Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2009 · David Yates · Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince on Sightlines
A stone basin. A thread of silver tipped out of a glass vial. And then two people standing in the corner of a room where everything has already finished happening. Harry looks at an orphan boy who will grow into the thing that killed his parents, and the boy does not look back. He can't. What is in the room isn't a person, it's a memory somebody once had and poured out, and Harry has been brought here to look at it, because looking is the job now.
That is the actual engine of the sixth Potter film, and it explains why people who bought a ticket for a wand fight came out saying nothing happens. Something happens. The film has just stopped believing in the thing blockbusters are made of.
Deleuze called that thing the action-image: a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the acting changes the situation. Five Potter films ran on it beautifully. A mystery is posed in autumn and solved by June. Half-Blood Prince keeps the school and drops the circuit. Harry knows Draco is doing something and can prove nothing and stop nothing. He becomes brilliant at potions by copying instructions in a stranger's handwriting, so even his competence is borrowed. He is present at the death he exists to prevent, and prevents nothing. Deleuze's name for this is the crisis of the action-image: people who perceive perfectly well and can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. It happened to cinema around 1948, in Italy, to filmmakers with no money and a ruined country, and it is what Bazin was defending when he argued that some realities deserve to be watched rather than cut into consequences. Here it happens to the richest franchise on earth, on purpose, in July.
What comes in its place is what Deleuze called the voyant, the seer: not an agent but a watcher and endurer. The situations such a film builds are pure optical and sound situations, where a character can only look and listen because no available action fits. The Pensieve is a machine for manufacturing them. Consider how strange that object is for a children's adventure to invent. It's a bowl you climb into in order to become powerless.
Most films that visit the past use what Deleuze calls a recollection-image: a dated flashback, a former present, clearly signposted, returning with its piece of information. The Pensieve doesn't behave that way. Harry and Dumbledore walk around inside the past, choose where to stand, leave, come back, set one visit against another, and discover that one region of it has been tampered with. That is the sheets of past: not a picture slotted into the present but an order of coexisting regions you move through. Deleuze built the idea partly out of Citizen Kane, where a reporter goes hunting one man's origin through fragments of other people's testimony and the film lays the man out in layers instead of a line. The Pensieve sequences are Kane's structure with the metaphor made physical, and the film's investigative climax is not a duel but a confession: Slughorn, vain and frightened and ashamed of who he was in that room, finally letting the region be entered. Jim Broadbent plays it as social discomfort until it stops being social.
Notice who isn't in the movie. Voldemort appears as a child in borrowed memories and otherwise as weather. The film opens by dropping the Millennium Bridge into the Thames with nobody there to fight for it, and later brings the war to the Weasleys' house, a sequence invented for the film. Deleuze separates two kinds of offscreen: the relative one (there's a corridor next door, we'll get there) and the absolute, where what lies outside the frame isn't anywhere in space, and registers instead as a change in the whole. This is the film where the series' enemy converts from the first kind into the second. That is why it feels like dread rather than danger.
The person who made the dread visible is Bruno Delbonnel. He came from Amélie, where he'd built a grammar of warm pools of light inside enveloping shadow, and from A Very Long Engagement, where figures go black against blown-out skies. He kept the grammar and drained the warmth out of it: slate, cold blue, a green like something left too long in water. Deleuze's colour-image is exactly this, colour that stops describing a scene and starts absorbing it, so the feeling isn't on anyone's face, it's in the air of the room. The cave and the Astronomy Tower push further and lose their coordinates altogether. Espace quelconque, the any-space-whatever: space that has quit being a setting where action could happen. And the one sustained piece of violence in the film is the Inferi rising out of the black lake, dead matter moving, which is the oldest expressionist idea in cinema, the non-organic life of things. Delbonnel lights interiors as though from a single candle. It earned the only cinematography nomination in eight films, and it is doing conceptual work, not decoration. This is a school being bled.
Stuart Craig's Hogwarts, built in the first film as a storybook, is emptier and colder here, and the society inside it is rotting at the top. Slughorn keeps a little court, collecting promising children the way other men collect wine. Draco, handed real material at last, comes apart inside the school's own walls. Snape's allegiance is an open question. Writing about Visconti's dying aristocracies, Deleuze described a crystal in decomposition: an ordered world with an intact surface, disintegrating from within while still keeping its manners. That is this Hogwarts. The house rules still run. The house is finished.
