava," the purest fantasy image in the film. Its ancestor is Marcus Bartley's moonlight boat in Mayabazar (1957), made with in-camera tricks. The contract is the same in both: the effect is a magic trick performed for believers, with no claim to be real.
This matters for film theory. André Bazin argued that cinema's power came from its photographic bond with reality. Most frames in Bāhubali 2 carry digital work. Its images are assembled more than photographed, and the virtual camera does impossible things, craning off a rampart into a thousand-foot drop or circling a hero in mid-leap. The film sides openly with cinema as conjuring. It also brought the method home: a previsualized pipeline, with live action shot as one layer of a frame finished months later, was standard in Hollywood and new to Indian production. It made Hyderabad a place that could lead effects work, not just take subcontracts. And it revived the Chandralekha (1948) model of one film made for several language markets, with a Hindi version released wide on the same day. That showed the industry a Telugu film could open across the country as an event.
Here is the open question. In Deleuze's account, the action-image cracked after the Second World War. Characters stopped being able to act on what they saw and became watchers instead. Bāhubali 2 refuses that crisis, sincerely and at enormous scale. Is the large form exhausted, or did it only lose its nerve in certain places? The cost of believing in it is real, too. The large form tends to bless whoever acts decisively, and the film's dynastic and caste politics have drawn sustained scholarly objection. Both its power and that objection grow from the same root.
So watch the stops. Each time the film slows to hold a figure in the air, ask what it wants you to bow to and why. That's where Rajamouli's invention lives: a camera built to count every instant equally, taught all over again to worship.
Concepts in play
- privileged instants — Slow-motion ramping on nearly every action beat stops the gesture at its most legible moment, as in the three-arrows sequence; low-angle elevation shots make the hero into an icon.
- large form of the action-image — The story asks who may rule and resolves it through decisive heroic acts within an epic situation that presses on everyone.
- the encompasser — Sabu Cyril designs Mahishmati as a single legible machine (throne room, plaza, walls, gates, waterworks) set against the green Kuntala.
- binomial — The court sequence, with Sivagami forced to choose between her word and her son, is staged through position and gaze, using the Mughal-e-Azam durbar composition.
- recollection-image — Most of the film is Kattappa's flashback testimony to Mahendra: a dated past that explains and completes the action, built on Sholay's withheld-flashback structure.
- attraction-image — 'Saahore Bāhubali' is cut as spectacle-montage, the hymn 'Dandaalayyaa' sits where a triumph cue would, and the CG swan-boat of 'Hamsa Naava' is fantasy offered as a magic trick, in the line of Mayabazar.