The Tale of the Fox · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A complaint is being read against the fox, and the fox is listening. Watch his face while the charge is read out. The eyes go first, sliding off to the side. Then the brow lifts a fraction. Then the jaw sets. Before he has said a word you have watched him decide to lie.

There is no actor in that shot. There is fur and felt over a wire armature, standing on a table in a house at Fontenay-sous-Bois, moved by a man's fingers twelve or twenty-four times for every second you are watching, with his daughter Irène building and animating beside him and the rest of the household doing everything else. Le Roman de Renard has no studio behind it. It has a family and a lamp.

Hold onto that, because it makes this film the clearest demonstration in cinema of the idea Deleuze starts from. His categories usually float somewhere above the movie. Here they are objects on a workbench. This is the movement-image with the case off and the gears showing.

Deleuze takes the first idea from Bergson: film does not record movement, it manufactures movement out of still slices taken at equal intervals. He calls those slices any-instants-whatever. Ordinary instants, none of them the peak of the gesture. Older arts hunted for the privileged instant, the pose that sums up the leap; cinema gave that up, took the mechanical sample instead, and got real movement in the bargain. For live action this is free, since the shutter does the sampling. Starewicz had to make every any-instant-whatever with his hands, and decide what each one was.

He found the principle the hard way. Around 1910, in Kaunas, he tried to film stag beetles fighting and the beetles went inert under the lights, so he rebuilt them out of their own dried carapaces, wired at the joints, and produced the fight himself a frame at a time. The Beautiful Leukanida (1912) came out of that. The method never changed afterwards, only the ambition, and it left a permanent signature: a Starewicz animal never reads as a designed shape the way a cartoon animal does. It reads as something that was alive and has been talked into moving again.

That is not far from what Deleuze means by expressionism, which for him is the German silent line, where light and shadow carry the drama and objects are charged with a life that is not organic. Usually the phrase is a metaphor. Here it is a job description. Starewicz had solved chiaroscuro at miniature scale by La Voix du rossignol (1923): hard raking key, deep shadow on fur, so a twenty-centimetre puppet holds the tonal range of a photographed face. Renard is lit that way throughout, with shafts and pools that model fur and throw hard shadows onto the walls. The throne room takes its grammar from Lang's Die Nibelungen, low angles that make architecture loom, courtiers ranked in symmetry, stone modelled by torchlight, all of it rebuilt at one-sixth scale.

Now back to the face. Deleuze calls the close-up an affection-image: a feeling that has arrived and has not yet been spent in an act. He splits the type in two. There is the face held still, reflecting a single quality, wonder or dread, which he calls a qualisign. And there is the face where small movements build toward a threshold, a face that wants something: the potisign, the icon of power. The second is far harder, and it is precisely what Starewicz engineered. He refused the fixed carved head that the later Czech school would make standard and built mechanisms instead: movable eyes and lids, hinged jaws, mobile brows and lips, parts swapped between exposures. What he manufactured was the capacity to hesitate. A carved mask can be grave and it can be frightening. It cannot squint, and it cannot change its mind while you watch.

The story it serves is the oldest joke about power. Deleuze keeps a category for films in which the social world turns out to be a skin stretched over appetite: the impulse-image, and its logic is naturalist. There is a derived milieu, the drawing room or the court, everything correctly named, and beneath it an originary world of drives that keeps breaking the surface. The beast fable does something lovely to that scheme. It wears the originary world on the outside. The doublet is the milieu; the fur is what is under it, and the fur is visible from the first shot. Noble's court runs on heraldry, banners, gallows and procedure, and it is staffed entirely by predators and prey obliged to sit down together. Complaints pile up against Renard because Renard is the only one who never pretends the arrangement is real. Envoys go out to fetch him, the bear, then the cat, then the badger, and each is maimed in the attempt. In Deleuze's naturalism this normally slopes down toward exhaustion and death, the shape of Stroheim or Buñuel. Comedy blocks the slope. Renard does not degrade. He is an appetite that keeps winning, which is why the film reads as amoral rather than cruel.

The soundtrack arrived a decade after the images, and it shows in a way that happens to help. The film was animated silent around 1929–30, stranded without money for sound, then fitted with German dialogue for Berlin in 1937 and French for Paris in 1941: Jean Nohain's rhymed music-hall patter over Vincent Scotto's score, which behaves less like film scoring than like the continuous accompaniment of a silent feature. Because the mouths had to serve two languages, the lip movement is expressive but generic, and the voices sit very slightly upon the bodies instead of inside them. Deleuze built a whole late regime out of voices coming loose from bodies, in Duras and in Straub. This is not that. Nobody planned it; it is what happens when financing fails. But the ventriloquial hum is real, and it suits a story about creatures whose mouths are their weapons.

The shape of the thing is picaresque, and Deleuze's term for that shape is the small form of the action-image. The large form starts with a situation pressing down and ends with the act that transforms it. The small form runs backwards: an act comes first, and the act discloses a situation you could not previously see. Each envoy's humiliation shows a little more of what this kingdom actually is. Nothing accumulates toward a verdict. Starewicz had run the structure once already in The Frogs Who Wanted a King (1922), massed puppets in depth before a throne, a trial that ends in accommodation rather than justice.

A puppet film also has a problem live action never has. Deleuze says every shot is a closed set that nevertheless opens onto an out-of-field: the room next door, the world continuing past the edge of the frame. In a miniature, the world stops where the table stops. So Starewicz manufactures the out-of-field like everything else. Continuity coverage borrowed wholesale from live-action comedy, which he had been cutting since The Cameraman's Revenge in 1912: eyelines, shot/reverse-shot, inserts on hands and objects. Depth staging with foreground occlusion. Business running at the edges of frame. And above all a camera that travels through the sets rather than facing them; The Mascot (1933) had proved that could be done, craning through a crowded miniature while dozens of puppets animate at once. Fill the court the way Bruegel fills a panel and the box stops feeling like a box.

Renard's weapon is speech. Brought before a court that wants the truth out of him, he offers something more useful: a truth of his own manufacture, treasure that does not exist, penitence he does not feel. Deleuze's name for this figure is the forger, the character who does not so much lie against the truth as produce it, serially, in whatever version the moment requires. And the film is on his side. That is worth a pause, because the oldest claim in film theory is Bazin's, that the photographic image is a trace: the thing was there, in that light, in front of the lens. Stop-motion is the one cinema where this is entirely true and entirely beside the point. Every object in Renard existed and was really photographed. Not one of them ever moved. The most physically honest images available, put at the service of a hero whose whole art is the convincing fake.

Sixty-five minutes carried by objects, at a moment when nobody was sure that was possible. The claim that this is the first feature-length stop-motion puppet film needs care: the animation predates Ptushko's The New Gulliver (1935), but Ptushko reached screens first. And the film's own chronology is a small tragedy of timing. Conceived at the end of the silent era, released in Berlin in 1937 on German money after French backing failed, and in Paris only in 1941, under the Occupation, into a market with American films shut out. Its home audience met it four years after Snow White had already decided what the phrase "animated feature" was going to mean. The pacing is late-silent, and you feel it.

The invention that matters is the head. Everyone who animates objects works downstream of the choice Starewicz made there, and the tradition mostly went the other way, the carved mask, dignity in place of the sneer. Watch the eyelids next time. Then ask what animation would have become if the face had stayed a machine.