Out of Africa · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the biplane. Finch Hatton banks the little Gypsy Moth low over the Rift Valley, the herds break and scatter beneath the wings, and Karen Blixen reaches her hand back over the open cockpit into the slipstream. He takes it. Nobody speaks. For two or three unbroken minutes Pollack stops telling the story and just lets you see the land from a height no settler in 1913 could have reached. John Barry's theme carries the whole thing. People remember this sequence when they have forgotten the plot, and they are right to. It is the film thinking out loud.

Deleuze has a name for what happens here. He calls it the movement of world. Usually in cinema a character moves through a setting to get something done — perceive a problem, act, change the situation. But sometimes the character goes still and the world does the moving instead. The dancer stops; the dance keeps going and absorbs her. That is exactly the flying scene. Karen does nothing. She is strapped in, motionless, looking. It is the earth, tilting and unscrolling under her, that performs the love. Pollack scores these passages rather than scripting them precisely because there is no action to narrate — only a state to be undergone. This is what Deleuze means by a pure optical situation: an image you can only look at, because there is nothing to be done about it.

Once you notice that, you notice it everywhere, and it changes what kind of film this is. Out of Africa wears the costume of the action-driven prestige epic, the lineage of Lawrence of Arabia, where a man crosses a desert and bends history. But almost nobody here bends anything. Karen builds a farm and the farm fails. She marries Bror and the marriage rots — he gives her syphilis, and even her body becomes something done to her rather than by her. She loves a man whose entire being is a refusal to be owned. The drought comes, the coffee burns, the plane goes down. The dramatic engine, as the film knows, is not suspense but inevitability. Deleuze would say the sensory-motor link has gone slack: situations no longer resolve into actions, so the protagonist becomes a seer, someone who watches and endures. Streep plays this beautifully. Her performance is built on a held, reflecting face — wounded pride kept just under the surface — what Deleuze calls the affection-image, a feeling registered but never discharged into a deed. Watch her at the dinner table, at the bedside, at the grave. The drama is interior because the action has nowhere to go.

The frame around all of it seals the case. "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills." That is an old woman's voice, speaking from years later, from Denmark, from after the end. So the entire film is a recollection-image — Deleuze's term for an image presented as a former present, a past being relived rather than a present unfolding. We are not watching events. We are watching someone watch her own losses again, knowing how each one ends before it begins. This is why the editing can afford to be so unhurried, why scenes are given room to breathe past the point of plot. Those are stretches of what Deleuze calls dead time, the everyday held open, time felt as itself rather than as the measure of someone getting something done. The leisure is not indulgence. It is the form mourning takes.

And the land itself does a specific kind of work. Pollack stages a constant war between Karen's cluttered farmhouse — the crystal, the linen, the transplanted Danish formality — and the vast emptiness outside it that Finch Hatton stands for. That emptiness is not scenery. It is closer to what Deleuze calls an any-space-whatever: a space drained of its function as a setting for action, charged instead with pure feeling and possibility. Finch Hatton lives in it precisely because it cannot be farmed, owned, or plotted. The film's deepest romance is between Karen and that ungovernable openness, and the tragedy is that she keeps trying to bring her furniture into it.

This is where the lineage pays off. Pollack inherits the terrain-as-protagonist grammar from Lean, the single recurring leitmotif holding a memoir-romance together from Doctor Zhivago, and most tellingly the magic-hour natural light plus plain elegiac retrospective voiceover from Days of Heaven — Malick's doomed period romance narrated from after the fact. What Pollack does with those borrowed tools is smuggle a time-image film inside a movement-image package. The Oscars rewarded the package: the sumptuous craft, the scale, the romance. But the reason the film outlasts its own colonial nostalgia, the reason that flight still catches in the throat, is that underneath the spectacle it has quietly stopped believing in action. It believes in looking, in losing, and in telling it again.

Which is the last turn. Blixen was a storyteller; the film is narrated in her own cadenced prose. It does not just depict a life. It shows a person in the act of making her losses into a story she can survive — Deleuze's fabulation, legending oneself. Rewatch the flying scene knowing that. She is not only up there with him. She is already, decades on, telling you about it.