Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Loves of a Blonde
1965 · Miloš Forman · Loves of a Blonde on Sightlines
A bottle of wine crosses a dance floor. Three middle-aged reservists have decided to send it to a table of young women, and the sequence is mostly the trip: the ordering, the waiter, the distance, the looks going out from one table and the looks coming back. Forman cuts on those looks. He lets it run well past the point where a comedy would normally rescue everybody. Nobody in that room can make anything happen. They can only watch each other trying.
Hold onto that, because it is the whole film, and it is also a precise moment in the history of film form.
For its first fifty years cinema mostly ran on one circuit. A character takes in a situation, something in them tightens, they act, the situation changes. Gilles Deleuze called this the movement-image, and its engine the action-image: perception discharging into deed. After the war the circuit started to slip. People in films began to perceive more than they could answer. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, and he listed its symptoms almost clinically: the dispersive situation, where the screen fills with loosely connected people instead of a hero and an obstacle; the balade, the trip that transforms nothing; and a consciousness of clichés, characters speaking in ready-made phrases because nothing else is available to them. Loves of a Blonde has all three. What's unusual is that it is funny about all three.
Start with the premise, which is a piece of administration. The factory town has too many young women and not enough men, and the official remedy is to post army reservists nearby. A classical film would take that as a situation to be resolved by action. Forman takes it as weather. The women are lined up before officialdom and told the matter is in hand; the dance is the hand; what arrives is the wine bottle and its long journey. Deleuze has a hard phrase for what's absent at the center of a scene like that: the people are missing. He means the collective subject that cinema once addressed — a people who could be mobilized and spoken for — is no longer there, and modern political film has to work inside that absence instead of faking its way around it. Forman is filming a state that says the people constantly, in a town where nobody can find anybody. Watch how he composes a group: ranks of dormitory beds, a row of women facing a desk. Deleuze calls a crowd rendered as one feeling-unit a dividual — not individuals, a body-in-common with a mood and no voice. Every collective in this film is dividual. That is the joke and it is also the wound.
Then there is a wedding ring, turned nervously on a finger. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this a gest: a posture or a scrap of physical business in which an entire social relation becomes visible without anyone explaining it. Not a symbol — a body caught doing something. The ring holds marriage, the army, the evening's arithmetic and a man's private estimate of his chances, all at once. Forman builds from these. Two parents jammed into a bed too small for the argument they are having is a gest. A window blind that will not stay down is a gest, and it is the funniest object in the movie.
And Andula. Hana Brejchová plays her with almost nothing on the surface: hope and humiliation registering in a face that barely moves. Deleuze's name for the character of this new cinema is the voyant, the seer — not an agent but a watcher, someone things happen to while she takes them in. Andula sees everything in this film clearly. She simply has no available action. The seduction and the scene in Milda's parents' apartment are what Deleuze calls pure optical and sound situations: stretches that give you seeing and hearing with nothing to do about either. Her held face, reflecting one quality rather than launching a reaction, is a qualisign. In the party scenes the camera does something related and slyer — it watches people watching, and we feel it there in the room, a perceiver among perceivers.
Forman didn't invent this. He inherited it and changed its temperature. André Bazin had argued that Italian neorealism was cinema's closest approach to fact: shots that respect what is actually in front of the lens instead of converting it into plot. Deleuze's founding example of the new image is the maid making coffee in Umberto D., where the film just stays with unremarkable time — Zavattini's cinema of duration, what Deleuze calls dead time. From Bicycle Thieves Forman took the non-professional on a real location, cast for a face rather than a résumé. From Umberto D. he took the shape: a chronicle instead of a plot, three long situations instead of three acts, an ending that refuses catharsis. Andula goes to Prague. It is the balade in its purest form, a journey with the weight of a pilgrimage and the effect of nothing; she returns to her routine, chastened.
