Anthropoid · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man steps off the curb, lifts a submachine gun at a slowing Mercedes, and squeezes. Nothing. The Sten jams. That click — and the silence where a burst of fire should have been — is the pivot of Sean Ellis's Anthropoid, and the truest door into it. Everything before that sound is preparation; everything after is consequence the men can no longer steer.

For most of its first hour the film runs as procedure. Two paratroopers, Gabčík and Kubiš, drop into occupied Prague and disappear into a resistance network run on suspicion and rationed trust. We watch logistics: safe houses, forged papers, a tram route timed, a curve in the road where a car must slow. This is what Deleuze calls the action-image in its small form — the sensory-motor circuit where a precise act is meant to disclose a hidden situation. Nobody explains the occupation to us in a speech; we read it off elliptical gestures, a glance held a beat too long, Toby Jones's resistance chief weighing whether a stranger is a plant. Each small act is an index pointing at the vast unseen thing pressing on it. The grammar fits: wide, locked-off frames for planning, the composition treated as a system to be solved. The film teaches us to read space the way the men must — every doorway and gun slit a measure of exposure.

Then the gun jams, and Deleuze's most important hinge arrives: the crisis of the action-image. The whole point of the action-image is that perception flows into a deed that changes the situation. Here it doesn't. Kubiš throws a grenade modified with plastic explosive; the blast wounds Heydrich but the clean kill is gone; the cascade of error keeps spilling. Ellis refuses to rescue the moment with slow motion or a grace note — handheld, short lenses, bodies cutting across their own sightlines. The act succeeds and fails at once, and from that point the men can perceive their doom perfectly well but can no longer act their way out of it. This is the exact threshold on which Deleuze's two cinemas turn, and Anthropoid crosses it inside a single botched second.

The last forty minutes are the other side of that line: the time-image. In the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius — the genuine crypt, its stone still bullet-marked — the men are trapped, and the film hands them nothing to do but endure. Deleuze calls these pure optical and sound situations (opsigns and sonsigns): moments where a character, and we with him, can only look and listen because no decisive action remains available. The siege is built almost entirely from them. German commands bark from outside; ricochets map the room; water seeps through the walls; the men breathe. Ellis withdraws Robin Foster's score so the production sound carries full weight — a strategy he inherits from Klimov's Come and See, where battlefield sound replaces music as the subjective register. The soldiers become what Deleuze names voyants, seers: not agents but watchers and sufferers of a situation that has closed over them.

And the editing makes this a moral argument, not just a style. The crypt runs for an extended stretch with few elisions — Deleuze's dead time, temps mort, the held duration in which nothing advances the plot because there is no longer a plot to advance, only living and dying. The decision not to cut away is the film's ethics: we stay with the dying as long as the dying lasts. The crypt itself becomes an any-space-whatever — Deleuze's term for a space that stops being a setting for action and turns into a pure field of affect. Ventilation shafts pump tear gas; torchlight fails; the geometry of cover decomposes. The architecture that earlier promised options now offers only thresholds with nothing behind them. What we are finally watching is a cinema of the body: not heroes deciding but exhausted bodies carrying time, Murphy's scoured affect giving way to simple physical endurance.

Place this in the lineage and the achievement sharpens. Ellis takes Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers device — historical events shot to look like recovered footage — and Melville's Army of Shadows refusal of heroic inflation, grey palette and all, and Zinnemann's Day of the Jackal trick of building suspense around a known outcome. The desilvered grade flattens skin, civilian cloth, and Nazi regalia into one besieged grey. From Das Boot he borrows constriction prolonged past dramatic convenience. He revises Gilbert's Operation Daybreak point for point on identical material, trading its romance and heroism for spatial compression and the crisis I've described.

The significance is what this does to the war film. Most WWII cinema gives the audience the bunker's-eye view — dramatic irony, retrospective vindication, the comfort of standing above events. Anthropoid refuses the vantage. It traps us in operational uncertainty, then strands us in the time-image with men who cannot act, and only at the very end — a title card naming the erased villages of Lidice and Ležáky — lets the full weight land. It turns the crisis of the action-image, usually a melancholy art-cinema mood, into something closer to grief. Watch it again for the jam. Everything the film knows is in that silence.