Love Is the Devil: Study for a Portrait of Francis Bacon · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Love Is the Devil stakes its claim on a radical proposition: if Bacon's paintings dissolve the figure into meat and smear, the film of his life should subject cinema to the same pressure. Maybury works squarely within the **affection-image** — the close-up face as the primary register of feeling — but deforms it through Baconian optics: John Mathieson shoots Derek Jacobi through curved glass so that a cheekbone or jaw blooms out of recognition, converting what ought to be revelation into facial anguish, feeling pushed past legibility into distortion. The figures themselves inhabit **any-space-whatever**, Deleuze's term for disconnected, evacuated space stripped of coordinates: Bacon's habit of pinning subjects in shallow cage-like pools of light becomes, in the film, lamplight suspended in total blackness, with George Dyer (Daniel Craig) increasingly marooned in those voids as his addiction swallows him. What joins these strategies is the film's refusal of causal narrative in favor of **opsigns & sonsigns** — pure optical situations where atmosphere does the work of exposition, causation psychological and tonal rather than plotted, the whole shaped as a tone poem rather than a tragedy. The craft lineage runs through Derek Jarman: Maybury worked inside his unit on The Last of England (1987), and the governing model here is Caravaggio (1986), Jarman's painter-portrait that makes meaning through chiaroscuro composition and tableau — never depicting the act of painting, always embodying the painted world — the template Maybury directly inherits.