Athena · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A firework leaves a boy's hand in the dark and travels — flat, fast, a tracer of orange — across a courtyard and into a line of riot shields. Hold on that arc. In most movies the throw would be a cut: hand, then shields, then the bloom of impact, three shots the editor stitches into a cause. Romain Gavras refuses to let you off the hook. The camera goes with the firework. It runs the distance the missile runs, and in running it ties the thrower to the target inside one continuous breath of space. That refusal is the whole film, and it is also a wager about what cinema is still for.

Deleuze divided film history with a hinge. On one side, the movement-image: a character sees a situation and acts to change it, and the cut serves that chain of cause and effect. On the other, after the war, the time-image: action stops resolving anything, the protagonist becomes a watcher, and we are left to feel time itself go by. The great modern films — Antonioni's dead afternoons, Tarkovsky's drift — live on the far side of that break. Athena does something almost defiant. In 2022, deep into the era of the seer, it builds a pure, roaring movement-image and dares you to call it naïve.

Watch how the situation works. A boy is dead, apparently at police hands, and the estate detonates. This is what Deleuze called the large form of the action-image: a global situation — an encompassing milieu charged to bursting — that presses on people until someone commits a decisive act that transforms it. The estate is the synsign, the encompasser: not a backdrop but a force that calls action out of bodies. Karim storms the precinct because the milieu demands a storming. Abdel, the soldier, is pulled toward the act he most wants to prevent. Every character is the imprint of the place, and the place takes its shape from what they do to it.

Gavras then sets force against force with classical bluntness — Deleuze's binomial, the duel that organizes the whole genre. Insurgents against police is the obvious one. The deeper duel is between the brothers: Karim's insurrection against Abdel's discipline, the rebel and the soldier as two answers to the same grief. The film stages them as tragic functions more than psychologies, which is exactly why the duel reads so cleanly. You are watching forces collide, not personalities negotiate.

The celebrated opening take is the clearest proof that Gavras understands the grammar he's using. A long take, for Deleuze, is the mobile section — a shot whose movement is not decoration but the expression of a change in the whole. The camera leaves the press conference, crosses into the storming of the station, climbs onto a commandeered vehicle, rides it into the cité. That trajectory is a vector, a line of the universe zig-zagging across disconnected spaces and welding them into one continuous field of action. And because the frame never settles, it keeps opening onto something larger than itself — the Open, the sense that this courtyard belongs to a whole country coming apart just out of view.

Inside the estate the staging breathes. Deleuze noticed that the action film alternates a vast milieu-space with the taut line of the act — respiration-space. Gavras gives it architecture: the courtyard is the arena where the crowd massings happen, the stairwells are the channels of charge and retreat, the apartments the redoubts. Crowd movement becomes legible as tactics, and the crowd itself stops being many people. It becomes a dividual — a collective rendered as a single affective body that surges and recoils as one animal.

But something hotter is leaking up through the action, and this is where the film stops being only a war movie. The fireworks-as-weapons, the sodium glow, the choral score sacralizing the violence — the estate keeps tipping into an originary world, Deleuze's term from the impulse-image for a milieu that is revealed as a savage underlayer beneath the social one, a place of pure drives. The riot is also a descent. The tragedy marches downhill with the inevitability Deleuze called the line of slope, the irreversible entropy toward ruin and death that naturalism loves. You sense the ending in the first ten minutes. The form won't let anyone climb back up.

And the spectacle is doing its own work. When a swarm of fireworks is choreographed into ritual combat — beautiful and lethal at once — action has tipped over into figure. This is the attraction-image, staging that shows rather than does, the riot transfigured into a vision of hell. Gavras learned this from music videos, and it is the move critics distrust: the politics dissolving into the sublime.

That distrust is the real argument the film picks. Its ancestors are La Haine's gliding cité and the embedded combat take of Children of Men, the engineered single breath of Birdman and 1917, the crowd-and-camera feat of Russian Ark. From all of them Athena takes continuity as spectacle. What it adds is the claim that the movement-image is not exhausted — that you can still make a film where action means something, provided you push it all the way to tragedy and let it burn. Whether that's courage or evasion is the question it hands you. Watch the firework leave the hand again. Decide where the cut should have been, and why Gavras kept the camera running.