Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of In the Name of the Father
1993 · Jim Sheridan · In the Name of the Father on Sightlines
Gerry Conlon is stealing when the street goes up. The camera doesn't compose the riot, it gets caught in it: handheld, shoved, finding him the way a news crew would find anyone. Peter Biziou shot the Belfast opening as if it were being covered rather than staged, and for twenty minutes this is the most kinetic film Jim Sheridan ever made. Then it does the thing almost nobody does to a hero like this. It takes his ability to act away, and keeps it for fifteen years.
That subtraction is the film. It's also why Deleuze is worth bringing along.
Deleuze divided cinema in two. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and does something that changes it, and the cutting exists to carry that chain. In the time-image, action stops working, and what's left is a person who watches. Most films are one or the other. In the Name of the Father is a movement-image film that survives an amputation, and the scar is visible.
Start with the shape Sheridan builds. Deleuze called the biggest version of the action-image the large form: an encompassing situation presses on a person until he acts, and the act transforms the situation. He had a name for the encompassing part, the synsign, the milieu that calls action out of people. Here it's the whole apparatus. Belfast in the Troubles, the Guildford bombings, an English police force under political pressure to produce somebody. Gerry chooses none of it. It arrives and closes. Deleuze also named the bond that forms between a man and the situation gripping him: empreinte, the imprint. The situation stamps the character; the character carries the stamp back into it. The arc everyone remembers, feckless kid to politicized man, is exactly that. Fifteen years press a shape into him, and the last act is that shape acting.
But look at the middle, because that's where the film gets strange. From the arrest to the appeal, Gerry can do nothing at all. The interrogation rooms tighten around him, hard-lit and confined, staged as theatres of intimidation. Then prison, where Gerry Hambling's cutting, propulsive until now, slows into something elegiac around Giuseppe's decline. Deleuze's term for this condition is unglamorous and exact: a pure optical and sound situation. The link between seeing and doing breaks. You watch, you listen, and there is no available act to discharge it into. The person this happens to he called a voyant, a seer. Gerry watches his father die of an illness and an injustice at the same speed, in a room ten feet wide, and nothing he does touches either one.
That cell is Sheridan's invention. Father and son were not imprisoned together; he put them there. It's the film's largest departure from the record and its best dramatic idea, because it forces the political argument to happen at arm's length between two men who have to keep sharing a sink.
It also means the politics get carried by bodies instead of speeches. Late in his thinking, Deleuze described a cinema that puts time into attitudes and postures rather than plot — what a body looks like after it has waited. Day-Lewis inherits that register through a specific chain: Brando's inarticulate, physically expressive dockworker in On the Waterfront, with a father-figure moral drama running underneath him; De Niro's live-the-role transformation in Raging Bull; and closest to hand, the method the Sheridan–Day-Lewis partnership established on My Left Foot, where total immersion was the working principle. He reportedly kept himself in cell conditions during the shoot. What that buys onscreen is a man whose slouch becomes a stance. Postlethwaite does the other half with almost nothing. Giuseppe's restraint, his devotion, his refusal to become the thing he's accused of being. Deleuze called a posture that exposes an entire social relation a gest. Giuseppe upright in that cell is the film's whole case, made without an argument.
The frame is testimony. Gerry tells the story to Gareth Peirce while she builds the case, so much of what we see is a recollection-image, a dated memory standing in for a former present. Deleuze thought the flashback was the weakest way to get time into a film, and he was right that it keeps memory obedient to the plot. Sheridan wants precisely that. A man's freedom depends on the past being settled, not labyrinthine. This isn't Resnais and shouldn't be.
