Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Firemen's Ball
1967 · Miloš Forman · The Firemen's Ball on Sightlines
The prizes for the raffle are laid out under glass at the side of the hall, counted and labeled, ready. Over the course of the evening that table empties. You almost never see a hand take anything; the camera is usually elsewhere, on a face in the crowd, on a man giving a speech. That is the film's method and its best joke at once. Forman shows you the plan, cuts to the plan's execution, and leaves the distance between them for you to measure yourself.
The occasion: a volunteer fire brigade in a provincial Czech town is throwing a ball for its eighty-six-year-old former chairman, who is to be presented with a ceremonial axe in a box. There will be a raffle and a beauty pageant. Seventy-three minutes later the pageant has collapsed in embarrassment, the prizes are gone, a house has burned down, and the axe has been stolen out of its box. Nobody planned any of it. Everyone caused it.
Deleuze's history of cinema turns on a single hinge, and this film sits right on it. He called the dominant form of the medium's first half-century the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, acts on it, the action changes the situation, and the cutting exists to carry that current from one link to the next. A fire brigade is about the purest subject that form could want. Fire is a situation that demands an act. These are the men trained to supply it. You could not draw a cleaner circuit.
Forman breaks it in front of you. When the fire finally comes, a real one, a house across a snowy field, the one emergency the whole institution exists to answer, the firemen get there and can do nothing. They stand and watch it burn with everyone else. Then, because they are decent men and this is what they have, they offer the old man whose home it was a fistful of raffle tickets as compensation. The prizes those tickets could win have already been stolen. Deleuze's name for this is the crisis of the action-image: people who perceive perfectly well and can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. The circuit is cut on the side of the act. This is worth insisting on, because the easy reading is that the firemen are fools, and they are not. They are sincere about everything and competent at nothing that matters, which is sadder, and it is structural rather than personal. Nobody in that hall can act. The committee cannot run a raffle. The girls cannot walk onto a stage. The thieves cannot stop stealing.
What takes the place of acting is watching. Deleuze's word for the figure this produces is the voyant, the seer: not an agent but a witness, someone taking in more than they can do anything about. The old man in front of his burning house is the film's true seer; the firemen beside him are the comic version of the same posture. The camera has been training us in it all night. Ondříček's telephoto lenses put us inside the throng, closer to faces than we have any right to be, scanning a crowded frame the way you scan a real room for someone you know.
The other half of the crisis is structural. Deleuze calls it a dispersive situation: many characters, weakly linked, no center. Miroslav Hájek's cutting refuses to let a protagonist form. Jan Vostrčil's bluff, self-important chairman comes closest, and he has no arc. The unit of the film is the room. When the raffle exposes the fact that the prizes are gone, the shame belongs to nobody in particular and the whole hall holds it at once, which is close to what Deleuze meant by the dividual, a crowd registered as one affective body rather than a set of people.
Then there is the pageant, where the comedy stops being comfortable. The committee wants pretty girls, there are not enough, and the ones they find are herded in front of a bench of elderly men to be looked at and sashed. Forman holds it. The silence goes on. Nothing advances: Deleuze would call this dead time, stretches where the action does not move and the everyday is simply held open. What fills it is posture. Hunched shoulders. A bench of dignitaries arranging their faces into dignity. A girl who does not know where to put her hands. Deleuze borrowed a term from Brecht for this, the gest, an attitude of the body that exposes a social relation instead of describing it. You need no line of dialogue about who has power in this town. Watch who is standing and who is seated.
Objects carry the argument too. The glass case, the sashes, the banner, the axe in its box. Each is a thing the ceremony needs in order to mean anything, and each either disappears or humiliates whoever is holding it. The axe is the film's symbol in the strict sense, the single object condensing the relation the whole picture is about: a community forges an emblem of its own honor, then steals it from itself. And the fireman, the one uniform in the culture that simply means rescue, appears here in what Deleuze called an inversion, the heroic type shown in its feeble reverse. That is the joke the real firemen of Vrchlabí could not forgive.
Which raises the film's ethics, and its lineage. Forman cast the town: locals, actual members of the brigade, their own hall, practical light. The debt to Bicycle Thieves is exact, De Sica's non-professionals and real locations and a moral catastrophe assembled out of tiny transactions instead of plot machinery, and it runs back through Bazin's argument that realism is a contract, that the camera's claim on us rests on not having staged what it found. Primary and direct cinema had just proved you could film a live public event as it behaved. Forman's invention is to sign that contract and then build a fiction inside it. He does not direct acting, he coaxes behavior, and the dramatic unit he discovers is the committee meeting and the public ceremony, occasions where people are already performing themselves badly. He had rehearsed it in Black Peter and Loves of a Blonde with the same crew, Ondříček and Hájek and the writers Passer and Papoušek. The ball is where the method finds its subject. And the brigade felt mocked precisely because nothing was counterfeit; there was no performance standing between them and the audience.
Deleuze's last move fits the film's fate. In modern political cinema, he says, the artist can no longer address a unified people, because the people are missing, and the work becomes the registering of that absence. A state whose founding image was the collective banned this film permanently after August 1968. It is not an allegory, and reading it as one makes it smaller. It is a room full of people who cannot become a we, filmed with enough patience that you can see them trying.
Its nearest relatives make the achievement legible. L'Avventura lets a group's moral indifference surface through duration after a disappearance. Closely Watched Trains does the Czech trick of deadpan warmth curdling into weight. The Firemen's Ball does both in seventy-three minutes without once raising its voice. What it did to narrative is easy to state and very hard to do: it built a film out of a group's accumulating embarrassment, with no hero, no villain and nobody to root for, and made it land like tragedy. Carlo Ponti wanted his money back. Truffaut and Claude Berri bought the rights and rescued it, which tells you what the people capable of recognizing it thought it was worth. Forman carried the method out of Barrandov and into Hollywood.
Watch it again, and watch the table. Not the speeches, the table. The question the film leaves open is the one nobody in the hall asks out loud: was there a moment when any of them could have acted, and would they have known it when it came?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The one genuine emergency the brigade exists to answer — the old man's house burning across a snowy field — reduces the firemen to spectators, after which they offer him stolen raffle tickets as 'compensation'.
- the seer (voyant) — 'The pathos of the old man watching his home burn': the camera holds on human reactions rather than cutting to the spectacle of the fire, so watching replaces acting for characters and audience alike.
- dispersive situation — Hájek's editing 'orchestrates the ensemble so that no single protagonist emerges — the character is the collective'; multiple small dramas unfold simultaneously in the hall's confined geography.
- dead time (temps mort) — The beauty pageant's awkward silences and the reluctant contestants herded before the committee, staged in near-real-time across a single evening with the camera restrained and holding.
- the gest — The bluff self-importance of the seated committee against the blank discomfort of the standing pageant girls — postures caught in non-professionals that expose the town's social relations without dialogue.
- dividual — The raffle table steadily emptying until 'the raffle exposes everyone as a thief' — the shame belongs to the room as one affective body, not to any individual.
- symbol — The ceremonial axe in its box, the gift meant to honor the retiring chairman, which vanishes like the raffle prizes: 'objects carry the moral weight of the film'.
- inversion-image — The film takes the culture's emblem of rescue — the fire brigade — and stages it in feeble reverse, helplessly watching a house burn; the real firemen cast as extras felt their profession and dignity mocked.
- the people are missing — A collective that cannot constitute itself: the committee's dignified intentions against the self-interested behavior of everyone present, in a film banned 'permanently' after the August 1968 invasion.