Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of High Hopes
1989 · Mike Leigh · High Hopes on Sightlines
Two people stand in front of a big stone head in Highgate Cemetery. The head is Karl Marx. Under it is the instruction everybody knows: the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Cyril reads it. Then he and Shirley go home, and the film carries on for another hour, and nothing gets changed.
That gap is the film. Cyril sees his situation with total clarity. His mother is the last council tenant on a terrace being bought up around her. His sister has gone over to the money. The couple who have taken the house next door treat the street as an investment. None of that understanding converts into anything he can do with his hands. Mike Leigh made a comedy out of a man who can see and cannot act, which happens to be the exact hinge on which Gilles Deleuze splits the history of cinema in two. Borrowing his vocabulary for an hour makes the film sharper, not more abstract.
Deleuze's account of classical cinema is physical and easy to hold. Someone perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts; the act changes the situation; the cutting exists to carry that chain along. He calls the link between perceiving and acting sensory-motor, and the whole apparatus the movement-image. After the war, films began appearing where the link went slack, where a character perceives and the perception has nowhere to go. Deleuze calls that character a seer: someone who watches and endures instead of intervening. The general condition he calls the crisis of the action-image, and he dates it to Italian neorealism, to people walking through a ruin they have no power to repair. Philip Davis plays Cyril as precisely this. Watchful, wry, quietly disappointed, carrying an inherited socialism with nowhere to put it. The cemetery scene is what Deleuze would call a discourse-image: an image that poses a problem in the form of a statement it cannot act on. A man goes to a grave to be told to change the world.
Why bother with the terms? Because the standard complaint about a film like this is that not much happens in it. Deleuze lets you see that the not-happening is the argument.
The other symptoms are all present. The crisis, in his account, arrives with a dispersive situation: a lot of people loosely attached to one another instead of one line of cause and effect. High Hopes has three households that barely touch. Cyril and Shirley's cramped, plant-filled flat. Mrs. Bender's dim council house. Valerie and Martin's knocked-through display home. Leigh cross-cuts them so the meaning comes by contrast rather than consequence. Nothing in one house makes anything happen in another. They sit next to each other, like the wall.
And the scenes are long. Jon Gregory's cutting lets an encounter run to its full social length, so the birthday party and the tea at Valerie's become unbearable in real time rather than being trimmed for pace. Deleuze's word is temps mort, dead time: stretches where the action does not advance and you are left with duration, with people being in a room. This is where Leigh meets André Bazin, who argued that chopping an event into shots pre-digests it for you, and that holding the shot leaves the ambiguity of real life inside the frame. Leigh holds. The comedy comes from how long he holds. The look comes from the same tradition: Roger Pratt extends the patient, unglamorised observation Loach brought to working-class rooms in Kes (1969), which came in turn out of the Free Cinema habit, in A Taste of Honey (1961) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), of shooting ordinary lives in real streets and letting the environment do the dramatising.
What Leigh is holding is bodies. His method, months of paid rehearsal and improvisation with no screenplay to green-light, doesn't produce dialogue so much as people with their histories in their posture. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, calls this the gest: an attitude of the body that lays bare a social relation without anyone having to state it. Edna Doré's Mrs. Bender, frail and nearly silent, is a gest for what happened to a generation of tenants. So is the way the Boothe-Braines' vowels work as a piece of furniture. Leigh had been building this instrument for two decades: the held silences of Bleak Moments (1971), the class-legible props and manners of Nuts in May (1976), and above all Abigail's Party (1977), which set naturalistic pathos in the have-nots against grotesque caricature in the aspirant. That is the exact tonal machine High Hopes runs between Valerie and Cyril.
