The Queen of Spades · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Servants take the Countess apart for the night. Off comes the wig. Off comes the paint, then the layers of a dress cut for a court that stopped existing decades ago, and what is left in the chair is a small old woman who will be built again in the morning. Dickinson gives this more screen time than the plot needs and stages it as ceremony rather than character work. Hold it, because the whole film is inside it: a woman maintained rather than alive, in rooms so packed with mirrors and screens and accumulated bric-a-brac that she reads as one more object among the objects.

Gilles Deleuze had a name for images like this. He called certain shots crystals — moments where a thing and its double (its reflection, its memory, its image of itself) can no longer be told apart. Mirrors are the obvious machine for making one, and Dickinson's mirrors return the wrong information, which in Deleuze's finer vocabulary makes them demarks: objects that break the habit we read them by and force interpretation where recognition used to be enough. He also sorted crystals by condition. Crystal-decomposition is the ordered aristocratic interior rotting from inside, a world still performing itself long after the reason for it has drained away. Visconti's dying families were his case in point. The Countess's toilette is the same thing, staged at Welwyn on sets built for another director.

Which is worth more than a label. The Gothic reading of The Queen of Spades is that an old woman has a secret and a young man wants it. Deleuze changes what Herman is after. He doesn't want information. He wants the eighteenth century, a world where luck had an owner and fortune could be held as property. She can't hand it over. She is already only a nightly reconstruction of herself.

Then Herman. Anton Walbrook plays him from the first scene as a man already gripped, escalating by intensification rather than by stages. Deleuze would file this under the impulse-image, his term for cinematic naturalism, and it is the sharpest tool in the film's box. Naturalism as he uses it has two layers. On top, the derived milieu: the Horse Guards' table, the salon, officers losing in a night what an engineer earns in years. Underneath, the originary world, a savage zone of pure appetite the social surface only thinly covers. Dickinson's poverty of means produced that underneath by accident and then kept it on purpose. No daylight in this picture, no location air. His St Petersburg is forced perspective, painted backings and manufactured snow, sealed and short of oxygen — which is exactly what naturalism needs, a world with no outside. Its clock runs one way, too. Deleuze calls that the line of slope: not a plot that builds but an entropy that descends, appetite burning through a man until nothing is left to burn. And the drive has to fasten on something. The three cards are a textbook fetish in his sense, a part-object carrying the whole charge. Herman never really wants money. He wants the sequence.

Two opposite faces run against each other here, which is rarer than it sounds. Deleuze separated the reflexive face, a contour holding one quality without moving, from the intensive face, where small movements build toward a threshold. The Countess is the first: wig, paint, a mask returning a single expression. Walbrook is the second, and his Viennese-inflected English strands him among Britons playing Russians, so even the voice sits at an angle to the room.

Watch the blocking too. Herman is staged over and over at thresholds, outside a lit window, at the foot of a staircase, on the lip of a room he can't afford to enter. Deleuze borrowed the word gest from Brecht for this: a posture that exposes a social relation nobody has to state. The class geometry of Pushkin's story is legible before dialogue does any of the work. Dickinson had rehearsed it in Gaslight (1940), Walbrook prowling a bric-a-brac interior, taking a person apart inside a set that tightens as the reels advance. Vampyr (1932) gave him the threshold blocking and the trick of drifting the camera through a doorway ahead of the character, so architecture rather than editing delivers the dread. La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) supplied animate architecture as the index of a fixation.

The camera is the invention, and it came out of an emergency. Dickinson took the job at a few days' notice, inherited Oliver Messel's finished designs, and could change nothing on the floor, so he put everything into movement. Then he made one genuinely clever decision: he moves the camera when the drama doesn't ask for it. Lateral tracks through the gaming rooms, glides down corridors, description with no dramatic business being in motion. By the time a movement finally coincides with Herman's climb toward the bedchamber — a traverse the 1916 Queen of Spades had already established, which Dickinson restages with a moving camera — you don't read it as emphasis. You read it as the house coming toward him.

The other half of the invention is what he refuses to show. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, the room next door, from the absolute out-of-field, a something beyond the frame with no place to be. Dickinson gets the second by elision. Key events are cut away from or given only in reaction, and the fear runs on isolated sound inside near silence: the drag of silk, a stick tapping, wind at a casement, the wheeze of a music box. Cat People (1942) had proved that inference does what an effects budget can't. But the consequence here isn't only economic. Because nothing supernatural is ever located, nothing can be checked, and the film stays undecidable about whether Herman is visited or simply mad. It stays that way by looking elsewhere.

And the light. Otto Heller works from single isolated sources inside enormous dark, a candelabrum, a fire, the pale rectangle of a window, leaving the rest of the studio volume unmodelled black. That grammar comes from Faust (1926), where a key on the supplicant's face and blackness everywhere else makes the bargain look struck with the dark itself rather than with a visible devil. Deleuze called this expressionism: the shadow gradient, the non-organic life of things. Here the darkness is a party to the contract.

So: a horror film in which the shocks are what you aren't shown. Long ceremonial stretches hold with nothing advancing, what Deleuze calls dead time — the toilette, the lying-in-state, Herman waiting in the dark — while Auric's dance music plays on for a society that hasn't noticed anything. The slowness trains you, so the hard cuts land like assault. It made little money and stayed hard to see until a BFI restoration around 2009 put it back on screens, which is when critics finally said out loud that Britain's 1940s Gothic imagination was the equal of its famous realist one. The thread forward runs through Heller, who carried this vocabulary of obsession lit from one source into Peeping Tom (1960).

Watch it again with the sound up and count how many minutes go by carrying a single noise. Then ask what the Countess actually is. A person with a secret, or a machine for manufacturing a past that other people need? Dickinson knows. He declines to say, and he declines by not showing you.