The other half of the inheritance is documentary. Momma Don't Allow put a handheld camera in a jazz dance hall full of working kids, and that is the direct ancestor of Forman's roving dance floor and its plucked close-ups. Chronique d'un été — Jean Rouch, about whom Deleuze writes at length — showed that you could provoke real speech and record it. Deleuze's word for what Rouch found is fabulation, legending: people caught in the act of making themselves up out loud, so that the person and the performance of the person can't be separated. Forman's version is a trick played back on the method. His overheard dialogue was written. The banality is composed. Non-actors placed in real rooms don't play the reservists, they occupy them, while the trained performers give the film its spine. Milda talks himself into being a Prague sophisticate and then talks himself out of every obligation that follows; his charm is a legend he tells, and it curdles into evasion while you watch.
What Forman added belongs to him. Neorealism had proved you could build a film out of dedramatized time, and it did that in a tragic key. Forman found that the same slack structure is hilarious. Embarrassment is the exact feeling of the broken circuit: you perceive perfectly, you cannot act, and the gap between them is where the comedy lives. Hold it one beat longer than is comfortable and it turns into an ache. That is his invention — he located the comic in the precise place Deleuze located the crisis, and he taught the cut to land on the beat after the one you expect. The Firemen's Ball pushed it to the edge of allegory. Ondříček carried the observational camera and the crowd-of-faces method into Hair, Ragtime, Amadeus, where the art of finding one real face inside a throng survives at studio scale.
Watch it again for hands. What people do with their hands while they are saying something else is most of the information in this film, and none of it is in the dialogue. The question Forman leaves open is whether Andula's hope has been defeated or merely spent on the wrong person, with plenty left. He declines to say. That refusal is the reason the film hasn't aged a day.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The film is 'deliberately anti-dramatic': no plot engine of obstacle and resolution, a loose chronicle of three extended situations, and an ending that withholds catharsis, returning Andula to her routine.
- voyage / balade form — Andula packs up and travels uninvited to Prague; the trip changes nothing and she is returned to her factory-town routine, chastened.
- dispersive situation — Ensemble construction around weakly-linked groups — the factory women lined up before officialdom, the three reservists, the dormitory, Milda's parents — rather than a protagonist-antagonist pair.
- consciousness of clichés — Dialogue that is 'overlapping, banal, evasive, full of the platitudes people reach for when they cannot say what they mean'; Forman mines comedy and pathos directly from cliché and small talk.
- dead time (temps mort) — Forman and editor Miroslav Hájek 'let scenes breathe until embarrassment becomes unbearable, then cut' — duration held past the point of dramatic usefulness, the structural debt to Zavattini's cinema of duration in Umberto D.
- pure optical and sound situations — In the seduction and the parents' bedroom the framing 'tightens and holds, letting awkwardness accumulate within the shot' — seeing and hearing with no action available to anyone.
- the seer (voyant) — Hana Brejchová's Andula: 'a face that registers hope and humiliation with minimal outward gesture' — watchful, guarded, enduring rather than acting.
- qualisign (icon of quality) — The held close-up of Andula's near-immobile face expressing a single sustained quality of hope or shame, plucked from the group by Ondříček's camera.
- the gest — Props that expose a whole social relation through a posture: a wedding ring turned nervously on a finger, a window blind that will not stay down, parents jammed into a bed too small for their argument.
- dividual — The recurring composition of the individual isolated within a group — Andula among the ranks of dormitory beds, the factory women lined up before officialdom.
- dicisign — The dance-hall sequence is built from the exchange of looks between tables, shot with a loose roving cinéma-vérité camera whose presence as a perceiver of perceivers is felt.
- fabulation (legending) — The Chronique d'un été method of provoked real speech reworked: dialogue scripted to sound overheard, non-professionals cast for face and manner who 'seem less to act than to be,' and Milda, the small-time charmer whose glibness curdles into evasion.
- the people are missing — The state's official 'solution' to the factory town's gender imbalance — posting reservists — and the film's portrait of a state-managed society in which official optimism never meets private disappointment.