Sightlines · a reading

A Deleuzian reading of The Long Voyage Home

1940 · John Ford · The Long Voyage Home on Sightlines

The rigging comes down across the deck in a cage of black lines. Gregg Toland lights the Glencairn low and hard, and the ship keeps printing itself onto its own crew: a bar across a shoulder, a face cut in half, a man's back receding into a dark the lens still somehow holds in focus. Almost nothing happens in these shots. That turns out to be what the film is about.

A year earlier Ford had made Stagecoach, about as clean an example as American cinema offers of what Gilles Deleuze called the movement-image: someone takes in a situation, does something about it, and the situation changes. Deleuze's grand version of that circuit is the large form, where an encompassing world presses down until a decisive act rearranges it. Monument Valley and the Apache press; Ringo shoots; the world is different afterward.

The Long Voyage Home keeps the first half of that circuit and quietly cuts the second. The Glencairn is carrying high explosives from the American tropics to a blacked-out English port in wartime. The encompassing situation could hardly press harder. And the men do essentially nothing about it, because there is nothing to be done about it. They sweat, drink, sing, suspect each other, and go on watch.

Deleuze called that failure the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. He dated it to after the war, to Italian rubble first and then to American cinema of the sixties, and he listed its symptoms. A dispersive situation, meaning many characters weakly attached, none of them the protagonist. Weak links, meaning the causality between episodes goes slack, which is precisely what Dudley Nichols built when he fused four separate O'Neill one-acts into one continuous crossing; the movements sit beside each other instead of driving each other. The voyage form, a journey that transforms nothing, named in the title and refuted by it, since the long voyage home is the one that never arrives and the men who swear off the sea are pulled back onto it. And a shadow of a fourth symptom, the plot behind the plot: in the In the Zone passage the crew manufactures a conspiracy, decides there is an agent among them, and the conspiracy dissolves in their hands. Four of five, in 1940, from the director then running the most confident action cinema in Hollywood.

That is the case for reading this film through Deleuze, and it needs making, because without it the picture looks like a gorgeous near-miss: admired, six times nominated, oddly inert, minor Ford. The inertia was chosen. Walter Wanger financed it independently for United Artists, outside any studio's house style, and Ford came to it off the leverage of 1939 with no romance, no arc, and John Wayne cast one year after Ringo as a naïve Swedish boy who has to be rescued by other people.

Toland's contribution is not only the shadow. Deleuze uses frame for the composition treated as a closed system, loaded with information, readable all at once. Toland's deep focus makes the forecastle exactly that: a face hard-lit in the foreground and more men held sharp behind it in the same shot, everyone present, nobody subordinated. André Bazin would soon build a whole theory of realism on this technique, arguing that depth of field hands the viewer back the ambiguity of the real and the freedom to look where you like instead of being told by a cut. Toland was Bazin's exhibit, through Wuthering Heights the year before and Citizen Kane the year after. But watch what depth is doing here. Welles used it for hierarchy and will: someone small and deep in the frame being decided about by someone large and near. Ford uses it for company. The crew is held in one plane of attention as a single feeling body, which is close to what Deleuze took from Eisenstein and named the dividual, a group that functions as one affective unit rather than a set of individuals. The songs do it audibly. The deep focus does it optically. And the realist tool is bent here toward dread, since the photography is frankly expressionist, much further from O'Neill's stage naturalism than from German shadow-play.

Expressionism in Deleuze's sense is not a mood, it is light and dark treated as one continuous gradient in which things take on a life that isn't organic. The ship's iron becomes as alive as the men. That gradient has a pedigree, and it is craft debt rather than atmosphere. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) established staging in depth with expressionist modeling of light on a Fox soundstage. Sternberg's The Docks of New York (1928) gave the fogged waterfront and its enclosed dockside world. Toland had pushed Germanic lighting under Karl Freund on Mad Love (1935), then deep-focus staging inside a single enclosed set on Dead End (1937), foreground faces sharp against a deep background, which is this forecastle rehearsed. And Ford and Nichols had already made fog-bound studio expressionism out of symbolic pools of light in The Informer (1935), along with the stagebound adaptation method Nichols reprises to weld the one-acts together.

What all that shadow is for is the thing you never see. Deleuze separates the relative out-of-field, the room next door that a pan could reach, from the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that has no location in space at all and opens onto duration, or onto death. The war in this film is absolute out-of-field. The U-boat has no address. The cargo in the hold is a fact nobody can look at. Sound carries most of it: creak, wind, wash, the vessel's own noise sealing an acoustic world with no shore in it. In the opening at the tropical anchorage, where the women come aboard in the heat and Ford stages a languor unusual for him, the men can only look and listen, and Deleuze's name for a scene that offers perception with no action attached is the pure optical and sound situation. Sherman Todd's cutting lets those stretches breathe. Time held with nothing advancing in it is what Deleuze called dead time, and this film has more of it than any American picture of its year.

