Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Liz and the Blue Bird
2018 · Naoko Yamada · Liz and the Blue Bird on Sightlines
The film would rather show you her shoes.
A girl stands in a corridor with one decision in front of her, whether to say hello, and Naoko Yamada frames her from the knees down. Weight goes onto one foot. Then back. The greeting arrives half a second late. That half second is the film.
Worth saying early: nothing in a drawn frame is an accident. The usual defense of behavioral detail in cinema is Bazin's — the camera catches more than the director intended, reality leaks in at the edges, and we trust what we see because nobody put it there. Drawings don't leak. Every ounce of shifted weight in Liz and the Blue Bird was decided by a person at a desk, then decided again for the next frame. So when Yamada spends her budget on feet, she isn't recording behavior. She's claiming it. This is what the moment is made of. Take it or leave it.
That claim is where Deleuze earns his place here, and not as decoration.
Deleuze builds his first cinema book on a distinction he takes from Bergson. Older arts pick privileged instants: the pose at the peak, the form that sums the action up, the discus-thrower at full coil. Film samples time mechanically and so gets the any-instant-whatever for free, the ordinary unremarkable slice between poses, which is where movement actually lives. Animation went the other way. It is made of key poses with in-betweens filled in around them. The pose is the unit of the craft. Yamada's invention, carried over from K-On! and refined here, is to make the in-between the unit instead. Her summits are unposed instants. Fingers resting on an oboe key. A gaze going down and away. The big poses another film would build toward tend to fall just past the cut.
And the faces. Deleuze argues that a close-up is not a shot of a face; it is a face. Anything held close enough starts behaving like one. Yamada tests this to its limit by handing the job to legs and feet, a system she worked out in A Silent Voice and brings to full strength here. The Deleuzian name for what those shots carry is the affection-image: feeling registered but not yet spent on action. The finer node is the potisign, the icon of power, where small movements accumulate toward a threshold that may never be crossed. Feet shifting weight before a greeting is exactly that graph, plotted in shoes. Meanwhile the real face sits in the out-of-field, just past the frame line, close and adjacent and unavailable. That withholding is not coyness. It's the film's argument about how much a face does for us in ordinary cinema, and how little we notice.
Kensuke Ushio builds the score out of footsteps and breath, which means the body is generating the music. Duration becomes audible. Deleuze's cinema of the body is this: the everyday body, standing and waiting and adjusting, carrying time rather than executing a plot. And the hesitation before the greeting is what he calls a gest, a term he takes from Brecht — a posture that exposes the relation inside it. Half a second tells you who needs whom, and by how much. Neither girl says so for another hour.
There is a reason nothing can be solved. The year ends. Separation here is not a villain to defeat or a misunderstanding to clear up, so the sensory-motor circuit that runs most movies, perceive the problem and act on it, has nothing to bite. What's left is looking and listening. Deleuze calls those pure optical and sound situations, and calls the person caught in one a seer. The oboist watching her friend across a rehearsal room is a seer in exactly this sense. The lineage is named in the film itself: Ozu's Late Spring, the low camera, the cutaway to an empty corridor held after everyone has gone. Deleuze reads those held stretches in Ozu as time given directly, dead time, the everyday allowed to sit there. Yamada inherits the grammar intact and puts fluorescent light in it. Tamako Love Story taught her how long a doorway can hold.
Then there is the fairy tale. The band is rehearsing a piece about a girl and a bird who cannot stay together, and the parallel is obvious to every person in the building except possibly the two it describes. This is a crystal-image, Deleuze's densest idea and his most useful one: an actual thing and its virtual double reflecting each other until you can't say which is the original. The watercolor interludes are not an illustration running alongside the school story. They are its mirror, and the two keep trading places. Each girl has cast herself in the tale, and the casting is wrong, and discovering that is the plot. The piece itself functions as a seed crystal dropped into the rehearsal room, a small ordered thing around which the whole diffuse solution of the friendship organizes.
The third-movement duet is where this pays off. Deleuze has a figure for it: the movement of the world, where a character goes still and the world does the moving, the dancer absorbed into the dance. The two stop being girls who might say something and become the thing the music needs. Everything the friendship can't state gets stated, loudly, in a form neither of them has to own afterward.
What Yamada proved, extracting a two-hander out of the Sound! Euphonium ensemble with its close-mic'd instruments and rehearsal-room blocking, borrowing the sun-hazed distance of The Virgin Suicides and its refusal to explain girls: a drawn film can work at the resolution of behavior rather than expression. Animation, the medium of exaggeration, can withhold. That is now available to anyone who wants it.
Watch it again and try to keep track of which girl is the bird. You'll lose track. And the next time a film hands you a face in close-up, notice how much of the work it's doing for you.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — Yamada's behavioral method — feet shifting weight, fingers on an oboe key, the half-second hesitation before a greeting — makes the unposed in-between the unit of the film, inverting animation's key-pose craft.
- icon of power (potisign) — The legs-and-feet framing system inherited from A Silent Voice: micro-movements accumulating toward a threshold (the greeting) that may never be crossed.
- out-of-field-relative — Framing from the knees down and on downcast averted gazes keeps the face adjacent and unavailable, just past the frame line.
- attitudes and postures — Kensuke Ushio's score built from footsteps and breath, so the everyday standing-and-waiting body generates the film's rhythm and carries its duration.
- the gest — The half-second hesitation before a greeting, which exposes the asymmetry of who needs whom inside an ordinary private moment.
- pure optical and sound situations — Graduation and separation cannot be acted on or defeated, so the girls (and we) are left only to look and listen across a rehearsal room.
- temps mort — The Ozu debt named in the lineage — low camera, pillow-shot cutaways to empty corridors, holding on doorways and empty air after the figures have gone.
- hyalosign — The fairy tale of the girl and the bluebird who cannot stay together mirrors the friendship until the two are indiscernible, each girl having cast herself wrongly in the story; watercolor interlude against fluorescent corridor.
- crystal-seed — The rehearsed piece itself, a self-contained mise-en-abyme dropped into the band room, around which the diffuse friendship organizes.
- movement of world — The third-movement duet rehearsal, where the two go still as players and the music does the moving, saying everything the friendship cannot.