Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of If Beale Street Could Talk
2018 · Barry Jenkins · If Beale Street Could Talk on Sightlines
A face fills the frame, lit gold, and looks straight out at you. Not past the lens. Into it. Barry Jenkins holds the shot longer than the scene requires, long enough that you start to feel looked at in return, and then he cuts to the other face doing exactly the same thing. Two people in love, each one standing in the camera's place for the other. That reverse shot is the film's entire argument, and it is worth asking why a movie about a man jailed for a crime he did not commit spends so much of itself there.
On paper the story is a machine. A young couple in Harlem, a false charge, a pregnant woman setting out to prove her fiancé innocent. A wrong, a plan, an act that puts the world back in order. Gilles Deleuze had a name for that machine. He called it the action-image, and he thought it was the material American cinema was built out of: a character perceives a situation, the situation presses on him, he acts, the act transforms it. Perceive, react, resolve. The circuit closes.
What Deleuze noticed, watching postwar European film, was that the circuit had begun to fail. Characters saw things they could not act on. The situation was too large, or too rigged, or simply indifferent to being acted upon, and what remained when action drained out of the image was seeing. He called this the crisis of the action-image, and he treated it not as a failure of storytelling but as the start of a different kind of cinema.
If Beale Street Could Talk is a wrongful-conviction story that keeps declining the wrongful-conviction grammar. The case is there, the lawyers and the testimony and the grinding apparatus. But the film's attention is forever sliding off the machinery and back onto the faces of the people it is happening to. If you came for a procedural, that can feel like drift. It isn't drift. Jenkins is converting one kind of image into another right in front of you.
Deleuze's word for what's left behind is an opsign, a pure optical situation: an image you can no longer read as a cue for what happens next, so you have to look at it for its own sake. The person stuck inside one he called a voyant, a seer. Not a passive figure. A seer is someone whose power to act has been confiscated and whose power to see has become unbearable as a result. Regina King's mother is this film's great seer. The story's most devastating passage rests on her shoulders, and she carries it almost entirely with her face.
Here is Jenkins's specific invention, and it is a real one. The seer, as cinema had him, came out of rubble. Bazin defended the neorealists on the grounds that their long takes and unresolved situations kept faith with the ambiguity of the real and refused to tidy the world into plot; their watchers stood in bombed streets, and the withheld action left an austerity behind it. Jenkins keeps the withheld action and throws out the austerity. His seers stand in gold and emerald. He took the founding condition of the time-image, the person who can only look, and made looking itself into an act of love. That is how a formal condition becomes a moral one, and why tenderness, rendered with enough care, works here as a form of protest.
Which brings the close-ups into focus. For Deleuze a close-up is not a face in a place; it is a feeling lifted clean out of cause and effect. He distinguishes the face working through micro-movements toward some threshold from the immobile reflecting face that holds a single quality steady, wonder most often. Jenkins's faces are the second kind, and he and James Laxton hold them past the point of comfort, so that the quality has time to stop being a beat in a scene and become a fact about the world.
Because those faces look into the lens, the camera stops being neutral. Deleuze calls it a dicisign when the camera perceives someone who is themselves perceiving, so that you feel the camera's presence as an occupied position rather than a window. Jenkins inherits the frontal address from Do the Right Thing, where Spike Lee had a character hold the audience's gaze and put it on the hook for the racial drama on screen. Jenkins keeps the hook and changes what hangs from it. You are not being accused. You are being looked at with love, from the position of the beloved, and then the film shows you what the state does to the two people doing the looking.
The rest of the method follows from that. Color absorbs the scene instead of decorating it, which is Deleuze's affective color, a hue taking over a whole situation's feeling. The gold and emerald come from In the Mood for Love, whose jewel palette and returning musical refrain taught Jenkins to carry longing in the blocking and the camera rather than in the plot. And when the lovers cannot move the world, the world moves around them: the gliding Steadicam orbit, the slowed walk. Deleuze calls this the movement of the world, the character grown still while everything else takes over the motion. Jenkins brought the technique with him from Moonlight, along with Laxton and Nicholas Britell.
Britell's score is the second register. Brass and strings, breathing, running on through scenes of institutional cruelty without once conceding to them. That is why the film can hold a furious indictment and a swooning romance at the same time with neither one cancelling the other. Strictly, a Deleuzian disjunction means image and sound telling two separate stories across a gap. Jenkins's version is warmer but built the same way. The music descends from Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, wall-to-wall scoring and storybook color for lovers pulled apart by circumstance, and it stays fixed on the love while the images go on showing the machinery.
And then there is memory, which is the film's real architecture. The romance reaches us already remembered, told from a later position, so the past is not a dated flashback you cut to but a region the film lives inside. Deleuze called these sheets of past, the past as an order you move around in rather than a card you play. The past is where the couple are free. The present is where they are held. The film moves between them at will, and that freedom of movement is the source of both its sweetness and its cruelty.
Two ancestors supply the ethic. Nothing But a Man gave the unhurried domestic intimacy of a Black courtship buckling under economic and racial pressure, and its flat refusal of melodrama. Killer of Sheep gave the LA Rebellion's near-plotless attention to mood, faces, and ordinary grace over incident. Both of those films earned their truthfulness partly through austerity. Jenkins's wager is that you can keep the truth and add an orchestra, a palette, and a camera that adores. What he put into circulation is the demonstration that a film can run on regard: that holding a face is not a pause in the storytelling but the storytelling itself, and that this works on a subject where sentiment has always been suspected of softening the politics.
The film leaves a question open that it cannot answer, and shouldn't. What is the evidentiary weight of being looked at with love, inside a system that has already decided? Next time, watch the length of the looks. They are the film's only argument, and they are longer than they need to be on purpose.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The premise is a pure action-image setup (falsely imprisoned fiancé, a woman setting out to prove his innocence), but the film's attention keeps sliding off the case's machinery and back onto the faces of the people it is happening to.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — With the couple separated by the carceral system, looking is the only capacity left them, and Jenkins builds the film out of images held for their own sake rather than as cues for the next action.
- the seer (voyant) — Regina King's mother carries the story's most devastating passage on her shoulders, and carries it with her face — an endurer rather than an agent.
- qualisign (icon of quality) — The Laxton close-up inherited from Moonlight: the plunging, softly-lit face held past comfort, immobile, expressing a single sustained quality of wonder.
- dicisign — Faces gaze straight into the lens in reverse-shot, so the camera is felt as an occupied position — the frontal into-the-lens address inherited from Do the Right Thing, redirected from accusation to adoration.
- affective colour — Gold and emerald saturate every frame, absorbing each scene's feeling rather than decorating it — the jewel-toned palette openly modelled on In the Mood for Love.
- movement of the world — The gliding Steadicam orbit and Wong-derived slow motion: the lovers grow still while the camera and the world take over the motion, rendering longing through blocking rather than plot.
- audiovisual disjunction — Britell's near-continuous brass-and-strings score, descended from Demy's wall-to-wall romantic underscore, keeps singing the romance across scenes of the justice system's cruelty, so the two registers run in parallel without either cancelling the other.
- sheets of past — The facet 'Memory & amnesia': the courtship reaches us as already-remembered, a region the film inhabits and moves around in against the carceral present, rather than a dated flashback.