So why don't they leave the sea? Deleuze's impulse-image describes a layer of raw drive under the social surface, and behind any concrete setting an originary world, savage and exhausting, that the setting is only the skin of. The sea is that here; the ship and the pub are its surfaces. The pull runs along what he called a line of slope, the irreversible downward run toward exhaustion and death. An old sailor dies belowdecks. The English shore leave tightens into a trap. The vow to quit gets cancelled by the next berth.

Two objects repay attention. Smitty's letters work as a demark, Deleuze's term for an object that breaks the customary chain it belongs to. On a ship full of explosives in a war zone, a secretive man's private papers mean sabotage; that is the habit. Opened, they do not give the crew the spy they were certain of, and the object has to be interpreted rather than simply read. Then the shore leave, where the crew fights to get Ole back from being shanghaied, and for a few minutes the circuit closes: an act that discloses a hidden situation instead of resolving it, Deleuze's small form. It is the only fully successful action in the picture, and what it achieves is to save one man from the sea and deliver everyone else back to it.

Ford's invention, and it is his, was to take the encompassing situation he was the acknowledged master of and decline to let it produce an act. Toland walked off this ship straight onto Citizen Kane and made the deep-focus idiom famous in a film about one man's will. The other thing he learned here, depth as a way of keeping a whole crew equally present, largely went unfollowed.

Deleuze's account says cinema lost its faith in action because of the war, after it. This one was made before America entered, out of plays written during the previous war, and the symptom is already fully formed. Which raises a question his chronology doesn't answer: is the crisis a date, or is it just what happens to the action-image whenever people are carrying something they can't do anything about?

Watch the hands between episodes. Count the scenes that end without anyone having decided anything. And in the deep-focus shots, notice that you are never being told who the film is about. Hold onto that and the plotlessness stops reading as a defect and starts reading as the most modern thing in American cinema that year.

Concepts in play

crisis of the action-image — A ship carrying high explosives through a war zone — maximum pressure from the encompassing situation — produces no act that changes anything; the crew sweats, drinks, sings, suspects, stands watch. Ford refuses the circuit he had just mastered in Stagecoach.
dispersive situation — 'The ensemble is the star': Driscoll, Smitty, Ole, the captain, the Ford stock company — many weakly attached men and 'no overarching protagonist', with Wayne cast a year after Ringo as a boy who must be rescued by others.
weak links — Dudley Nichols fuses four separate O'Neill one-acts into one voyage; the result is 'a series of self-contained movements strung along the arc of the voyage', episodes that sit beside each other rather than causing each other.
the voyage that transforms nothing — 'The long voyage home is precisely the journey that never ends; the men swear they will leave the sea and are pulled back to it' — the title names a destination the film's grim circularity cancels.
the plot behind the plot — The In the Zone episode: the crew's paranoid suspicion that Smitty is an agent constructs a wartime conspiracy among themselves, which then dissolves.
the closed set (cadre) — Toland's deep focus holds 'a man in the foreground and figures deep in the background of the cramped forecastle together in a single frame' — the composition as one information-dense readable system rather than a hierarchy built by cutting.
the dividual — The crew rendered as one affective body — Ford's ensemble 'caught in ritual, drink, song, and idleness', the shanties binding them acoustically while deep focus keeps them all equally present optically.
expressionism — Toland's hard, sculptural low-key lighting: 'pools of light and deep wells of shadow, faces half-swallowed by darkness, the ship's rigging and gangways rendered as a cage of black lines' — the vessel's iron given a non-organic life, closer to German shadow-play than to O'Neill's naturalism.
the absolute out-of-field — The war that never acquires a location: the torpedo threat, the cargo of high explosives in the hold, the blacked-out English port, and a sound design of creak, wind and wash that seals 'an isolated acoustic world sealed off from land'.
pure optical and sound situations — The opening at the tropical anchorage, women coming aboard staged with 'a heavy, langorous sensuality unusual for Ford' — the men can only watch and listen; no action is available to them.
dead time (temps mort) — Sherman Todd's Oscar-nominated cutting 'favors duration and atmosphere over acceleration'; scenes are allowed to breathe and the camera lingers on faces and on the collective life of the crew while nothing advances.
icon of quality (the reflecting face) — Faces held in the dark and lingered on — Ian Hunter's secretive, delicate Smitty above all — registering longing and dread that never discharges into an act.
the originary world — The sea as the savage world beneath the social one, with the Glencairn's holds and the English pub as its surfaces; the men's unspoken longing to escape it for good never breaks its hold.
line of slope (degradation) — The old sailor's death belowdecks, the drink, the shore leave that 'tightens into a trap', and the vow to quit the sea cancelled by the next berth — an irreversible downward run.
demark — Smitty's letters: on an explosives ship in wartime, a secretive man's private papers customarily mean sabotage; the crew's suspicion breaks against what they actually find, and the object has to be interpreted rather than read.
action-image, small form — The shore-leave sequence: the crew's collective effort to save Ole from being shanghaied — the one closed sensory-motor circuit in the film, an act that discloses the pub's hidden trap, and it returns everyone else to the ship.

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