The Rider · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Brady's right hand closes on a rope and won't open. He works the fingers back one at a time with his left, the way you'd free a stuck latch. The film doesn't dress this up. Joshua James Richards shoots the injury at the scale of a hand rather than a whole man, which keeps it from becoming a symbol of anything. It stays a piece of equipment that has started failing on the job.

Start there, because that hand is the exact place where a whole kind of cinema stops working.

Deleuze's name for the movies most of us learned to watch is the movement-image. Someone takes in a situation and acts to change it, and the act lands. Perception runs into action like current down a wire; he called the wire the sensory-motor circuit. The Western is its cleanest case. The country poses a problem and a man's body is the answer. Ride out, rope it, get on. The genre has spent a century closing that loop.

The Rider is built out of the loop coming apart. Brady reads a nervous colt better than anyone else in the film. He knows the next thing to do, and then the hand seizes. His judgment is intact; the wire isn't. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image, the point where a character can no longer respond adequately to what he perceives, and he thought the whole modern cinema came out of it.

You can watch this movie without any of that and still love it. But then its shape looks like a defect. Nothing escalates. The middle is a run of days: another grocery shift, another visit to Lane, another horse. Somebody is going to call it slow. Deleuze gives you the better description. This isn't a recovery arc with the recovery withheld. It is what a film has to turn into once acting is no longer available to it. What's left he called a pure optical situation, an opsign: a stretch where a person can only look, because nothing they could do follows from what they see. The one who looks like that is a seer. Brady at the chute, on the wrong side of a rail he used to walk through, is the entire idea in one image. Zhao builds fences, gates and corral bars into a running visual system, and the composition keeps repeating the same relation: the man, the barrier, and the work he was made for on the far side of it. Deleuze borrowed a word from Brecht for a posture that shows you a social arrangement instead of arguing it. The gest. Brady against a fence is one. So is his body indoors, huge and articulate on a horse, small and short of words at a kitchen table.

The hand does something more specific. Deleuze thought the close-up was the image of a feeling with nowhere to go, the affect that swells into the gap when perception can't discharge into movement. His finest version of it, the potisign, is a face crossed by small movements building toward a threshold. The Rider's face is a hand. Grip, tremor, lock, the slow prying open. The gap in the circuit isn't described anywhere in the dialogue. It's filmed, at close range, as a series of micro-movements that never arrive.

Then there's the accident itself, which the film refuses to stage. When the fall finally appears it's low-resolution phone footage, watched. That's a lectosign in Deleuze's sense: an image that has lost its self-evidence and has to be read rather than simply seen. The cut treats it as information, not climax. The same logic governs the care-facility scenes with Lane Scott, where meaning arrives through hand signs, gesture, and old competition video, and the camera stays frontal and still and declines to help.

Those scenes with Lane are also the film's crystal-image. Deleuze's crystal is a moment where the actual thing and its own image become impossible to tell apart, and each keeps handing off to the other. In one room you have Lane in the bed and Lane on the screen, mid-ride, at full power, and there is no angle from which the film lets you resolve them into a before and an after. Neither is more real. That is why the scene is unbearable, and it is also why it can't be moralized.

Zhao's own invention is the casting, and Deleuze had a word waiting for it. Brady Jandreau plays Brady Blackburn; his father and sister play his father and sister; his trailer is the trailer; the buckles and the scars are his. Deleuze, watching Rouch and Perrault film people who had been handed no images of themselves, called this fabulation: catching a real person in the act of legending himself, so the story is neither documentary record nor performance but a becoming that the camera made possible. The rule descends straight from Bicycle Thieves, where the man was cast for a laborer's frame rather than a technique. Zhao takes it literally: the horsemanship is not simulated because the horseman is not simulated.

Which brings in Bazin, who argued that when the essence of a scene lies in the simultaneous presence of two things, cutting is cheating. Nothing in cinema tests that rule like an animal. The gentling sequences run for minutes without compression because the film's real argument is that this is expertise, intelligence and love, and montage would only assert it. Huston shot the mustangs that way in The Misfits, waiting on the animals' actual behavior. Ray had already built the broken-champion story and the fence-and-chute economy in The Lusty Men; Peckinpah grafted his fiction onto a live rodeo in Junior Bonner; Malick and Days of Heaven taught this dusk light and this habit of carrying story in image and ambient sound; the Dardennes' Rosetta codified the handheld rig that rides at nape distance behind a working body, which is exactly where Richards sits. That last one has a Deleuzian name too, the dicisign, the camera perceiving a character in the act of perceiving. The plains never open like a proscenium here. They arrive as what a man sees while working.

What the film did was find a time-image inside American genre material without irony and without deconstruction. It didn't parody the Western or expose it. It kept the Western's tools, the horse, the chute, the horizon, and removed the one thing that made them a machine. Two years later Zhao scaled the same method up in Nomadland and the industry that ignored this film gave that one everything.

Watch it again for the hands, and for which side of the fence he is standing on. The film tells you the whole story twice in a language nobody in it speaks out loud.