Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The First Slam Dunk
2022 · Takehiko Inoue · The First Slam Dunk on Sightlines
A player steps to the free-throw line and the arena goes quiet. Not quieter. Out. The crowd vanishes from the soundtrack and what's left is a body, a ball, and the little gap before the shot. Then the noise comes back and the game keeps going.
That drop-out lasts three seconds and it explains the whole film.
Bergson, whom Deleuze builds his entire cinema on, starts from a strange question: what is a living thing, in a universe made of matter in motion? His answer is that it's a delay. Matter passes movement along instantly; a rock struck by another rock answers on the spot. A living body receives a movement and holds it a moment before returning one. That held moment is the interval, and Deleuze calls the creature sitting at its center a centre of indetermination. Everything cinema does grows out of that gap. Perception comes in one side, action goes out the other, and feeling is what fills the middle while you wait.
Basketball has written that interval into its rulebook. A free throw is a legislated hesitation: play stops, one body is isolated, and for a few seconds nothing is determined. Inoue films it by cutting the sound. He doesn't explain the moment. He removes everything that was explaining it for you.
Twenty-six years after his manga ended, Takehiko Inoue directed the film of it himself, which almost never happens, and rebuilt the thing from the studs. The visible result is a surface nobody had quite made before: motion-captured CG bodies carrying his ink line, so the players move like athletes and look like drawings. That surface is doing philosophy whether it means to or not.
Deleuze opens Cinema 1 with Bergson's two ways of getting movement out of stillness. The old way is the privileged instant: the pose, the peak, the form at its most expressive. Greek sculpture works this way. So does a manga panel, which is a run of chosen peaks with the boring parts thrown out. The modern way is cinema's: the any-instant-whatever. Sample motion at equal mechanical intervals, keep the ordinary instant alongside the great one, and let real movement reassemble itself out of moments that were nothing special. A camera does this by nature. So does a capture rig, markers on a real athlete, sampled at a fixed rate, indifferent to whether this frame is beautiful.
Inoue laid one over the other. The motion is any-instant-whatever. The line is the privileged instant. Twenty-six years of drawn poses, riding on bodies moving to a machine's schedule. That's why the animation seems to breathe rather than pose: the drawing keeps promising a peak and the movement keeps refusing to stop there.
He didn't invent the pipeline. Appleseed (2004) was the first anime feature to drive cel-shaded characters entirely from full-performance capture. Ghost in the Shell (1995) worked out how to hide the seam where digital layers sit under hand-inked cels, the grammar all of this depends on. A Scanner Darkly kept a trembling hand-drawn line locked onto captured human performance. Tintin proved capture could feed a frankly illustrative render instead of chasing photorealism. And behind all of it sits Akira, whose full-animation cel realism set the benchmark for weighty bodies obeying physics, at a labour cost nobody could pay twice. Inoue's rig exists to get Akira's weight without Akira's bill. What he does with it is his own.
Capture is an odd object in film theory. Bazin's case for realism rested on the index: a photograph is a trace, light that actually came off a real body, which is why we credit it. Motion capture keeps the index and throws away the photograph. The movement in these players came off real people. The surface did not. So the ink line isn't styling laid over the truth of the bodies. It's what lets the truth through without the eye snagging on the uncanny.
The game runs close to real time, which is Bazinian too: respect the duration of the event instead of cutting it into highlights. What happens on the court, in Deleuze's terms, is the action-image in its large form, and the film runs it without a flicker of embarrassment. A vast situation encompasses the characters, Sannoh, reigning champions, untouchable, the national stage, and presses on them until somebody produces an act big enough to change it. Situation, action, changed situation. Deleuze noticed that the big form breathes, alternating between the encompassing space and the taut line of a single duel inside it. Basketball does that on its own, wide floor to one man's drive and back again, and Inoue knows it in his hands.
Cut into that, the past. The film keeps leaving the game for what made each player, above all Ryota Miyagi, the smallest man on the court, carrying a family grief the original barely touched. Deleuze has a name for the dated flashback, the recollection-image, and he's mildly impatient with it; it hands you a former present rather than time itself. But watch where Inoue puts them. They land in the interval. Where the circuit of see-then-act was about to close, memory opens instead and the film goes somewhere the court can't reach. The editing makes one argument over and over: the body out there is being moved by something that isn't out there.
