Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Executioner
1963 · Luis García Berlanga · The Executioner on Sightlines
Most of The Executioner looks something like this. A cramped flat or a small office, too many people in it, and a camera that stands back far enough to hold the whole room and then doesn't cut. Everyone talks at once. A garrulous old man frets about his pension and his family's future. His daughter keeps steering the conversation back to practical matters. Neighbors, relatives and officials chip in from the edges of the frame. Somewhere in the middle, slightly off to one side, stands a pleasant young man who keeps starting sentences he never gets to finish.
The young man is José Luis, an undertaker who would rather emigrate and become a mechanic. The old man is Amadeo, and Amadeo's job is to execute people for the Spanish state with the garrote. José Luis marries Amadeo's daughter, Carmen. Amadeo is about to retire, and there is a flat on offer that is reserved for civil servants. You can probably see where this is heading. José Luis can see it too, and he keeps walking anyway.
Luis García Berlanga and his co-writer Rafael Azcona tell this with a completely straight face. Azcona had already used the same trap in El pisito, where a man marries a dying landlady to get her apartment. Here the price of the apartment is much worse. Nobody in the film is a villain. Everyone is reasonable and kind, and every small accommodation can be forgiven on its own terms. That is exactly why it chills.
Gilles Deleuze gives us a useful way to see what Berlanga is up to. Deleuze divided cinema into two great regimes. In the first, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the film is built so that seeing leads to doing. The classic hero sees the trap and breaks out of it. Deleuze argued that after the war this chain broke, first in Italian neorealism. Characters began to find themselves in situations they could see perfectly well but could no longer answer with an act. He called this the crisis of the action-image. The figure it produces he called the seer: someone who watches and endures where the old hero would have acted.
José Luis is a seer stuck inside a comedy. That is the lens's real use here. Without it, the obvious question is a question about his character: why doesn't he just say no? Nino Manfredi plays him as passive and sympathetic, a man whose tragedy is that he never quite refuses. Deleuze lets us ask a better question, about form. Where in this film would a refusal even happen? Berlanga builds no scene for it. There is no close-up where a man looks into his conscience and decides. The camera keeps its distance and keeps the whole room in view, and inside that room, with everyone talking, a no has nowhere to stand.
This is where the film's style becomes its argument. Berlanga's signature was the plano secuencia coral, the choral sequence shot, which he first worked out on Welcome Mr. Marshall! and sharpened on Plácido. With the great Italian cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, he stages crowded scenes in deep focus, where many figures stay legible at once. Deleuze calls this a dispersive situation: no single center, many weakly linked people, attention spread over a crowd. Here the dispersal is moral. The pressure on José Luis comes from no one in particular, so it comes from everywhere at once.
André Bazin, the critic who championed neorealism, praised deep focus and the long take because they leave the image ambiguous and let us choose where to look. Berlanga keeps that freedom and turns it into an accusation. You can look at anyone. You won't find anyone to blame. The soundtrack does the same work. Like nearly every Spanish and Italian film of the period, it was dubbed afterward in the studio, and Berlanga uses that control to layer the babble of family and officialdom. The noise of ordinary life is exactly what drowns out the moral question.
The film's dramatic mechanism has a precise name in Deleuze too. One of his signs of the smaller, cleverer kind of action film is the index of equivocity: a single act that belongs to two different situations at once. Accepting the post is a housing decision. It is also agreeing to kill people. Each step José Luis takes can be filed under the first heading, a flat, a family, a steady job, along with the comforting thought that condemned men are often pardoned. The comedy lives in the gap between the two situations, and the dread grows as that gap shrinks.
Then there is José Isbert as Amadeo, one of the great faces of Spanish cinema. He plays the executioner as a doting, chatty grandfather with a clerk's manner. Deleuze borrowed Brecht's word gest for a posture or attitude that makes a social relation visible in a body. Isbert's ordinariness is a gest of that kind. Killing appears here as civil service, with forms, a pension and a successor. This is the Spanish esperpento tradition descended from Valle-Inclán: bend reality into caricature so its truth shows. It shares the tone of the sainete, the comic sketch of everyday manners, but the sketch keeps tipping into horror.
The film's ancestry is easy to read. From Bicycle Thieves it takes the decent everyman whom economic need drives toward an impossible act. From Umberto D. it takes Zavattini's habit of patiently trailing everyday behavior and letting ordinary time pile up meaning, which Deleuze himself saw as the place where the seer was born. From Big Deal on Madonna Street it takes the farce that keeps running into grim material fact. Berlanga's contribution was to turn that neorealist way of watching into satire, with a camera that refuses to judge in order to show how judgment gets avoided.
That matters because of when the film appeared. In 1963 the Franco regime carried out several executions by garrote that drew international condemnation, among them the Communist Julián Grimau. The Executioner premiered at Venice that year, won the international critics' prize, and caused a diplomatic incident. A comedy turned out to be the sharpest political instrument available, because its target was not one tyrant but the comfort that lets everyone go along.
So watch the edges of the frame. Notice where José Luis is standing in each long take, who is talking over him, and how much room is left for him to speak. And keep asking the question the film never answers for you: in which of these crowded, friendly rooms did the way out close?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — José Luis sees exactly what the executioner's job is, yet each episode offers him an exit he fails to take. Seeing never turns into refusing, and the drama builds out of postponements and rationalizations.
- the seer (voyant) — Manfredi plays José Luis as a passive, sympathetic weakling who never quite refuses. He watches and endures his own drift and does not act on it.
- dispersive situation — The plano secuencia coral: many characters talking over one another in a single deep-focus long take, so the moral pressure comes from the crowd as a whole and not from any one antagonist.
- the frame (closed set) — Delli Colli's wide, deep-focus compositions pack flats, offices and public places with props and bodies. Privacy is impossible, and no single figure is ever separated from family, neighbors and bureaucracy.
- index of equivocity — Each accommodation (the marriage, the civil servants' flat, the hope that condemned men will be pardoned) belongs at once to a domestic situation and to the state's machinery of execution.
- the gest — José Isbert's Amadeo is a genial, chatty grandfather with a clerk's manner, worried about his pension. His ordinary bearing makes killing visible as civil service.