Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mary Poppins
1964 · Robert Stevenson · Mary Poppins on Sightlines
A man in a straw hat is dancing with penguins. They are waiters, drawn in ink and paint, and they keep time with him beat for beat. Dick Van Dyke is a real body photographed on a Burbank soundstage. The penguins were added later, by hand. Yet the moment doesn't look pasted together. Look at the edges of the live figures, at loose hair and thin fabric. They sit against the cartoon world without the colored fringe that usually gave the trick away. That clean edge was an engineering problem before it was a pleasure, and Disney solved it on purpose.
The solution was the sodium vapor process. The actors performed in front of a screen lit by a single yellow wavelength of light. A prism inside the camera sent that wavelength to a separate strip of film, which recorded a perfect silhouette, while the color image was shot as usual. Ub Iwerks, the studio's veteran technical inventor, is the man most closely tied to perfecting it. Peter Ellenshaw painted the rooftop London. Cotton Warburton cut the numbers so that song, step and drawn motion never drift apart. Each of these is a particular invention by a particular person. Together they let a feature film walk from one kind of image into another without tripping.
Why bring Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, to a Disney nanny picture? Because he took the Hollywood musical seriously, writing about Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli, and his ideas fit this film unusually well. He never wrote about Mary Poppins. But he gives us words for what it does.
Start with his big picture. Most classical films, he argued, run on the movement-image: a character takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the editing links what they see to what they do. Mary Poppins has that setup. A father, played by David Tomlinson, is stiff and absent. Two children run through nannies. Someone arrives to fix things. But look at who arrives. Julie Andrews plays Mary brisk, self-possessed and a little ironic, keeping a trace of the severity of P. L. Travers's books. She does not change. She doesn't struggle or doubt, and the household never really pushes back at her. The usual engine of the story film, a hero straining against her world, has been switched off at the center. Something else has to supply the motion.
That something is the song. Here the numbers aren't breaks from the story. They are how it moves. Each Sherman brothers song is tied to a lesson, a mood or a change, and the lesson is staged as a show more than acted out. Deleuze would place this near what he called the attraction-image, where action is turned into spectacle and figure. A chore doesn't get done. It gets set to music, and the music does the persuading. Even Mrs. Banks's politics come to us as a number, "Sister Suffragette."
Then there is the dance, and here Deleuze's idea of world-movement comes in. In the musical, he noticed, a character's own small movement gets taken up by a larger movement that seems to belong to the world. A walk becomes a step. Then the set, the crowd and the colors carry the step on, as though reality were dancing on the character's behalf. He treated this as a kind of dream with no dreamer. Nobody has to fall asleep for it. The waking world simply starts to behave like a dream. That is the "Jolly Holiday" sequence exactly. The photographed world gives way to a drawn one, and the drawn world answers back, penguins and all. The dancer stops being the source of the motion and becomes its occasion.
"Step in Time" takes this to the scale of a city. Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood's choreography sends the chimney sweeps across Ellenshaw's rooftops in one long production number, and the chimneys and skyline turn into a stage. It is the film's kinetic center, and the clearest case of the world, not a hero, doing the moving.
All of this depends on a strange use of the frame. Edward Colman's compositions were built to leave room for things that weren't there on the day of shooting: an empty space held for a penguin, a backing waiting for a painted sky. Deleuze calls the frame a closed set, a system of everything it contains. In this film the system is fully planned, high-key, frontal and readable, with nothing hidden in shadow. The flat storybook London isn't a cost-cutting compromise. It is a style.
That puts the film on the far side of an argument André Bazin, the great French critic of realism, made in the 1950s. When a scene's wonder depends on two things sharing the same space, Bazin said, the filmmaker must not cut between them. We have to see them together, really together. Mary Poppins agrees that we must see them together. Then it manufactures the togetherness. The sodium matte exists to fake a shared space so cleanly that Bazin's suspicion has nowhere to land. Where Bazin trusted the world to show its own wonder, Disney builds a world that can be trusted to dance.
The ancestry is right there in the craft. The Alice Comedies of the 1920s first put a live performer inside a hand-drawn world. Fantasia worked out the studio's rule of cutting animation precisely to a pre-recorded score. The Three Caballeros and Song of the South tested the mattes and the full hybrid feature. Gene Kelly's duet with Jerry the mouse in Anchors Aweigh is the direct model for Van Dyke and the penguins. The Wizard of Oz supplied the soundstage Technicolor fantasy. What Mary Poppins added was polish and integration. The hybrid stopped being a novelty insert and became a musical device sustained across a whole feature. Its template of the outsider who mends a broken household has been copied ever since.
So here is the question the film leaves open. If the world can be made to dance on cue, what's left for a person to do? The film keeps its eye on the father, the one character least willing to step in time. Watch him against all that motion. And watch the edges of the figures in the drawn scenes, where an engineer's yellow light lets a real dancer and an invented world share the same air.
Concepts in play
- movement of world — Van Dyke's dance with the animated penguin waiters and the 'Jolly Holiday' composite, where the drawn world takes up the dancer's movement; 'Step in Time' carries it across the rooftops
- onirosign (the implied dream) — The move from photographed reality into hand-drawn fantasy in 'Jolly Holiday,' presented as the waking world turning dreamlike rather than as a framed dream
- attraction-image — Songs and magical episodes are the mechanism of change: each Sherman song is attached to a lesson or transformation, staged as spectacle rather than acted out, including Mrs. Banks's 'Sister Suffragette'
- the movement-image — A classical situation (rigid, absent father, estranged children) plus an agent sent to repair it, with Mary herself a static figure who does not change, so motion passes to the numbers
- the closed set (cadre) — Colman's high-key, frontal compositions framed to leave room for animated elements and matte extensions; London built from painted backings and miniatures