Then the recentering, which is Inoue's real invention and has nothing to do with technology. He re-storyboards the same Shohoku–Sannoh match his own 1993 TV anime already canonized, takes the shonen-hero frame off Sakuragi, and hands narration to his point guard. Think about what that does to the frame. A scorer's film is about what's in it: the shot, the dunk, the arriving body. A point guard's film is about what isn't. His whole art is knowing where the unseen teammate will be a second from now. Deleuze's word for the space a frame implies but withholds is the relative out-of-field, and by moving the camera's loyalty to Ryota, Inoue makes it the subject. Ryota is also the man who plays at lightning speed while feigning composure, which is a gest in Deleuze's sense, a posture that gives away a relation rather than a feeling. The smallest player on the floor, performing a size he doesn't have.
The last minutes play almost without sound. It's the boldest thing in the film and it looks like nothing at all. Out on the floor the sensory-motor circuit is at full power, ten bodies, a clock, a ball. But the film has taken away the layer that was connecting it up for you. No crowd, no score cues, no music. What's left is optical and aural in the barest sense: bodies in space, soles, breath, sweat. Deleuze calls an image you can only look at, with no action available to you through it, an opsign, and he finds them in Italian rubble and Ozu's empty rooms. Finding one at the climax of a sports movie, while the sport is still being played at full speed, is somewhere genuinely new to put it. The action never breaks. Your way into it does. For those minutes, one of the decade's great set pieces asks you to do exactly what a time-image asks: watch.
That's what the film did, and why it took Japan, Korea and China at once. It showed that animated sport could carry the dramatic freight people reserve for live action, and it settled an argument anime had been having since Akira about whether captured human movement could live under a drawn line without killing it. Inoue's answer is that the line isn't the compromise. The line is how you see.
Go back to it and listen. Notice that the cuts to the past arrive precisely where the play was about to resolve. And keep an eye on Ryota's eyes, which are always going somewhere the frame hasn't shown you yet. Once you catch him looking, you can't watch the game the old way again.
Concepts in play
- the interval (centre of indetermination) — The crowd noise dropping out at a free throw: play stops, one body is isolated, and the film cuts the sound instead of scoring the moment — basketball's rulebook manufacturing the Bergsonian gap between perceiving and acting.
- any-instant-whatever — The motion-capture pipeline: real athletes' movement sampled at a fixed mechanical rate, ordinary instants kept alongside great ones, so movement reconstitutes itself the way a camera's does rather than the way a pose does.
- privileged instants — Inoue's rough ink line, the vocabulary of the manga panel — a sequence of chosen peaks — laid directly over the captured bodies, so the drawing keeps promising a pose the movement refuses to hold.
- action-image, large form — Sannoh as the reigning, untouchable champion on the national stage: a global situation that presses on Shohoku across a near-real-time game until an act large enough to transform it arrives.
- the encompasser — The championship match itself as the encompassing milieu — the Inter-High final against the reigning champions — which calls the action out of every player rather than merely hosting it.
- respiration-space — The film's basic alternation between the whole court as milieu and the taut line of one player's drive, the large form breathing in and out the way a basketball game does by nature.
- mnemosign / recollection-image — The game intercut with the past that made each player, above all Ryota's family grief, dated flashbacks placed at exactly the points where the see-then-act circuit was about to close.
- out-of-field (relative) — The protagonist-recentering onto point guard Ryota rather than Sakuragi: the film's subject becomes the space the frame implies but withholds — where the unseen teammate will be — instead of the arriving scorer inside it.
- the gest — Ryota running circles around opponents at lightning speed while feigning composure: the smallest man on the court holding a posture that performs a size he doesn't have.
- pure optical and sound situation (opsign/sonsign) — The final minutes played nearly without sound — no crowd, no music, only soles, breath and sweat — leaving an image to be looked at rather than a chain to be followed, even while the action runs at full speed.