Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Silent Victory Submarine Warfare in WWII
2010 · Silent Victory Submarine Warfare in WWII on Sightlines
Water with nothing on it.
That is the image this film keeps returning to, and it isn't a stylistic preference. It's the only image the subject allows. A submarine war leaves almost nothing to photograph. The boat is under. The target is over the horizon until it isn't. The forty seconds that settle a patrol happen where no 1943 camera could be. So the film does what films about invisible things have always done: it shows you the sea, and tells you what is beneath it.
That gap between what you see and what you're told is not a weakness in the film. It is the form itself, and the form repays knowing.
Deleuze sorts images by how they reach us. Some arrive whole. A face held in close-up gives you a feeling with no work required. A man sprinting for a door gives you an action. A third kind means nothing on its own and needs a relation that you supply; Deleuze calls it the relation-image, or mental-image, and in it the audience does the joining. Archival footage is this kind almost by definition. Smoke on a horizon is weather until a voice tells you whose ship it was and what it was carrying. Depth charges throwing up white columns could belong to any hour of any year of that war. The footage supplies the fact that something happened. The narration supplies which something. Everything a compilation documentary does lives in that division of labour.
Bazin is the useful company here. His claim for photography was that the image shares the being of its object: the thing was there, light from it struck the stock, and that is why old footage moves us in a way a painting of the same scene cannot. But the guarantee covers existence, not placement. The camera swears the smoke was real. It says nothing about which sinking it belongs to, or what that sinking cost an empire. The March of Time worked out in 1935 how much room that leaves an editor, and built the editorial newsreel on it: material cut to prosecute rather than to report, under a narrator who sounds like the record speaking. Capra's Why We Fight industrialized the method with maps and rhythmic cutting. This film inherits the grammar intact, and assembles plainly. The argument does the work.
Watch what happens to that argument at its sharpest point. For nearly two years American boats went to war with the Mark 14 torpedo, which ran deep, ran wrong, and often struck a hull and did nothing at all; the Navy's bureau blamed the crews before conceding the weapon was broken. Deleuze has a small, exact pair of terms for this. A mark is an object that means by habit — the periscope goes up, so a ship goes down. Film teaches these chains within minutes and we stop noticing them. A demark is when the chain breaks and forces thought. A torpedo that hits and produces silence is a demark of terrible purity. And notice what the film must do with it: there is no footage. A failure to explode leaves no image. Nothing to cut to. The most consequential fact in the campaign has to be spoken, by men, into a camera, decades later, because the archive is constitutionally unable to hold it.
Which is the film's real discovery, whether or not it puts it that way. The submarine war was lost to the record because it was unfilmable at both ends. Deleuze distinguishes a relative out-of-field (the room next door; you could pan to it) from an absolute out-of-field: something that exists beyond the frame but nowhere you could point a camera. The result of this campaign was absolute out-of-field. Oil that never reached a refinery. Rice that never reached a garrison on a bypassed island. Steel that never became a hull. You cannot photograph a shipment that didn't come. The sinking is filmable; the strangulation is not, and the strangulation was the point.
Pair that with a structural fact and the revisionism starts to look like a formal argument rather than a contrarian pose. Deleuze splits the action-image into a large form and a small form. In the large form a vast situation presses down until a decisive act transforms it: Midway, the day the war turned, the shape in which the Pacific is almost always told. In the small form an act comes first and discloses a situation you couldn't otherwise see. The submarine service had no decisive day. It had patrols, hundreds of them, each a small act from which a hidden situation could be inferred: an empire running out. A war story with no climax is a narrative problem before it is a historical one, and the small form has never photographed well. Carriers photograph. Blockades don't. The history followed the camera, and this film is an attempt to walk it back.
So the veterans matter structurally, not decoratively. Writing about Straub and Huillet, Deleuze describes an image in which an emptied landscape is spoken over by a past no longer visible in it: the stratigraphic image, ground with the event buried under it. The Pacific in 2010 is water. Under it are the boats that didn't come back, from the branch that took the highest casualty rate of any in the American armed services — the cost that Clay Blair Jr.'s 1975 history, whose title this film borrows, put at the center of the account. What the survivors do on camera is not dialogue but what Deleuze calls a speech act: a voice that constitutes an event rather than describing a scene, testimony carrying what no footage exists for, spoken by men standing in for crews that cannot speak.
The lineage tells you where the nerve came from. John Huston shaped front-line footage into The Battle of San Pietro in 1945 and let it quietly indict official optimism about what things cost, and that is the ancestor this film honors most — more than the tribute structure it takes from The Fighting Lady, the one-crew framing of Memphis Belle, or the procedural walk-through of a weapon system it owes to Target for Tonight. No director's name travels with this film, which is itself a fact about the mode: the compilation documentary is authored by its argument. And the argument here reverses the tool. The compilation-thesis was built to manufacture consent for a war. Silent Victory uses the identical instrument on the identical archive to correct the story that instrument helped install. The footage doesn't change. Only the relation does. That is Deleuze's thirdness with its stakes showing, and it is the honest claim to make for a television hour that invented no shot and reinvented no form.
Watch it again for the cutaways to open water. Ask each time what the narration is asking that water to mean, and whether you'd have believed it without the voice. Then ask the harder one. If the war that decided the Pacific is the one nobody could photograph, what is missing from all the other pictures we've agreed to trust?
Concepts in play
- the mental-image (Thirdness) — Anonymous period footage of naval battles means nothing until the narration assigns it: smoke on a horizon becomes a specific merchantman only because a voice says so. The compilation form puts the audience in the position of the knowing third who joins image to claim.
- demark — The Mark 14 torpedo that ran true, struck the hull and did not detonate — the habitual chain (periscope up, ship down) broken, and the Navy blaming its own crews for two years before conceding the weapon was defective. The failure has no image at all, so the film must have it spoken.
- mark — The film's inherited stock grammar of period naval footage — periscope view, torpedo wake, depth-charge column, ship going down — objects that read instantly by customary chain and need no explanation.
- out-of-field-absolute — The campaign's actual result — Japanese industry starved of oil, rice and steel, garrisons unreinforced, the merchant fleet gone — exists nowhere a camera could be pointed. The sinking is filmable; the blockade's consequence is only nameable.
- action-image-small-form — The thesis that the Pacific was decided not by the carrier battles (a large-form story of a decisive day transforming a global situation) but by an accumulation of individual patrols, each act disclosing a hidden situation: an island empire running out of everything.
- the readable image — Endless archival footage that has lost its sensory-motor self-evidence — generic, interchangeable combat material that cannot be perceived directly but must be deciphered through narration and testimony before it means anything.
- the archaeological image — The 'deceptively placid ocean surface' of the plot description: an emptied seascape with the event buried beneath it, spoken over by survivors of the branch with the highest casualty rate in the American armed services.
- acte de parole — The veteran interviews function as testimony rather than dialogue — a legending voice that has to constitute events the archive cannot show (the dud torpedoes, the boats lost), speaking on behalf of crews that did not return.