Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Forbidden Games
1952 · René Clément · Forbidden Games on Sightlines
After the planes go, a girl of about five is left standing on a country road holding a dead dog. Around her is what remains of a refugee column: people who, minutes before, were a slow crawl of Parisians heading south in the June 1940 exodus. Her parents are among the dead. Paulette doesn't scream and she doesn't run. She picks up the dog, because the dog is hers, and she carries it.
That shot contains the whole film, and it also marks a break in what movies were able to be about. For fifty years cinema ran on a simple engine: a character sees a situation, the situation demands something, the character acts, the act changes things. Gilles Deleuze called this the action-image, and he thought the war broke it. What surfaced afterward in Italian and French films was a figure with no move available, someone who can only look. Deleuze's word for that person is the seer, and he noticed that the purest seers of postwar cinema were children, precisely because a child's helplessness isn't a failure of nerve but a fact of size. Unable to act, the child is free to see. Edmund in Germany, Year Zero is Deleuze's own case in point, and this atlas lists that film as one of Clément's direct debts. So is Shoeshine. So is Bicycle Thieves. So is Rome, Open City. The craft-debt list and Deleuze's argument turn out to be the same list.
Where Clément departs from his teachers is the odd entry on that list: Vigo's Zéro de conduite, in which children's play mocks the hollow ceremony of adult authority. Rossellini gave the child a gaze. Clément gives her a job.
The job is the game. The dog needs burying, so Michel buries it; the grave needs a cross; one grave looks lonely, so they need more dead, insects and chicks and a mole, and more crosses. Michel takes them from graves, from a hearse, finally from the altar of the church. As behavior this is theft and sacrilege. As cinema it is the most interesting thing in the film, because the children have rebuilt the broken engine at a scale small enough to hold it. They can do nothing about the war. They can do something about a mole.
Deleuze would call their liturgy a gest: not an act that changes a situation but a posture that exposes one. The children perform the forms of mourning with total conviction and no understanding. A field away, the Dollé and Gouard families perform the same forms with total understanding and no conviction, trading insults over funerals and finally brawling in the graveyard, which Clément stages as farce. Set the two rites beside each other and the film has made its argument without a line of dialogue carrying it. Those adults belong to what Deleuze called naturalism, a social surface with appetite churning underneath, visible wherever the surface tears. The brawl is the tear.
The crosses are worth slowing down on. Following Peirce, Deleuze separates a mark from a demark. A mark is an object that means by habit: you see it and its usual chain arrives with it. In a French village nothing is more heavily marked than a cross. Death, priest, consolation, the promise. A demark is that same object knocked out of its groove, where habit stops telling you what to think and you have to read. A cross over a mole is a demark. That is why the sight is funny and unendurable at the same time, and why the adults, who possess only the mark, can see nothing but vandalism. The film's whole motor runs on this gap. Deleuze calls images built this way relation-images: the meaning isn't in the shot, it sits in a relation the audience holds and the characters don't. We know the game is grief. Nobody on screen does.
The style is built to keep us there. Robert Juillard's camera stays at child height, so the adult world arrives from below or crowded to the frame's edge. That's what Deleuze means by a dicisign, a camera you can feel perceiving someone who is perceiving. Brigitte Fossey's face does the rest: grave, watchful, unmoving, registering one quality without discharging it into anything. Deleuze's name for such a face is a qualisign, and Fossey's is among the great ones. And the long middle of the picture loafs along at the pace of a farm, weather and animals and mud, time that advances no plot. Dead time, in the technical sense, and the film needs it. Grief in a child doesn't arrive on schedule.
The prologue's method Clément imported from his own La Bataille du rail (1946), reportage staging with no cushioning, which is why the strafing plays as a pure optical situation rather than a set piece: nothing to do, only see. Bazin's postwar case for neorealism was that the camera should stop organizing the world into meaning in advance and let ambiguity stand. Clément honors that contract for ten minutes, then hands the rest to the tradition of quality, a literary screenplay, an engineered irony, the polished apparatus a younger generation of French critics would shortly declare the enemy. Read as a hybrid, that looks like a compromise. Read through the seer, it isn't. Both halves are doing one job, which is to keep a child in front of a catastrophe she cannot answer.
Even the score obeys. A war drama of 1952 would reach for strings; Clément uses one classical guitar, held back so long that each entrance lands, carrying the children's interior life since they can't speak it.
What the film changed is structural. It proved that a child's incomprehension could be a whole narrative architecture rather than one affecting scene, and that an episodic drift of small burials, bracketed by two catastrophes, would hold an audience better than a plot. The Golden Lion and the honorary Oscar made a modest French picture portable, and the form travelled with it.
The last shot is a relief center, a crowd, a girl calling for Michel and for her mother, then gone. The film never tells us what Paulette thinks a cross is. It stays outside her, which is the discipline that makes it hurt. Watch it again and keep count of the adult acts that change anything. The number is very low. Then watch the children's hands.
Concepts in play
- the seer (voyant) — Paulette after the strafing of the refugee column: orphaned, uncomprehending, 'grave, watchful, utterly present,' with no action available to her in the adult world.
- pure optical & sound situations — The aerial-attack prologue staged with documentary bluntness, 'chaos, running figures, sudden death rendered without lyricism' — a situation that can only be witnessed, not acted upon.
- crisis of the action-image — The Dollé–Gouard feud, a running quarrel over funerals and insults culminating in a graveyard brawl staged as grotesque farce: action that transforms nothing, against a war no character can answer.
- the gest — The children's secret liturgy of burials and stolen crosses — a mimicry of adult mourning that exposes the adults' hollow performance of the same rite; the cemetery becomes the frame's moral center.
- mark — The cross as an object meaningful by its customary chain in a Catholic peasant milieu — grave, priest, funeral, consolation — the chain the adults can read and nothing else.
- demark — Crosses stolen from graves, from a hearse, finally from the church altar and planted over insects, chicks and a mole: the object wrenched out of its habitual chain, forcing interpretation rather than recognition.
- relation-image (the mental-image) — The film's stated dramatic engine is dramatic irony: the audience reads the game as displaced grief while the adults read only sacrilege and delinquency — meaning held by a knowing third party outside the frame.
- dicisign — Juillard keeps the camera at the children's scale so the adult world is framed from below or at its edges, 'an optical expression of the film's governing point of view.'
- qualisign (icon of quality) — Brigitte Fossey's Paulette — 'grave, watchful, uncomprehending and utterly present' — an immobile reflecting face holding a single quality without discharging it into action.
- dead time (temps mort) — After the prologue the cutting 'relaxes into a more classical, observational pace suited to rural rhythms and to the slow accretion of the children's game' — dim interiors, animals, weather, mud.
- naturalism — The Dollé and Gouard families' venal feud erupting through the surface of Christian ritual — funerals, insults, the graveyard brawl — adults performing the forms of mourning without feeling.