Doctor Zhivago · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the breath. At Varykino the dacha has frozen solid — chandeliers of frost, windows blind with ice, the whole house turned to a glittering cave — and inside it Yuri Zhivago sits writing poems by candlelight while the snow keeps its silence outside. It is the most beautiful room in the film, and nothing happens in it. A man writes. The world has stopped at the door. Hold that image, because it tells you what kind of film this secretly is.

For three and a quarter hours Doctor Zhivago looks like the grandest action picture ever mounted: cavalry charges, troop trains crawling across white expanses, a demonstration sabred down in a Moscow street. Gilles Deleuze's name for that machine is the movement-image, and its engine room is the action-image — a character sees a situation and acts to change it, perception and deed locked in a circuit, history as something you do. Lean built the biggest version of it Hollywood could afford. In its grandest mode, what Deleuze calls the large form, an encompassing situation presses on every life until a decisive act transforms it. The Revolution here is exactly that encompasser — the synsign, the milieu that surrounds and demands. Lean stages it as sheer encroachment: rooms divided and crowded, the family house requisitioned and subdivided, warmth besieged by cold. History keeps pushing through the wall.

And the man at the center won't act. That is the strange, quiet scandal of the film. Zhivago is a doctor and a poet, and Omar Sharif plays him, in the dossier's phrase, "a watcher more than an actor." When the mounted troops ride the marchers down in the snow, he doesn't lead and doesn't fight; he is a physician, so he goes to the bodies and binds what he can. He perceives everything and alters nothing. Deleuze has a word for this figure — the seer, the voyant, the one who can only look and endure when no action is adequate to what he sees. And he has a word for the historical moment a cinema discovers such a figure: the crisis of the action-image, characters who can no longer react adequately to what they perceive. Here is what makes Zhivago worth the lens. It plants the seer at the dead center of the action-image's most lavish cathedral. The large form roars all around him; he stays a still point inside it.

Watch what the still point does to the film's time. Deleuze loved an image of the dancer absorbed by the dance — the body grows quiet while the movement passes through it. He calls it the movement of the world: the figure stills, and the world moves instead. That is Zhivago in the frozen dacha, and Zhivago at the window. The poet becomes the place where action drains out of an event and pure duration seeps in. Freddie Young's wide 65mm frame is the instrument of the exchange — it isolates one small contemplative face against an enormous indifferent space, so the close-up and the vast shot share the screen. Sharif's held, inward face is a qualisign, an icon of quality: a reflecting surface registering wonder and grief without discharging them into deed.

The spaces follow the man. The frozen Varykino interior is an any-space-whatever — not a setting for action but a blue-white void emptied of it, a luminous field where time is simply felt. Color does the feeling for you: the warm field of flowers against the desolate ice is an affective colour-image, a hue that absorbs the scene and becomes its emotion. And the whole story reaches us secondhand, as memory. Robert Bolt's frame device — Yevgraf interrogating a young woman, reconstructing his dead brother's life — turns the film into a recollection-image, a past laid out to be moved through rather than a present unfolding. The debt is exact: it is Citizen Kane's survivor-reconstructing-a-dead-man device, retooled. Threading it all is the balalaika, the motif tying Lara, the lost daughter, and the frame together — an object condensing the film's whole organizing relation, a symbol you can hear.

The craft debts run deeper than Kane. The doomed-love structure scored to a single recurring theme is Brief Encounter (Rachmaninoff) blown to continental scale, with Jarre's "Lara's Theme" doing what the Rachmaninoff did — carrying feeling the characters cannot speak. The trick of isolating one figure against vast hostile space by long lens and dissolve is Lawrence of Arabia, the same team turning desert into snow. From Gone with the Wind and Ben-Hur comes the roadshow architecture, overture and intermission, that gives the seer room to simply behold.

What Lean invented out of these parts is the personal epic: the claim that the inner life of one passive, feeling man could be the true subject of the largest canvas cinema had. He proved the time-image's watcher could live inside the movement-image's biggest spectacle, and that melodrama — love persisting, doomed, inside catastrophe — was a serious vessel for it.

So watch it again for the man who doesn't act. The Revolution is the weather. The film is about what it costs to only behold it, and to write.