Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Flowers of St. Francis
1950 · Roberto Rossellini · The Flowers of St. Francis on Sightlines
Near the end, the friars stand in an open field and spin. They turn on the spot until they are too dizzy to stay upright, fall down, and then each one gets up and walks off in whatever direction he happens to be facing. That is how they decide where to go and preach. It is the last thing that happens in the film, and it settles nothing.
Imagine the same scene in an ordinary movie. There would be a decision: a map, an argument, someone assigning territories, someone hesitating, someone volunteering. Rossellini cuts all of that and leaves a children's game. The men give up the one thing films had been built out of for fifty years, which is a person choosing what to do next.
Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on cinema that turn on exactly this hinge. For decades, he says, film ran on the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, the situation demands something, he acts, the act changes the situation, and editing exists to keep that chain tight. Then something breaks in Italy after the war. Characters start perceiving far more than they can do anything about. The chain slackens, and what comes up through the gap is time itself, felt directly instead of measured out by action. He calls the result the time-image, and the director he keeps returning to is Rossellini — usually Germany Year Zero and Journey to Italy. Francis is the film where that method stops being a symptom of ruin and becomes a way of living.
Take the rain. The brothers are caught out in the weather and thoroughly soaked, and Otello Martelli's camera simply stays and watches them be wet. Nobody can do anything about rain. Deleuze's name for an image like this is a pure optical and sound situation, an opsign: the image stops being a link in a chain and becomes something to look at and endure. Most films treat discomfort as a problem awaiting a solution. Here it is only weather, and the good joke is that the friars find it funny.
Jolanda Benvenuti's cutting inside the scenes is spare and patient, letting actions finish. Critics of the period had a phrase Deleuze borrowed for this, temps mort, dead time: stretches where nothing advances and the everyday is simply held. But the structural nerve is larger. Nine self-contained vignettes, a prologue, and no causal chaining between them. Nothing in the third episode causes the fourth. The connective tissue of the film is "and then," never "and therefore."
The friars are played by actual Franciscans, with Nazario Gerardi as Francis. Their bodies do not perform. They stand a little wrong, they wait, they kneel, they carry things badly. Deleuze eventually argued that a whole kind of cinema gives up on plot and works through attitudes and postures instead — the body in its everyday attitude and the body in its ceremonial one. Francis is a rare case where those two are the same thing. For a friar, the everyday is ceremonial: walking, begging, kneeling, eating. So the film can be nothing but a chain of postures and still be a portrait of a spiritual life.
The exception proves it. When Brother Juniper walks into the camp of the tyrant Nicolaio, Aldo Fabrizi plays the warlord as a bellowing cartoon in armor, all voice and metal, and everyone around him has to react. That reacting is what power actually is. Juniper doesn't. He stands there being literal-minded. Deleuze's word for a posture that lays bare a social relation by theatricalizing it is the gest, and the gest here is the gap between a man who must perform his power constantly and a man with nothing whatever to perform.
Martelli composes flat and frontal, figures small against sky and open ground, in the manner of the panel paintings of Francis's own century. Deleuze distinguishes two ways a frame can open. Relatively: there is a room next door, and you could walk into it. Absolutely: onto something that cannot be placed anywhere in space at all. A saint's-life film normally solves the second by putting God into the picture, with shafts of light and a choir on the soundtrack. Rossellini keeps him out of frame and lets the sky, the birdsong and the silences carry it. The ending works the same way. We never see where a single one of them arrives.
You would expect a medieval religious picture to be made of shadow, and this one isn't. Martelli shoots even natural daylight, and the near-absence of expressive chiaroscuro is the key to how the film looks. Deleuze separates two traditions of light: in expressionism light fights shadow and objects take on an unnatural life; in what he calls lyrical abstraction light doesn't fight at all, it alternates with whiteness and poses a spiritual alternative rather than a struggle. Francis belongs firmly to the second. That is why it looks poor instead of gothic. Poverty here is a lighting decision as much as a costume one.
And there is the strangest fact about the production. Real Franciscans perform the founding stories of their own order, taken from the fourteenth-century Fioretti. Deleuze, writing about political cinema, describes filmmakers who catch their subjects in the act of legending themselves. He usually means peoples who do not yet exist. The Franciscans lack something different: their founder is already a legend, sanded smooth by seven centuries of retelling. Putting living members of the order back inside the stories makes the legend porous again, and you can feel the difference between a man acting holiness and a man who does this on Tuesdays.
