Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Never Rarely Sometimes Always
2020 · Eliza Hittman · Never Rarely Sometimes Always on Sightlines
A girl reaches one hand backward, down and behind her where no one will see it, and waits. Another hand finds it and holds on. That is the largest event in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and I mean that as praise.
Eliza Hittman's film is mostly logistics. Two teenage cousins from rural Pennsylvania, a bus to New York, a handful of dollars and the arithmetic that comes with them. The clinic sees Autumn and tells her to come back tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes a problem with no good answer: where do two seventeen-year-olds with no money spend a night in a city neither of them knows? Hittman shoots it on 16mm, close, with Hélène Louvart's camera on faces, on hands, on the backs of necks. Autumn barely speaks. Sidney Flanigan had never acted before.
So why bring a French philosopher to a film this plain? Because Gilles Deleuze spent two books on exactly what Hittman is doing here, which is taking the engine out of a movie and watching what runs instead. His vocabulary won't make the film more complicated. It will let you see the construction under the plainness, and there is a great deal of construction here.
Deleuze says most cinema runs on a circuit: a character perceives a situation, acts on it, and the situation changes. He calls what that circuit produces the action-image, and he finds two shapes of it. The large form runs situation to act — a town is threatened, a man draws. The small form runs the other way. Someone performs a small act, and the act discloses a situation you could not otherwise see. Hittman works almost entirely small. A girl counts her money. A girl gets on a bus. A girl agrees to come back tomorrow. Each one opens a door onto the law, the distance, the total absence of any adult who might simply drive her there.
Her sharpest instrument has a name too. Deleuze calls it the index of lack: a gesture that implies a situation the film never shows you. We do not see what happened to Autumn. The film gives us the consequence and leaves the cause off-screen, where it cannot be argued with.
The circuit only holds while action can answer perception. In the clinic it stops. Autumn sees her situation with total clarity and there is nothing available to do about it except wait, travel further, and wait again. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image, and it is the hinge his second book turns on. What floods in when action drains out is time. The film fills with what he calls pure optical and sound situations, opsigns and sonsigns, stretches where the character can only look and listen. It fills with dead time, temps mort: hours that advance nothing and are the entire substance of the ordeal.
Then the scene the title comes from. A counsellor reads questions off a clinic intake form, and the four answers on offer are never, rarely, sometimes, always. Hittman shoots it as one slow push-in and never cuts away. Deleuze divides the close-up face in two. A face held still, reflecting a single quality, he calls a qualisign: a contour, a feeling shown. A face where micro-movements gather and climb toward a threshold he calls a potisign, not a quality but a power, an intensity going somewhere. Flanigan's face starts as the first and turns into the second inside one unbroken take, and because Hittman will not cut, nothing lets it out. That refusal is a theoretical position. André Bazin argued that carving an event into shots interprets it for us, while holding it whole leaves the ambiguity of the real intact and the viewer's judgment free. Here that means a girl's history arrives through what four small words cost her to say.
Because so little is spoken, the body carries the film's time. Deleuze's late idea of a cinema of the body covers precisely this: attitudes and postures holding duration where plot used to. Louvart's camera rides behind Autumn's shoulder and nape, which makes it a dicisign in Deleuze's sense, a camera you feel perceiving someone who is perceiving, a presence at her back. The bus terminal at night stops being a location and becomes an any-space-whatever, a place emptied of use and left as pure endurance. And the hand reached backward is what Deleuze calls a gest: a posture that exposes a whole social relation. I cannot ask out loud. I can put my hand where you will find it.
None of this came from nowhere, and Hittman doesn't pretend it did. Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days gave her the logistics-first grammar, the withheld exposition, and the long unbroken take as the place where this kind of film keeps its truth. The Dardennes' Rosetta gave her the camera pinned to a young woman's nape while she solves survival minute by minute, with no establishing shot to let you step back. Barbara Loden's Wanda gave her the grainy 16mm and the near-wordless drift through transactional encounters. Varda's Vagabond gave her the journey built as a string of strangers who each extract something or offer something. Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher gave her skin and hands in place of dialogue. Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank gave her the template of a newcomer's face pressed tight in handheld.
What is hers is where she put the climax. The dramatic centre of this film is a form on a clipboard — a screening questionnaire designed to detect coercion — and Hittman found that its flat multiple choice could do what a confession scene always does badly. The most contested subject in American public life, filmed with no argument anywhere in it. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Berlin in 2020, weeks before the theaters closed, so it went out into a year with no theaters at all. Its inheritance has travelled quietly since, less as a style than as a method left lying in the open: you can make a film this charged out of bus fares, a first-time actor, and one take nobody interrupts.
Watch the hands next time. Who reaches, and who takes it. The whole moral position of the film is in there, and it never once says it out loud.
Concepts in play
- action-image (small form) — The film is built from small acts that disclose a hidden situation: counting a handful of dollars, boarding the bus, agreeing to come back tomorrow — the 'logistics-first grammar' Hittman inherits from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.
- index of lack — Exposition is withheld entirely; the whole drama sits in 'what the nearly wordless Autumn refuses to say aloud,' so the cause of the pregnancy stays off-screen and is implied only by its consequences.
- crisis of the action-image — Autumn perceives her situation with total clarity, and the clinic's answer — come back tomorrow — leaves her nothing adequate to do but travel further and wait.
- pure optical and sound situations (opsigns/sonsigns) — Louvart's 16mm camera holds on faces, hands and the backs of necks during the stretches where the cousins can only look and listen, with no action available to them.
- dead time (temps mort) — 'The quiet arithmetic of where to sleep when the clinic says come back tomorrow' — hours in the city that advance nothing and are the substance of the ordeal.
- icon of power (potisign) — The title scene: a single slow push-in with no cutaways, micro-movements accumulating across Sidney Flanigan's face as she answers never / rarely / sometimes / always, climbing toward a threshold the film refuses to release with a cut.
- reflexive vs intensive face — Inside the one unbroken intake-questionnaire take, the face turns from a held, reflecting contour answering a form into an intensive face of features under pressure.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Hittman 'works close to the body' — the camera on hands, necks and backs carries the film's duration in posture rather than in plot or dialogue, the debt to Ratcatcher's tactile close-up.
- the gest — 'A hand reached backward in a moment of need, and taken' — a posture that exposes the entire social relation between the cousins without a word of dialogue.
- dicisign — The over-the-shoulder handheld pinned to the nape, inherited from Rosetta: we feel the camera as a presence perceiving a girl who is herself perceiving and calculating.
- espace quelconque (any-space-whatever) — The bus-terminal itinerary of dependencies and the nowhere-to-sleep night in New York: spaces that stop functioning as settings for action and become places to be endured.