Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Sorcerer
1977 · William Friedkin · Sorcerer on Sightlines
Rain, a rope bridge, and a truck's front wheels feeling for the first plank.
The bridge moves. Not the way a set moves. The way something too heavy for the river moves. Friedkin had that thing built and rigged so it would heave under real weight in real water, and when the location went bad he had it rebuilt somewhere else at a cost that entered the film's obituary before anyone had seen the film. You can feel the money in the shot. You can feel the danger. That isn't a side effect of Sorcerer. It's the argument. This is a picture about what matter does when you ask too much of it, made by a director asking too much of matter.
Deleuze splits cinema roughly in two. In the movement-image, a person sees a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. Most films, most of the time. But he isolates one peculiar branch of it, the impulse-image, whose mode he calls naturalism: not decisions, but appetites and compulsions working away under the social surface. Naturalism needs two worlds stacked. There is the derived milieu, the actual place with its wages and its weather. Under it sits the originary world, which is not a location but a condition: raw matter, hunger, slope.
Porvenir is the derived milieu, and Friedkin gives it as an inventory. Mud, corrugated metal, an oil company, men without papers. The production design refuses any romance of exile; these four are trapped in squalor before they are ever trapped on the road. Beyond the town is the originary world. He shoots the rainforest with no tropical beauty in it at all, oppressive rather than picturesque, wet weight leaning on the trucks, and the camera stays down near the axles where the friction is.
What joins the two worlds in naturalism is the line of slope: entropy given a story shape, an irreversible tilt toward exhaustion and death. Sorcerer front-loads that slope and makes you wait for the plot. Before the job exists there are four prologues, each shot in a different country and language, one per man: political violence, financial crime, terrorism, organized crime. Every one of them is already falling when we meet him. Porvenir is not where these stories begin. It is where the first fall lands. The drive is the second fall.
Now the strange part. Having built a world in which nobody can really act, Friedkin runs the rest of the film on the most muscular structure cinema has, what Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: a situation presses until someone does something big enough to alter it. The burning well is the encompasser, the single fact that organizes the map, sets the price, and decides what will count as an act. The large form usually turns on a binomial, force against force, a hero and an adversary. Here the adversary has no face. It is the chemistry of dynamite old enough to sweat nitroglycerin and the load limit of wet wood. Clouzot found that in 1953, out of the same novel, and Friedkin inherits it whole: the suspense is extracted from physical mechanics, not from a human antagonist. The road is enough.
Deleuze has a word for how such a film breathes. Respiration-space: the alternation between the enormous milieu and the taut line of the act. Sorcerer may be the purest respiration picture in American cinema. Two hundred miles of rainforest, then two inches of rotten plank. The cutting follows exactly that lung, patient to the point of severity across the prologues, then tightening inside the set pieces until the bridge crossing is almost unbearable and almost wordless. What carries it there is sound: water, straining timber, engines at the top of their range, and Tangerine Dream's synthesizer threaded through as an anxiety you can hear. In 1977 a major studio thriller scored on synthesizers was close to unheard of. It is the one part of this film that arrived early rather than late, and the part that ran furthest forward into everything after it.
This is also where Sorcerer is a Bazinian film, maybe the last great one. Bazin argued that when a scene's meaning depends on two things being really present in the same space, cutting between them destroys it. Friedkin takes that as law. Real truck, real bridge, real water, held together in frame so the physics cannot be faked. The grammar came out of his own The French Connection: handheld coverage, available light, a set piece staged as a physical event instead of choreography. The sound discipline came out of The Exorcist, along with the appetite for effects nobody could fake. The moral arithmetic came from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, where men grind through hell for money that evaporates. The ethic of expendable men bound by a job walked in with screenwriter Walon Green from The Wild Bunch. Herzog had made the same wager in another jungle five years earlier: you cannot fake a river, so go stand in one.
Which brings the argument round. Deleuze's account of postwar cinema is the story of the action-image coming apart: dispersive situations, characters weakly linked, plots that refuse to converge, journeys that transform nothing. That breakdown is normally a slow film's subject. Friedkin lays it in the foundations of a fast one. The first movement is pure dispersion, four men in four countries with nothing to do with each other, no marquee hero to organize them. Then the machine starts, and it works. The trucks go. The act is completed at full torque. And the last movement takes the survivor's escape away and closes the ring the prologues opened. The circuit runs perfectly and pays nothing out. That is not the action-image abandoned. It is the action-image driven to the end of its own logic by a man who had already read its obituary and got in the cab anyway.
Look at the trucks. They have names painted on the doors, Sorcerer and Lazaro. Lazarus, the man brought back. And a magician, in a film where nothing supernatural occurs at all, where every catastrophe reduces to torque, rot, and chance. The director of The Exorcist made a picture with no devil in it and then put the devil in the title. Those names carry the whole quarrel: whether the thing that finds you out there is a fate or a pothole.
The film will not tell you, and that refusal is what it is for. Watch it again for the suspension, the way the springs load and unload under the crates, and listen to what the road is doing underneath. Then decide what you think happens at the end, and whether Friedkin would agree with you.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Four men driven by ruin rather than choice take a suicidal contract; Friedkin 'stages the world as hostile matter,' with Porvenir a place of mud, corrugated metal and human desperation.
- naturalism — The four prologues (political violence, financial crime, terrorism, organized crime) present a world of drives erupting beneath the social surface, converging on an oil town where the men are trapped in squalor before they are trapped on the road.
- derived-milieu — Porvenir: mud, corrugated metal, an oil company, production design that 'refuses any romance of exile.'
- originary-world — The jungle photographed as oppressive rather than exotic — grimy, saturated, all sweat, rot and muck, the camera close to weight and friction.
- entropy / degradation — Each prologue shows a man already fleeing a specific ruin; the ending is 'bleakly ironic, denying its survivor any redemptive escape and closing the circle of doom the prologues opened.'
- action-image-large-form — A burning oil well commissions a 200-mile haul of nitroglycerin-sweating dynamite: global situation → decisive act → transformed situation, run at full power.
- the encompasser — The oil-well fire as the single encompassing fact that sets the contract, the route and the stakes for every character.
- binomial — Force against force with no human antagonist: terror extracted from 'the physical mechanics of trucking nitroglycerin over impossible terrain,' the trucks against rotten planks and crumbling switchbacks.
- respiration-space — Alternation of the vast rainforest milieu with the taut line of the crossing; editing patient across the prologues and tightening 'to sustain almost unbearable suspense' at the bridge.
- dispersive-situation — A long opening movement of four separate prologues, each shot in a different country and language, with a deliberately star-light international cast and no single marquee hero to bind them.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — The sensory-motor machine completes its act and yields nothing: 'the narrative dramatizes contingency itself,' and the ironic ending voids the completed run.
- symbol — The two trucks are named Sorcerer and Lazaro and treated 'almost as characters, extensions of the men's fate' — resurrection and magic painted on machines in a film where every disaster is pure physics.