Flow · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The camera walks the cat down to the waterline and then does something a camera has no business doing. It goes under. Light bends, sound thickens, the surface turns into a ceiling. A moment later it comes back up and the world is exactly where we left it, except that we have now been on both sides of it. Nothing in the story needed that dip. It happens because in Flow the camera is a body, and the flooded world is a place that keeps existing whether or not anyone is framing it.

That is Gints Zilbalodis's actual invention, and it begins as a production fact. Most animation is built shot by shot: the frame comes first and the world is assembled to fill it, which is why there is usually nothing behind the wall at the edge of the image. Zilbalodis builds the world first, in Blender, with a team small enough that he can keep his hands on all of it, and then he shoots it — a virtual camera moved through a finished space the way an operator walks a set. He proved the method alone on Away (2019). Flow refines it. Because the off-screen space genuinely exists in the file, those long unbroken takes aren't a flourish. They're the honest way to photograph something that is already there.

Deleuze would call each of them a mobile section. His claim in Cinema 1 is that a shot is not a piece of space but a slice of duration: it cuts into a whole that is changing, and when it moves, it expresses that change. Two things bracket every shot. The frame is a closed set — the boat, the animals in it, the objects to hand. The Open is not a bigger set but change itself, and it can never be closed. Flow puts the Open directly in the picture. The water is rising. Every closed set in this film, boat and ruin and treetop alike, is a set the Open is in the process of dismantling. That is why the camera can't sit still, and why cutting would be a lie about what's happening.

The film's other perceptual idea is in its title. Writing about the French school of the 1920s, Deleuze describes a liquid perception, a reume: perception cut loose from a standing human observer, carried by currents, poured rather than aimed. Flow is a feature-length instance. The camera drifts with the boat, lifts on the secretarybird's flight, threads submerged rooms. Its rhythm is set by water, not by cutting.

And there is nobody in it. Not a human offscreen, not a human voice, no human character at all. Deleuze's limit-case for this is the acentered image: matter and light registering each other with no privileged observer, the world filming itself. Animation shouldn't be able to reach that, since every frame is authored. Flow gets close by giving the authored camera an animal's height, an animal's pace, and no opinions.

You are never quite alone with the world, though. The camera rides slightly behind and beside the cat, the way a third-person game camera does, so what you're mostly watching is an animal watching. Deleuze's word is dicisign: the image perceives a perceiver, and you feel the camera as a presence in the scene rather than a window onto it.

What the cat perceives is colossal statues, drowned buildings, the debris of an order that is simply gone. The film explains none of it. No prologue, no map, no captions. These are any-spaces-whatever in Deleuze's sense — places that have stopped functioning as settings for a story and become pure expressive terrain. And they lean on an out-of-field of the absolute kind. A relative out-of-field is the next room, reachable by a pan. An absolute one is a beyond you cannot pan to: where the water came from, who carved the statues, why they left. It presses on every frame without ever being located in one.

It's worth putting this next to Bazin. He argued that some scenes must not be cut: when the drama depends on two things really being in the same space at the same time, montage cheats, so hold the shot and let the viewer's eye do the choosing. His faith was in photography, in the camera's dumb fidelity to whatever stood in front of it. Flow has no such fidelity available. Nothing in it stood in front of anything. It keeps Bazin's ethic anyway. The animals negotiate the boat in sustained shots, in one continuous space, and you are left to decide where to look and what a hesitation meant. Realism turns out to be a matter of how you hold time, not of what the lens was pointed at.

Say plainly what kind of film this is: Flow is not a time-image film. Deleuze's big historical story is that after the war, cinema's protagonists stopped being able to act on what they saw, and the sensory-motor circuit broke. Flow runs the old circuit at full power. The flood is what Deleuze calls an encompasser, a global situation that presses until an act transforms it, and the cat perceives, swims, climbs, boards. Situation and creature mark each other in the process — Deleuze's imprint. A solitary animal that would never have shared a boat becomes one that can live alongside a capybara, a lemur, a dog, a bird. The crisis of the action-image was a human crisis, made of exhausted plots and clichés and people who no longer believed acting changed anything. Animals never entered it. Removing the human is how Zilbalodis gets the whole machine back.

All of this has to be legible without a word. The animals never speak and never mug, and Deleuze's late cinema of the body — postures and attitudes carrying time rather than illustrating a line — names the film's entire performance register. The cat's wariness is a way of standing. The lemur's acquisitiveness is a way of holding things. That's the direct debt to Watership Down (1978) and The Plague Dogs (1982), which gave animals real mortal stakes and observed field behavior instead of cuteness, staged at ground level and refusing to reassure. Bambi (1942) supplies the other half: catastrophe witnessed at an animal's eye height with almost no speech. The Red Turtle (2016) proved a wordless feature could carry eighty minutes of feeling on weather and gesture alone. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) supplies the gliding flight and the long wordless action passage.

What Flow passes forward is partly industrial and already in motion. A Latvian–French–Belgian production made in free open-source software, on a budget a major would treat as rounding error, took the Academy Award over the studios, and the Blender community now cites it as the proof that a feature-scale world can be built and shot by a small team. The aesthetic consequence is the real inheritance, though: build the world, then discover it. Once the space is complete, the camera is free, and a camera that is free stops being a device and starts being a creature.

So carry the simplest question back into the film. Where is the camera standing, and why there? Watch it as one more animal in the flood. It has no lines either, and it always knows which way the water is going.