Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Great War
1959 · Mario Monicelli · The Great War on Sightlines
Mud, fog, and gray all the way to the back of the frame. Somewhere in the middle of it, two men are arguing about food.
Monicelli keeps them small. The widescreen is full of army: columns, encampments, the whole machinery of a national war that Dino De Laurentiis paid real money to put on screen. Jacovacci and Busacca sit inside it like two pebbles in a boot. They have one program and they pursue it for two hours, which is not to be here.
That program is the reason the film matters to anyone thinking about what cinema can do.
Most movies run on a circuit Deleuze called the sensory-motor link, and the war film is its purest house. A man sees a situation, the situation demands something, he acts, the situation changes. Take the hill. Hold the line. Deleuze's name for cinema built that way is the movement-image, and he thought it cracked in Italy after 1945, in films where people could see everything and do nothing about it. He called that the crisis of the action-image. Jacovacci and Busacca are that crisis wearing a comedy hat. They perceive their situation with total clarity (it is a meat grinder and they are the meat) and nothing available to them touches it. In one register that's Rossellini. In another it's a gag. Monicelli plays the diagnosis and the joke with a single gesture, which is the thing almost nobody else could do.
Look at how the film is actually built. Deleuze separates two shapes of action cinema. In the large form, a huge encompassing situation presses down until someone acts and transforms it; his word for that encompassing milieu is the synsign, and La Grande Guerra has one at full epic scale. In the small form the direction reverses: someone does a small thing, and the act discloses a piece of a situation you couldn't otherwise see. This film has the body of the first and the nervous system of the second. A dodge, a forged illness, a bit of foraging, a romance with Mangano's Costantina in a rear-area village — each little act reveals one more fact about the war and none of them alter it. You learn the front through the lice.
So the picaresque structure isn't laziness. Deleuze had a name for the journey that transforms nobody: the balade, the stroll, the trip that gets you nowhere. The episodes hang loosely, on slackened causality, and could nearly be reshuffled. That is the shape of a war experienced from underneath, where events don't accumulate into a story, they just keep arriving. And the connective tissue is boredom. Cold, wet, lice, bad food, waiting. Deleuze borrows the phrase temps mort, dead time, for stretches where nothing advances the plot. In a war film, dead time is the war. The trench stops working as a stage for action and becomes a space you endure, which is close to what he meant by an any-space-whatever: a place drained of its use as a setting. Monicelli shot in black and white in 1959, when color was available for a picture this size. Gray keeps the war looking like the newsreels Italians already carried in their heads, and it keeps the mud from turning into scenery.
Even the cutting rhythm tells you. Deleuze noticed that the big action film breathes: vast milieu, then the taut line of the duel, then out to the milieu again. Monicelli keeps the breathing exactly, wide views of marching columns and then in tight to the two-shot, and puts nothing on the taut line but two men bickering in different accents.
Those accents carry the film's second argument, and it's political. Sordi's Roman against Gassman's northern bluster. Post-synchronization, standard Italian practice, made the soundtrack a place where you could assemble a country out of voices that don't match, and here they don't. Italy in 1916 was a state about fifty years old, and every scene says so. Deleuze wrote that modern political cinema begins when a filmmaker can no longer assume a unified people standing behind the camera; his phrase is that the people are missing. The nation-in-arms turns out to be a rabble of mutually foreign tongues who have not yet become Italians. The objection raised at the time from nationalist and veterans' quarters, that the film insulted the fallen, was the state noticing precisely this. The complaint was accurate. Monicelli declined to supply the people the myth required, and the Venice jury split the Golden Lion between his film and Rossellini's Il generale Della Rovere, two 1959 reckonings with cowardice that becomes something else at the end.
Then the last movement, still the best thing of its kind.
Captured. The clutter strips away to an interrogation, two men, an Austrian officer asking about Italian positions. Rota, who could have drowned it, backs off. They refuse. They're shot.
