Belfast, Maine · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Hands take a fish off the belt, open it, drop it, take the next one. The shot holds. It holds past the point where you have learned how the job is done, and then past the point where you are interested in how the job is done, and somewhere in there what you are watching stops being information and becomes a rate — the speed a body finds when it knows it will be doing this until the end of the shift.

That holding is the whole method. Belfast, Maine runs four hours and eight minutes with no narration, no interviews, no score, no captions. Nobody is named. Frederick Wiseman shot a small port town on Penobscot Bay — lobster boats, a fish plant, a hospital, a courtroom, a police cruiser, a high-school English class, a dance studio, the front rooms of the old and the dying — and cut it together without telling you what any of it means. Which raises the obvious objection to reading the film at all. If a filmmaker has withheld every interpretive cue, what is there to interpret?

Gilles Deleuze helps here not because he decodes hidden meanings but because he spent two books on what happens to a film when the ordinary engine of movies is removed, and he gave the parts names. Start with the engine. In most cinema a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the acting resolves things. Documentary had its own version of that. Primary (1960) is the origin point: Robert Drew's team built the lightweight sync rig — camera on one shoulder, recorder on the other, joined by a cable — to chase a crisis with an outcome. Will he win. Wiseman kept the rig, down to the cable and the two-person crew, and threw the dramaturgy away. What he films instead is what Deleuze, after Bergson, calls the any-instant-whatever: the ordinary instant rather than the posed climactic one. Cinema's break with the older arts was that it could sample motion anywhere, without waiting for a decisive pose, and then most cinema hurried back to decisive poses anyway. The trap comes up over the rail. The rake goes through the blueberries. No instant in the sequence is the one the sequence was for.

Take away the crisis and something else floods in. Deleuze's term for what is left is opsigns and sonsigns — pure optical and sound situations, where a character, and you with them, can only look and listen because no action is available. The neorealists arrived at this through catastrophe. Wiseman arrives by subtraction. Remove the score and the narration and there is nothing to do about an old woman dying in her own front room except watch her and hear the room she is in. No cue tells you how to feel, and that refusal is an ethical position rather than a stylistic one. It also produces Deleuze's figure of the seer, the voyant: someone who registers and endures instead of acting. Much of Belfast is in that position — the sick, the tired, the ones whose social role has thinned out and who are simply present — and by the second hour so are you.

Wiseman lets sequences run past the moment their information has been delivered, into the region where boredom and tenderness and effort become visible. Deleuze calls this dead time, temps mort: stretches that advance nothing. Nothing is a misdescription. It is where the everyday is held still long enough to be looked at, and across four hours it accumulates into the argument.

John Davey's camera gets called neutral, and it isn't. It favors a medium shot that keeps a body and its task in one frame — hands, tool, face — so work stays legible as work instead of being illustrated by close-ups. Deleuze's late category for this is a cinema of the body: postures carrying duration, meaning arriving through what a body does over time rather than through what a plot does to it. Bazin had argued that certain events lie when you cut them up, and the rule goes back to Flaherty filming the seal hunt through to completion in Nanook of the North (1922). Franju's Le Sang des bêtes (1949) supplied the harder version: hold on the workers' practiced hands, never cut away to a reaction shot for the audience's comfort. Belfast's gutting line is downstream of that ethic exactly.

Then there are the rooms. The counter, the pew, the bench, the school desk, the hospital bed, the conveyor: arrangements that assign people positions relative to each other, deciding who speaks, who waits, who is examined. Deleuze's word for a posture that exposes a social relation this way is the gest — theatre without anyone acting. Wiseman presses on it by putting an amateur stage rehearsal near a courtroom and a classroom. A judge adjudicating, a minister preaching, a teacher teaching, an actor rehearsing: all of them people executing practiced roles. He never says so. He just cuts.

Which is the largest thing. With no script and no narration, structure is carried entirely by adjacency, and a sequence in the fish plant placed beside a sequence in a hospital room is not a claim spoken aloud, but it is a claim. Deleuze calls that kind of join the interstice — a cut that links across a gap, an AND rather than a because. The meaning gets manufactured in the viewer or not at all. This is the Berlin: Symphony of a Great City inheritance rebuilt from scratch: Ruttmann's cross-section of a place organized by its labor, with montage tempo replaced by sync-sound duration.

Between sequences Davey shoots storefronts, gulls, snow, empty streets, water changing under changing weather. Lesser films would call these transitions. Here they give the town what Deleuze names the Open: the sense that the framed set belongs to a whole that is changing. And not only the season is changing. The canneries and poultry plants went in the seventies and eighties; a credit-card operation is opening white-collar offices in town. Wiseman narrates none of it. Both economies are there in the same week of footage.

Farrebique (1946) had shown that unstaged rural work could carry a feature's structure. Wiseman's proposition is bigger, and it altered what documentary is permitted to be about: a place is a sufficient subject, and a town where nothing in particular happens will yield four hours if you stay long enough and look at the work. His own filmography turns here, from institutions to communities — In Jackson Heights, Monrovia, Indiana, City Hall. What the durational documentary took from him afterward is specifiable: no score, no interviews, no captions, process filmed to completion, structure from adjacency. Trace it through Wang Bing, through Sweetgrass and Leviathan, through Philibert and Depardon.

He rejected cinéma vérité as a pretentious phrase for something anything but unmediated, and called his films reality fictions instead. The cutting is authorship, and he knows it. Which is why the film has been read two opposite ways, both defensible: a humane account of a community that works, and a grave one full of poverty and illness and decline. Some in Belfast felt it dwelt on the hardship. He supplies the evidence for both and settles neither, so the verdict you reach is partly a fact about you.

Watch for the moment a shot outstays its usefulness. Don't wait for it to end. That is where the film is.