Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Él
1953 · Luis Buñuel · Él on Sightlines
A priest is washing feet. It is Maundy Thursday, the ritual is public and devout, and one of the well-dressed men in the congregation is looking along the row of bare feet with an attention that has nothing to do with the liturgy. His eye stops at one. He follows it up to a face. That is where the plot of Él begins, and Buñuel stages it with no signal that anything has gone wrong: no music sting, no tilted frame. The man is Arturo de Córdova, a genuine star of the period, courteous and beautifully turned out. For the next ninety minutes he will be courteous to everyone he ruins.
Most films run on the circuit Deleuze called the action-image. A character perceives a situation, acts on it, the situation changes. Francisco looks like he is running that circuit all film long. He courts, marries, investigates, accuses, punishes; he is never idle. But his acts never answer the situation in front of him, because situations are not what move him. Deleuze had a name for this other regime, and he built it partly out of Buñuel: the impulse-image, the cinema of naturalism, where conduct is driven from underneath by an appetite that picks an object, seizes it, and wears it down.
Deleuze gives that world two floors, and Él is the cleanest demonstration you could ask for. The derived milieu is the real furnished place: Francisco's house, the ornate staircase, the ecclesiastical décor, the servants, the ordered routine of a wealthy Catholic bachelor. The originary world is not a different place. It is the same place seen as a field of raw drives, where things are not property but prey. This is where the Deleuzian lens earns itself, because the merely psychiatric reading — clinical study of paranoia — is true and slightly inert. It leaves the film's strangest decisions unexplained. Why does the desire ignite in a church? Why is the décor ecclesiastical? Why is the breakdown staged in a bell tower, among stairs, ironwork and bells? Because the drive is not sealed inside Francisco's skull. It lives in the milieu he is entitled to. Bourgeois-Catholic propriety is not the healthy surface the sickness hides beneath. It is the habitat.
The drive works by seizing parts. Deleuze calls the part-object torn loose from its setting and charged with compulsive force a fetish, and Él is full of them: a foot, a hairpin, a length of rope, a needle and thread, a revolver. Watch how they migrate. Each one begins as ordinary domestic equipment and ends as an instrument of the delusion. The needle and thread belong in a sewing basket until the night Francisco approaches his sleeping wife with them.
Impulse-images have a direction, and the direction is down. Deleuze calls it the line of slope: an entropy running through the film toward exhaustion. Él's slope is the marriage itself. Courtship, wedding, honeymoon, domestic crisis — the standard beats of a romance picture, laid out as a staircase going the wrong way. Buñuel supplies literal stairs to match, and shoots them for ascent, descent, and the sound of someone coming up.
The camera is complicit, which is the film's real audacity. Figueroa's deep, sculptural black-and-white gives Buñuel depth of field, the tool realist critics prized because it leaves the viewer free to choose where to look inside a frame. Él hands you that depth and then hands you a keyhole. The camera adopts Francisco's vantage: the sightline through the door, the surveying gaze down the staircase. Deleuze's term for an image that shows us a character in the act of perceiving while we feel the camera's own presence doing it is the dicisign. The queasiness of the film is located exactly there. For seconds at a time you are looking with him, and his looking is competent, and only afterwards do you notice whose eyes you borrowed.
The editing keeps the trap shut. Savage's cutting is invisible in the classical manner, clean and continuity-driven, so nothing sorts the evidence for us. What we get instead is what Deleuze, in the small form of the action-image, calls the index of equivocity: a gesture that could belong to two entirely different situations. A visit, a greeting, an ordinary evening — innocent life and the conspiracy against Francisco are made of the same footage. De Córdova never signals madness. He plays a composed, wounded, reasonable gentleman for whom every act of surveillance is an act of love, so his behaviour reaches us as symptom rather than as performance of illness. Even the soundtrack is conscripted: in the church, the murmuring congregation seems to him to be laughing.
What this did to narrative is easy to state and hard to do. Buñuel took the Mexican melodrama's romance-and-marriage shape and emptied it of romance, so that every familiar beat arrives as evidence. Gloria carries the point of view; the story reaches us partly as her retrospective account of how a marriage became a trap. So the film addresses us twice at once, from inside the delusion and from outside it, without ever switching style to tell us which we are in.
The grammar is inherited, and the debts are specific. The isolating close-up that cuts a body part loose into an autonomous erotic object is Un Chien Andalou's invention, brought here into a pew. The deadpan straight face for amour fou and anticlerical outrage is L'Âge d'Or's. The decisive one is Los Olvidados: Buñuel's first film with Figueroa, where he worked out how to embed a surrealist subjective interlude inside otherwise invisible naturalist continuity. Él lives on that seam. Figueroa's own idiom, codified on María Candelaria, lends the melodrama its sober weight. From Hollywood come Suspicion's retrospective wife's-eye reconstruction of a respectable husband, and Gaslight's staircase and parlour as the theatre of a husband's methodical persecution. Él's move is to take that thriller and put the camera inside the husband.
Forward, the line runs straight through Buñuel's own work: the obsessive, sexually pathological man of Ensayo de un crimen two years later, the fetish and fixation of Belle de jour. He named Él among the films closest to him. Mexican audiences laughed at the scenes he meant most seriously, and the picture's elevation came later and from Europe. That is roughly what it costs to prove that the most disturbing material a cinema can carry does not need distorted style to carry it. A house, a staircase and a man whose manners never slip will do.
The film ends with Francisco at peace in a monastery, and then with him walking away down a path in a crooked zig-zag. Deleuze would call that walk a gest: a posture that exposes the relation the story has just claimed to resolve. Watch for it. Then ask what Buñuel actually means by it — whether the walk is the truth beneath the cure, or whether he is telling us there is no beneath, and the drive has simply found better accommodation.
Concepts in play
- impulse-image — Francisco acts constantly (courtship, surveillance, accusation, punishment) but his acts answer a drive rather than the situation before him; the film is a portrait of appetite selecting an object and wearing it down.
- naturalism — The bourgeois-Catholic surface of an ordered household with ecclesiastical décor, beneath which pure drive erupts; Buñuel treats respectability as pathology's natural habitat.
- derived-milieu — Francisco's curated museum of propriety: ornate staircases, ecclesiastical décor, an ordered household and servants, staged so orderliness itself becomes claustrophobic.
- originary-world — The church, the vertiginous stacked verticality of Guanajuato, and the bell tower's geometry of stairs, ironwork and bells, where the milieu turns savage and externalizes Francisco's spiraling mind.
- fetish — The foot glimpsed at the Maundy Thursday foot-washing, and the hairpin, the rope, the needle and thread, the revolver — domestic objects that migrate into the delusion.
- entropy / degradation — The melodrama's beats (courtship, wedding, honeymoon, domestic crisis) run as an irreversible downhill slope toward the bell tower and the attempt to bind and sew his sleeping wife; the staircase as recurring site of descent.
- dicisign — The camera periodically adopts Francisco's paranoid vantage — the sightline through a keyhole, the surveying gaze down a staircase — so composition implicates the viewer in his suspicion.
- symptom — De Córdova's refusal to play madness broadly: a composed, courteous, wounded gentleman for whom every act of surveillance and cruelty is experienced as justified love, so conduct reads as symptom of a hidden drive.
- index-of-equivocity — Invisible continuity-driven cutting presents ordinary domestic acts without sorting them, so the same gesture belongs at once to innocent life and to Francisco's conspiracy; the audience is invited both to inhabit the delusion and to observe it clinically.
- the-gest — The closing image of Francisco's crooked, zig-zagging walk after his apparently peaceful retreat into monastic life, a posture that undoes the film's stated resolution.