What makes this great is not that cowards discover courage. It's that you cannot say what the refusal is. Describing the small form, Deleuze names an image he calls the index of equivocity: an act that could belong to two entirely different situations, with nothing in the film to settle which. Dignity or spite? Patriotism, or Busacca simply unable to be talked down to by an officer with better manners? There's no interior access, no score, no speech to decide it. And because two hours have established these men beyond argument as cowards, you can't read the act backward into character either. It stays equivocal. That is why it lands as devastation instead of uplift.
Watch what their bodies do rather than what they decide. Deleuze's word for a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a psychology is the gest. Sordi's whole performance is gest: the shrug, the ingratiating lean, the arte di arrangiarsi as a physical vocabulary belonging to people who have learned to treat the state as weather. At the end the same body just doesn't move.
Monicelli had built the detonator eight years earlier in Guardie e ladri, a broad farce that curdles into real pathos; here he wires it to a two-hour charge. I soliti ignoti gave him the ragtag incompetents and Gassman cast against his matinee-idol grain. Behind both stands neorealism: Paisà for the episodic war structure where each chapter ends in an anonymous death, Roma città aperta for war-as-environment, regional voices, and its own joking-priest-then-the-wall shock, Ladri di biciclette for the refusal to look at anyone but the unremarkable man. Bazin's case for those films was that they hand you reality with its ambiguity intact instead of pre-digesting it, and the last ten minutes here is that contract kept under maximum load. Further back, La Grande Illusion, which established that a war film could refuse glory outright. Monicelli translated Renoir's humanism into a register Renoir never touched: vulgarity.
What he invented was structural. He proved that two hours of an audience's laughter is an asset a film can spend, that comic investment converts at the end into a grief no solemn treatment could have earned. The last reel doesn't contradict the comedy. It collects on it. That gave the commedia all'italiana its license to carry national self-criticism at full box office, and left the tragicomic reversal in the language as a permanent option.
Watch it again for the frame edges: how much army there is, and how little of it has anything to do with these two. Whether they died for Italy is the one thing Monicelli refuses to know. He's betting you'll keep arguing about it. The argument is the monument.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Two conscripts who see the front with complete clarity and whose entire project is evasion; the staging 'frames the two leads as intruders on history — bodies that would rather be anywhere else, wedged into a machinery indifferent to them.'
- action-image, small form (ASA') — Episodes of malingering, foraging, romancing and petty fraud: each small act discloses one more fact about the war ('the war surveyed from below, as a sequence of indignities') without altering it.
- index of equivocity — The final refusal to reveal Italian positions, made 'not out of ideological courage but out of stubbornness, insult, and a last flicker of dignity,' staged bare with Rota's score declining to over-score it — the act belongs to two incompatible situations at once.
- the encompasser (synsign) — De Laurentiis-scale columns, encampments and battle sequences give the war a full encompassing milieu, yet it calls forth no adequate act from the protagonists.
- the voyage/balade form — Picaresque structure, 'a series of loosely linked episodes governed less by plot than by their unchanging project of avoiding danger and extracting small advantages.'
- weak links — 'The loose, digressive rhythm of episodic comedy — sketches of malingering, foraging, romancing, and petty fraud' — causality slackened almost to the point of reorderability.
- dead time (temps mort) — War staged as environment rather than spectacle: 'cold, wet, lice, bad food, and boredom are as present as combat.'
- any-space-whatever — The mud-and-fog trench world in diffuse light and deep gray scales, monochrome chosen in 1959 when color was available for prestige productions — space endured rather than acted in.
- respiration-space — The film 'alternates between intimate two-shots — the essential grammar of a buddy comedy — and wider views of columns, encampments, and battle,' keeping the large form's breathing while emptying its taut line.
- the gest — Sordi's Jacovacci as a physical vocabulary of the arte di arrangiarsi — evasive, ingratiating, cowardly with a survivor's shrewdness — and that same body's immobility before the Austrian officer at the close.
- the people are missing — Post-synchronized dialect used as a structuring device: Sordi's Roman inflection against Gassman's northern bluster encoding 'a whole geography of Italian regional character,' plus the nationalist and veterans' objection that the film insulted the memory of the fallen.