To Be and to Have · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with a small hand and a pencil. A boy of four or five is trying to write the letter that will not come; his fingers cramp, the tongue pokes out, the line wobbles and fails. And the camera does the one thing most films would never dare with a non-event this minor: it stays. It holds. It waits out the hesitation, the frustration, the slow gathering, until something crosses the face — a flicker that is not quite triumph, just comprehension arriving. Nicolas Philibert built an entire film, and one of the most-watched documentaries in French history, out of the decision to keep that camera still and let the moment take exactly as long as it takes.

This is why Deleuze is useful here, even though he died years before the film existed and never wrote a word about it. Deleuze split cinema roughly in two. In the movement-image, a person sees a situation and acts to change it — perception flows into action, and the cut serves that chain. In the time-image, that circuit snaps. The character can no longer convert what they see into a decisive act; they can only look, and endure, and so we feel time itself, no longer as the measure of movement but as a substance we are sitting inside. To Be and to Have lives almost entirely in that second mode, and it gets there not through art-cinema obscurity but through the most literal situation imaginable: a child cannot yet act on the world, can only struggle toward the means of doing so, and we watch.

The held shot on the working face is what Deleuze calls a pure optical situation — an opsign, twinned with the room's sonsign, the scratch of pencils and the teacher's low voice. The point of an opsign is that nothing about it tells you what to do next. There is no sensory-motor response available; you can only register it. When Philibert isolates one pupil in the frame while the rest of the room blurs to a hum of background sound, he is manufacturing opsigns out of arithmetic. We become, in Deleuze's word, seers (voyants) rather than agents — and so, beautifully, do the children, who spend their days perceiving far more than they can yet act upon.

Look closer at the face itself and the concept refines. A face held immobile, reflecting a single quality — concentration, contemplation — is what Deleuze names a qualisign, the affection-image in its purest contemplative form. But the great shots here aren't static. They catch the micro-movements, the almost-invisible muscular gathering as a difficult idea approaches the threshold of being grasped. That intensive face, building toward a tipping point, is the potisign, the icon of power: not a feeling displayed but a feeling mounting. The film's emotion is almost entirely made of these — comprehension as a physical event, watched in close-up.

And then there is everything the edit refuses to cut away from: the four-year-old's nap that coexists with an eleven-year-old's long division, the bodies slumped, fidgeting, leaning, the daily postures of a one-room school. Deleuze called this the cinema of the body — film that lets the everyday body carry duration rather than perform a plot. The whole classe unique is a choreography of attitudes, and Philibert honors it without staging it. These stretches are temps mort, dead time, the patches where nothing advances any 'story.' Except that in this film the dead time is the story; the coming-of-age is built from accumulation, the very thing Hollywood spends its energy editing out.

That refusal places the film in a real lineage, and naming it matters because film is a conversation across decades. Philibert's seasonal architecture — snow to thaw to harvest light — is lifted almost directly from Farrebique (1946), which organized a rural French household by the agrarian year. The patient durational portrait of a self-enclosed world performed by its own non-actor inhabitants descends from Nanook (1922). And the formal rigor — no narration, no interviews, no score telling you how to feel, meaning constructed wholly in the cut — is the High School (1968) model of the institution film, made possible by the lightweight sync-sound 16mm of Primary and Chronicle of a Summer. Philibert's contribution is to soften that tradition without betraying it: he keeps the observational ethic but adds warmth, the burnished grain of film stock giving a snowed-in pasture and a child's face the same pictorial dignity.

The significance is quietly radical. Direct cinema had often treated patience as a tool for catching truth. Philibert treats it as the subject. The film's title — the two auxiliary verbs, être and avoir, to be and to have — turns out to name what the camera is teaching us too: that being present to something is not the same as possessing it or acting on it. (The bitter coda, the lawsuits over who owned the film's value, reads almost as the title's revenge.) Watch it again and notice how rarely anything is decided, and how much, nonetheless, changes. That gap — between a year in which little is done and a year in which a child is remade — is time itself, finally let onto the screen.