André Bazin made the theoretical case for this kind of cinema: respect for the integrity of real space and real duration, an image offered to be read rather than a montage that dictates the reading. Deleuze's time-image is Bazin's argument carried further, into a claim about time rather than realism.
The craft debts are precise. Paisà gave the film its shape, six loosely linked vignettes, scripted with the same young collaborator, Fellini. Rome, Open City supplied the toolkit of real locations and non-professionals salted with a few pros — and Fabrizi, the pro here, comes straight from it. Germany Year Zero perfected the instrument: a camera that stays with a non-professional and refuses to help him. Francis aims that same non-manipulative attention at grace instead of rubble. Around it, Visconti's La Terra Trema had real Sicilian fishermen speaking their own dialect and De Sica's Bicycle Thieves was built on a factory worker; Rossellini takes the practice one step further, since friars playing friars are not non-actors playing characters at all. The deepest debt is to Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, which proved the sacred could be filmed through plainness rather than spectacle. Rossellini keeps the principle and reverses the distance. Dreyer's instrument is the unglamorized face in close-up. Rossellini backs away and holds the whole body in the whole field.
Forward, the film is a hinge in its own director's work. Everything it learned goes straight into Stromboli, Europe '51 and Journey to Italy, the films Deleuze would place at the origin of modern cinema. Venice met it coolly in 1950; it has since become a touchstone for the austere, contemplative treatment of the sacred.
Here is what it did to the art. The postwar cinema of people who can only watch is almost always stunned — bombed flat, grieving, catatonic. Rossellini's invention was to show that the collapse of action need not mean despair. Take away the sensory-motor chain from a man who wanted things, and you get paralysis. Take it away from a man who has renounced wanting, and you get lightness. Francis is an anti-dramatic film that is genuinely happy, and nobody had managed that before.
Watch it again for the moments when nothing is being decided. The waiting, the walking, the getting rained on, the standing still in front of a shouting man in armor. The film's wager is that a life can be built entirely out of those, and that a film can be too.
Concepts in play
- the time-image — No protagonist's arc, no rising conflict, no resolution: the closing spin-and-fall sends the friars out to preach without resolving anything narratively, and the film's nine vignettes present duration rather than a chain of consequences.
- pure optical & sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — The rain sequence — the friars drenched, Martelli's camera holding on physical weather and real bodies with documentary attention to discomfort and joy, with no action available against the rain.
- the seer (voyant) — "The camera observes rather than dramatizes"; the community's exposure to weather and want, and the brothers' encounters with a leper and with the poor, are endured and witnessed rather than acted upon.
- dead time (temps mort) — Benvenuti's cutting is spare and unhurried, preserving duration and the integrity of the performers' actions; Martelli's long-held framings let incidents simply occur and pass.
- weak links / slackened causality — The narrative is built as nine discrete, self-contained episodes without the causal chaining of classical dramaturgy — an assembly closer to an illuminated manuscript's sequence of exempla than to three-act structure.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — The direction of non-professional friars' bodies — their real awkwardness, their unactorly stillness — carries the film in place of psychological interiority; the final vignette resolves through the body spinning until it falls.
- the gest — Aldo Fabrizi's Nicolaio as a bellowing armored warlord in near-carnivalesque staging, set against Brother Juniper's literal-minded plainness: theatrical bravura versus holy simplicity, dramatizing the gulf between worldly power and poverty.
- the absolute out-of-field — Flattened, frontal compositions with figures kept small against sky and open ground; a sparse sound design in which birdsong, rain and silence carry weight; and an ending whose destinations are never shown.
- lyrical abstraction — Martelli's even, natural daylight and restrained, luminous photography, with "little of the expressive chiaroscuro one might expect from a 'religious' film" — plainness read as devotional rather than decorative.
- fabulation (legending) — Casting actual Franciscan friars, reportedly from the Nocera Inferiore community, to perform their own order's founding stories drawn from the fourteenth-century Fioretti, with clergy also serving as production advisors.