That machine is the film's most argued-over feature, and Deleuze explains it better than the reviews did. The Benders are shot in the register of the seer. Valerie and Martin are not. They belong to what Deleuze calls the impulse-image: a world of appetites erupting through the social surface, people driven rather than deciding, objects turned into fetishes that hold the drive in place. Valerie's hysteria, Martin's philandering, the status goods arranged around the knock-through. This is naturalism in Deleuze's sense, and naturalism always runs downhill. Two regimes in one movie. It looks like inconsistency. It reads better as a diagnosis: the people who lost have become watchers, and the people who won have become appetites.
Meanwhile the Boothe-Braines are emptying the terrace. Their minimalism is tasteful and evacuating, a show home where a house used to be, which pushes it toward what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever, a space that has stopped being the setting for anyone's life. And behind it, sharing a party wall with Mrs. Bender's threadbare rooms, sits the film's symbol in the strict sense: the one object that condenses the whole relation. Britain divided not across a map but down the middle of a Victorian terrace, a brick thick.
Which leaves the thing Cyril and Shirley argue about for the length of the film: whether to have a child. Deleuze's late idea about political cinema is that modern films can no longer show a people rising, because the people are missing, and what remains is to invent one. Cyril's socialism has no constituency. Marx is a monument with a fence around it. The argument about a baby is that argument brought down to domestic scale. Whether anything is worth handing on, and whether there will be anybody left to hand it to.
So they take Mrs. Bender up onto the roof to look out over London. It isn't a solution and Leigh doesn't pretend it is. It's a vantage, which is the one thing you can give a person who can see and cannot act. The film gave Leigh a vantage too. After seventeen years away from cinema screens it turned a television dramatist into a film author with a career, and it proved a feature could be built out of rehearsal instead of a script and still find an audience. Watch it again for the gaps: the pauses nobody fills, the quiet after a joke has gone too far, the shot that stays a beat past the end of the scene. That isn't slackness. That's what a film looks like when it knows exactly what is wrong and has nowhere to put its hands.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Philip Davis's Cyril is watchful, wry and quietly disappointed, a man whose inherited socialism has nowhere to go; he perceives gentrification, his mother's isolation and his sister's defection with complete clarity and can act on none of it.
- the seer (voyant) — The camera tends to hold and watch rather than chase, and Cyril is written as an observer of his own situation; the Highgate visit to Marx's grave puts him in front of an injunction to change the world that he can only read.
- the discourse-image — The Highgate Cemetery elevation: the camera contemplating Marx's monument and its famous injunction to change rather than merely interpret the world — the film's central problem posed as a statement it cannot act upon.
- dispersive situation — No conventional plot, only converging pressures across three barely-connected households — Cyril and Shirley's flat, Mrs. Bender's council house, Valerie and Martin's knock-through — cross-cut so meaning emerges from contrast rather than causation.
- dead time (temps mort) — Jon Gregory's cutting lets scenes run to their full social length — the excruciating birthday party, the awful tea at Valerie's — so discomfort accumulates in real time instead of being clipped for pace.
- cinema of the body — Edna Doré's Mrs. Bender is a study in frail, near-silent dignity whose scenes anchor the film's pathos; performance, not montage, carries the meaning inside the long held takes.
- the gest — Leigh's months of paid rehearsal and improvisation build character as posture and idiom — accent, vocabulary and volume locate every figure on the social map, and décor becomes characterization, so a social relation is exposed without being stated.
- impulse-image (naturalism) — Heather Tobias's Valerie as a grotesque of nouveau-riche hysteria and Philip Jackson's Martin as a coarse philanderer, surrounded by the props of consumption and status objects in the brittle over-decorated knock-through — drives erupting under the social surface.
- any-space-whatever — The tasteful, evacuating minimalism the Boothe-Braines impose on the old terrace, and the show-home emptiness Pratt frames against the boxed-in quality of working-class rooms.
- symbol — The gentrifying terrace where a council tenant and a wine-drinking couple share a party wall — the dossier's own naming of the film's central image of a Britain being divided in place.
- the people are missing — Cyril's socialism has no constituency to act with; the unresolved question of whether he and Shirley will have a child stands in for legacy and whether anything worth continuing can be handed on.