Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
2004 · Alfonso Cuarón · Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on Sightlines
The train stops between nowhere and nowhere and the lamps die. Frost climbs the window glass from the bottom of the frame. Something comes along the corridor, and Harry looks at it, and looking is the whole of what he does, and then he is on the floor.
Two Potter films came before this one. In both, a boy sees a danger and does something about it, the doing works, and the school is safe by the last feast. Deleuze has a name for that arrangement: the movement-image. A situation is perceived, the perception runs through a body, the body acts, the situation changes. Nothing shallow about it; most of the cinema anyone loves is built that way. But it rests on a confidence — that seeing leads to doing, and that doing is enough.
The Dementor cancels that confidence in one scene. There is nothing to outwit and nothing to hit. It wants nothing from Harry. It isn't a villain with a plan, it's a weather system with a hood. Deleuze would call this a pure quality-power: an affect that has come loose from any person who might be feeling it and been handed a body of its own. Dread, walking. And what it makes of Harry is the figure Deleuze puts at the centre of modern cinema, the voyant, the seer: someone who can no longer answer what he perceives and is reduced to registering it. The series had never had that person in it before. It had heroes.
Cuarón's second move is quieter, and it is the one every later film in the series copied. He drained the palette, moved Hogwarts out into craggy Scottish highland weather, took the children out of their robes and put them in untucked shirts and hooded sweatshirts, and let the camera prowl. Those long, curious takes come straight out of the grammar Cuarón and Emmanuel Lubezki had built on Y Tu Mamá También: a shot that follows its protagonists across a courtyard and then, losing interest in them, drifts off to watch something else for a while. In the Mexico film that wandering was political. Here it does something stranger. It gives a wholly invented school an ordinary afternoon.
That is dead time, temps mort, the stretch that advances nothing. Bazin argued that holding a shot preserves the ambiguity of real duration, that a cut is already an interpretation and the long take a refusal to interpret. Nobody expected the argument to be tested inside a CGI castle. But you can feel what it buys. When the camera waits, the place stops being a set of plot locations and becomes somewhere it is possible to be thirteen, cold and unhappy.
Then the Willow. Cuarón keeps coming back to it, standing there shaking off leaves, then snow, then blossom, a bird flung loose each time. Nothing happens in these shots. They are the film's whole argument in miniature: what changes is not any object in the frame, it is the year. Deleuze, following Bergson, called this the Open — the sense that a frame gives onto a whole which is not a larger set of things but duration itself, which never stops altering. A tree may be the only honest way to film it.
Which makes adolescence the subject rather than the setting. The Truffaut debt is exact. The 400 Blows watches a boy who is unhappy for reasons no plot is going to resolve, and watches his body: the slouch, the loosened tie, the hands pulled up into the sleeves. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body, where posture carries time that dialogue cannot. Harry sulking in a courtyard in a hoodie is a thirteen-year-old some time before he is a chosen one.
All of which sets up the trick. Look at the premise the film advertises: an escaped killer converging on the school. That is a textbook large-form action-image, the biggest available situation bearing down until one decisive act transforms it. It never arrives. The killer is innocent, the villain is a rat, the climax is not a duel.
What happens instead is that Hermione turns an hourglass and the film runs the same three hours again from the other side. This is not a flashback. A flashback shows a past marked as past, Deleuze's recollection-image, dated and safely finished. Here the past is entered again as a present while the first version of it is still running. Two presents occupy one stretch of time; the heroes are inside both and are forbidden to touch themselves. Deleuze called these peaks of present, and he found them in Robbe-Grillet, in art films built to be undecidable. Cuarón found them in a children's book and made them load-bearing. The mechanism is Gilliam's, from 12 Monkeys: the closed, self-consistent loop in which the climax reveals that an earlier scene was already caused by the time traveller. Gilliam used it for dread. Cuarón uses it for grief.
Because of the lake. In the first pass Harry is dying on the shore and sees a figure across the water cast the spell that saves him, and believes it is his dead father. In the second pass he is the one standing on the far bank, waiting for his father to appear, understanding that nobody is coming, casting it himself — in his father's shape. Hold there. The image on that shore was always two images at once, a rescue and a memory, an actual thing and a wish, and for as long as Harry mistakes one for the other you cannot pull them apart. Deleuze's word for this is crystal: the smallest circuit in cinema, where an actual image and its virtual double keep exchanging places and neither one wins. Whether a boy standing in for his own father is a consolation or the loss stated twice, the film declines to say.
Afterwards the entire first pass becomes re-readable. Every shot in it had a second occupant you were not shown.
What it did was prove that a franchise could be authored. The visual grammar every subsequent Potter inherited was set here, and for Cuarón it was the hinge between Y Tu Mamá También and Children of Men: evidence that a sensibility survives the machine if it is brought in at the level of the camera and the weather rather than the script. It stays the rare blockbuster sequel people study for its filmmaking instead of its lore.
Watch it again and watch the empty corners. The willow. The courtyard the camera drifts into once the children have left it. The far side of the lake, before anyone is standing there. Someone is about to be.
Concepts in play
- the movement-image — The regime the film inherits from Chris Columbus's faithful, brightly lit installments, where a perceived threat is resolved by the hero's action; Azkaban keeps the machinery and removes its power to settle anything
- qualité-puissance (pure quality-power) — The Dementors as drifting rag-shrouded embodiments of depression — dread detached from any character who feels it and given a body of its own, the series' first genuine fear
- voyant / the seer — Harry facing the Dementor on the stopped train can only look and endure, not act; the Time-Turner third act extends the condition, binding the heroes to watch their own earlier selves without altering them
- temps mort — Seresin's long, curious takes and the roaming courtyard and Hogwarts-grounds walking shots inherited from Y Tu Mamá También, which drift off the protagonists to observe the surrounding world and advance nothing
- the Open — The shot of the Whomping Willow shaking off the seasons: nothing in the frame acts, but the year moves through it — duration as the changing whole rather than a set of things
- attitudes and postures — The young cast in street clothes with adolescence itself as the subject — thirteen is when the world darkens — descending from Truffaut's location-shot observation of an alienated boy in The 400 Blows
- large-form action-image — The advertised premise — a dangerous escaped wizard heading for Hogwarts, a global situation pressing toward a decisive act — which the film sets up and then never pays off
- peaks of present — The Time-Turner third act runs the same hours a second time while the first is still in progress, two presents coexisting in one stretch of time — the closed predestination loop taken from 12 Monkeys, where the climax reveals an earlier scene was already caused by the time traveller
- hyalosign (crystal-image) — The rescue at the lake, where the saviour across the water is at once the dead father Harry believes he sees and the boy himself, actual and virtual indiscernible until the second pass resolves them