Mark Day's editing works by alternation rather than acceleration, cutting between love potions, Ron and Lavender, Hermione's jealousy, and Draco walking a corridor he shouldn't be in. For a long middle stretch this is the lightest film in the series. As plot that's dead time, Deleuze's temps mort, stretches the story doesn't need. As argument it's the whole point. This is what a war looks like from inside a school when you are sixteen. The comedy isn't relief from the dread; it's the same year.
Then there's the book. The film is named after an annotation. Deleuze's term for an image that has lost its sensory-motor obviousness and has to be deciphered is the lectosign, an image you read instead of react to. A film whose title is a signature, whose plot is an archive, and whose hero's great new skill is following someone else's marginalia, has moved from seeing to reading. The reveal of who wrote it arrives almost as an afterthought. That's usually called a flaw. It's closer to a tell.
All of which cost the film its third act in the ordinary sense and bought something the industry noticed: a summer tentpole clearing well over $900 million that rations spectacle to two set-pieces and ends in a funeral. Cuarón's Prisoner of Azkaban had opened the tonal license; Yates imported a British-television method of actor-driven intimacy on Order of the Phoenix; Half-Blood Prince refines both into something almost austere. Williams's Hedwig's Theme is still in there, quoted and allowed to decay under Nicholas Hooper's solo instruments and choirs. Hooper wrote a Latin choral piece, "In Noctem," for a sequence that was cut; the music survives without its images, which is about the most Half-Blood Prince fact available. The franchise model Potter did so much to define went on to shape The Hunger Games, Twilight, and the studios' turn toward cinematic universes, and this is the film that taught the model its most reusable move: the penultimate chapter that darkens, kills the protector, and pushes the survivors out of the institution.
Watch again for where the camera puts Harry. Beside people. Behind them. In the corner of someone else's memory, in a room that already happened. And sit with the question the film leaves open and never answers: does knowing where your enemy came from give you any power over him? Harry ends this film knowing Tom Riddle's childhood in detail, and it buys him nothing but the shape of what's still to be done. That isn't a failure of the excavation. It's the condition the last two films have to live in.
Concepts in play
- crisis-of-the-action-image — A blockbuster that 'trades the wand-battle spectacle audiences had come to expect' for excavation and withholds catharsis: Harry perceives Draco's mission and can neither prove nor stop it, and is present at Dumbledore's death without acting.
- voyant / the seer — Inside the Pensieve memories Harry is a witness with no available action; the film's dramatic spine is Dumbledore and Harry 'reconstructing Voldemort's origins' rather than fighting.
- pure optical & sound situations — The memory sequences are staged as hush — sound design 'balances the hush of the memory sequences against the sudden violence' — with nothing to do but look and listen inside a scene that has already finished happening.
- sheets of past / order of time — The Pensieve structure of 'sequences within sequences, as Dumbledore and Harry step into recovered fragments of Riddle's past,' with one region withheld by Slughorn — explicitly descended from Citizen Kane's nested recovered testimony per the lineage.
- out-of-field-absolute — Voldemort is present only as a child in memories and as pressure everywhere else; the Death Eaters collapse the Millennium Bridge in the London opening and attack the Burrow with no confrontable antagonist onscreen.
- affective colour (colour-image) — Delbonnel's near-monochrome slate grays, cold blues and sickly greens, achieved by lighting and digital-intermediate grade, 'deliberately draining warmth from Hogwarts to signal encroaching darkness.'
- espace quelconque / any-space-whatever — 'The Astronomy Tower and cave sequences push toward abstraction'; both are staged for isolation and vertigo rather than as settings for action.
- expressionism (non-organic life of things) — The Inferi rising from the black lake — dead matter animated — inside interiors 'frequently lit as if by single practical sources,' deep pools of shadow, chiaroscuro.
- crystal in decomposition — Stuart Craig's Hogwarts 'emptier and colder,' the staging shifted 'toward decay and intrusion'; Slughorn's Slug Club as a vain little court, Draco's moral collapse inside the school, Dumbledore 'at his warmest and most fragile.'
- temps mort — Mark Day structures the film 'around alternation rather than acceleration,' pacing 'notably unhurried for a blockbuster, dwelling in conversation and reaction'; the long comic middle of love potions and jealousy advances no plot.
- lectosign / the readable image — The title names Snape's annotated Potions textbook — Harry's competence comes from reading a stranger's marginalia — and the authorship is 'seeded and paid off almost as an afterthought,' subordinating the title-plot to an archive of memory.