What it is, is a film about one speech act answering another. A confession signed under coercion doesn't describe a crime. It makes one. Against a document like that, facts are useless, which is why the film's spine is a man narrating himself back into existence for a lawyer. Deleuze's powers of the false aren't about lying; they're about narration that produces truth rather than reporting it, and this film is caught in that machinery at both ends. It borrows the grammar of things-found: Loach's handheld observation and natural light, Pontecorvo's newsreel coverage of raids and detention in The Battle of Algiers, the prison-interior vocabulary Biziou and Hambling had already built on Midnight Express. That grammar signs a contract with the viewer saying none of this was made up. Then the film makes up the cell, and builds a courtroom climax that departs markedly from how the appeal actually went, for the sake of release. The honest thing is to call this the film's unresolved problem rather than defend it cleverly. Can a film indict a fabrication while fabricating? Sheridan bet the picture on yes, and the argument hasn't stopped since.
Even the soundtrack refuses the past tense. Hendrix keys the early recklessness, period-close. But Bono and Gavin Friday over the title, Sinéad O'Connor over the credits, are 1993 voices laid across a 1974 image: sound belonging to the audience's present while the picture stays back there. It's a mild version of what Deleuze found in Duras, sound and image running on separate clocks. Here it does one job. It says this is not finished. The film opened before the 1994 ceasefire.
What it did to filmmaking: it proved a Hollywood major would underwrite an Irish-authored prosecution of the British judiciary while the conflict was still live, and it welded the miscarriage-of-justice procedural to a father-son melodrama so tightly that the public verdict arrives as private grief converted into resolve. Sheridan kept working that seam, into Some Mother's Son and The Boxer. And it set the terms every later film about a living, named, wronged man still has to meet: what you owe the record and what you owe the audience are not the same debt.
Watch it again for the middle. The first twenty minutes and the last twenty are a movement-image doing what it does well, and they're why the film won what it won. Between them is a film with its hands tied. That's where Sheridan and Day-Lewis actually work, and once you can see the tied hands, you can't unsee how much of the picture is one man learning to speak because he's been forbidden to move.
Concepts in play
- action-image-large-form — The film's 'single escalating movement from injustice toward vindication,' resolved by a courtroom climax 'built for maximum dramatic release' that transforms the encompassing situation.
- the encompasser — The opening Belfast riot shot with 'kinetic, handheld immediacy,' establishing a world 'already saturated with violence' that closes around Gerry before he acts at all.
- empreinte — Day-Lewis's arc 'from feckless, self-absorbed youth to a man politicized and matured by injustice and by his father's example' — the milieu stamping the character who then acts back on it.
- pure optical & sound situations — The interrogation scenes 'tighten toward claustrophobia, using confined framing and hard light,' and the prison passages where Hambling modulates 'to a slower, more elegiac rhythm' around Giuseppe's decline — stretches with no act available.
- voyant — Gerry in the shared cell (a dramatic invention) can only watch his father weaken and die; the film's middle is a hero reduced to witness.
- attitudes & postures — Day-Lewis's 'total transformation' and immersive method, reportedly extending to physical deprivation and staying in cell conditions — the performance, not the dialogue, carries the political argument.
- the-gest — Postlethwaite's Giuseppe as 'restrained, dignified, and quietly devastating' moral center — bearing and devotion in a cell exposing the whole social relation the film indicts.
- mnemosign / image-souvenir — The partial flashback frame: 'Gerry narrates his story to Peirce as she builds the case, so the account arrives filtered through memory and testimony.'
- acte de parole — Two testimonial acts in opposition — confessions produced in interrogation rooms 'staged as theaters of intimidation,' answered by Gerry's recounting of himself to Gareth Peirce.
- puissances du faux — A film in documentary-inflected realist grammar (Loach/Pontecorvo handheld, Biziou–Hambling prison interiors) that invents the shared cell and a courtroom climax 'departing markedly from the actual legal process' in order to make its truth sayable — the 'liberties with the historical record' the dossier flags.
- audiovisual-disjunction — Bono and Gavin Friday's title song and Sinéad O'Connor's end-credits track — 1993 sound over 1974–89 images, the 'charged, anachronistic pulse' the dossier identifies.