Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Mars One
2022 · Gabriel Martins · Mars One on Sightlines
A boy looks up.
Around him the house is doing its evening. The father is running numbers that depend on a football trial. The mother is listening for something bad to arrive. The daughter has somewhere else she would rather be, and someone she would rather be there with. And the boy has his head tilted back over the Belo Horizonte periphery, thinking about Mars. Not Mars the metaphor. Mars One, the actual colonization scheme, the one that took applications. Hold that picture; it is the whole film. Four people in one small house, each looking at a different distance, and none of them looking at the thing that is about to happen to all of them.
What is about to happen is an election. Gabriel Martins sets the film on the eve of Brazil's 2018 vote and then declines to dramatize it. The far-right ascendancy stays at the edge of the frame, which, as he understands better than most political filmmakers, is exactly where a family meets politics: as weather, as noise from the next room, as a change in the pressure of the air in a kitchen.
This is where Deleuze becomes useful, and I want to argue for him rather than assume him.
Deleuze split cinema in two. In the first regime, the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts on it, and the action changes the situation. Perceive, act, resolve. Most films are built from that circuit, and the circuit carries a quiet political assumption: that what a person does can reach the world they are in. After the war, Deleuze thought, European cinema broke that circuit, and something else appeared. People who could only watch and endure. Time felt directly rather than measured by what got done. He called it the time-image. Mars One performs that break inside a single household, in the year the household loses its handhold on the country.
Deleuze listed the symptoms of the break. One is the dispersive situation: characters whose lives touch without locking together, so no single line of action can gather them. A family is normally the opposite of that, the unit that guarantees connection. Martins uses it dispersively. Four dreams, four directions, one address. Another symptom is weak links, where the connective tissue between scenes goes slack and a scene ends because it is over rather than because it delivered something the plot needed. That patience is inherited directly: from Temporada, the Filmes de Plástico film that lets ordinary civil-service days sit on screen until they accrue meaning without underlining, and from Martins's own No Coração do Mundo, which had already run several Black working-class lives across Contagem in parallel without tying them into a knot.
Deleuze's word for those unhurried stretches is temps mort, dead time. The name misleads. Nothing is dead in them; they are where the film keeps its evidence. A film that shows you only decisive moments is asking you to take its word about everything in between. Mars One shows the in-between, and the in-between is the life.
Now the boy. Deleuze's term for a character who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher is voyant, a seer. The word does not mean mystic. It means a person whose situation has outgrown their hands, so that all that is left to do is look. It would be easy to take the boy's astronomy as a sweet character trait. Take it instead as the film's diagram of everyone's position. Each person here is looking at something they cannot reach by doing. The father looks at a professional contract through his son's legs. The mother looks at a catastrophe she can only wait for. The boy looks at Mars, and has at least chosen the honest distance.
The election itself works as what Deleuze called the absolute out-of-field. The relative out-of-field is the next room, a space you could cut to. The absolute is a change in the whole with no location you could point a camera at. That is what a national result feels like from inside a house. Bacurau does a fiercer version of the same move, letting the political backdrop seep into community life until the mundane goes strange; O Som ao Redor built an entire class system out of menace kept at the frame's edge. Martins takes the technique down to one family, and the loss of scale is the gain.
The mother's strand holds the sharpest thinking in the film, and Deleuze has a small, very precise concept for it: the demark. A mark is an object that means by habit — you see it, you expect what customarily follows. A demark is the anomaly that breaks the chain and forces you to interpret. An unexpected encounter is a demark, and she does what people do with one. She builds a system around it. She decides she is cursed. The film is not laughing at her. Interpretation rushes in wherever causality has become unavailable, and for a woman in her position the real chain of causes, an election and a labor market and a two-hundred-year arrangement, is not legible, while a curse is. The occult here is a working epistemology for people denied the other kind.
Which gathers the four dreams under the concept that makes this a political film without a single speech. Writing about filmmakers working where the national cinema had never spoken for them, Deleuze said the people are missing. Not that there are no people. That the people, in the sense of a collective subject a cinema claims to represent, does not include everyone, and therefore has to be invented. His name for the inventing is fabulation: catching people in the act of telling a story about themselves that is not yet true. Mars, the football contract, the new love, the curse. Four fabulations, and the film refuses to rank them. The boy's stars are not nobler than the father's trials. They are the same operation, making a future by narrating one, in a country that has just voted against them having one. Then Brazil submitted the film to the Oscars as its self-description in that exact year, which is the same act performed one level up.
Martins can do this because of who holds the camera. Filmes de Plástico is a collective from Contagem making films about Contagem, and the household grammar here — unemphatic, non-performing, ensemble — comes from Ela Volta na Quinta, where the method began by casting actual family members. Deleuze called this free indirect discourse: the author's vision and the character's vision become one vision, neither erased. In most films that is a stylistic achievement. Here it is a production fact.
Watch the bodies. Deleuze's late cinema of the body holds that a posture can expose a social relation more exactly than dialogue can, and he called such a posture a gest. The boy's body at the football trial is one. It carries his father's entire economic plan, and it is being assessed on the one exit route the country reliably advertises to boys like him. He did not choose the route. He is standing in it. Meanwhile the neon-tinged night photography does what Deleuze said affective colour does: it absorbs the scene and its feeling instead of describing them. That is how a periphery looks to someone who loves it. Warmth without softness.
The lineage runs back to Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett's episodic portrait of a Black working-class family, where dignity lived in unhurried routine rather than in crisis. Both films sit inside the realist contract Bazin argued for: hold the shot long enough that the world stays ambiguous, and let the viewer do the judging that montage would otherwise do for them. Burnett's economy was partly circumstance. Martins's is a decision, and the decision is political, since refusing to underline is a way of refusing to explain these people.
The invention is this. He shrank the Brazilian ensemble film from a city to a kitchen. O Som ao Redor needed a street to hold its strands apart. Mars One holds four incompatible futures in one apartment and finds them just as far apart. That is a real addition to what narrative can do, and it comes with an argument attached: the drama of a political catastrophe is not the catastrophe, it is the private plans the catastrophe quietly voids.
Watch it again and watch where everyone is looking. Then ask which of the four is being unrealistic. The honest answer is none of them, and that is the trouble.
Concepts in play
- dispersive-situation — The household's four weakly-linked strands — father's bet on the football trials, mother's premonition, daughter's new love, boy's Mars One — never converge into one line of action; inherited from No Coração do Mundo's multi-strand ensemble across Contagem.
- weak-links — The ambling ensemble rhythm and the Temporada-derived practice of holding long everyday scenes that accrue meaning without dramatic underlining; scenes end when they are over, not when the plot has been served.
- temps mort — The collective's patient, near-documentary observational rhythm — unhurried domestic and labor routine held on screen, the method Killer of Sheep founded for Black working-class portraiture.
- voyant / the seer — The boy stares past everything toward the stars and the Mars One colonization project; no act available to him reaches what he is looking at, and the same is true of his father, mother and sister.
- out-of-field-absolute — The 2018 election of a far-right president is never staged; politics is held at the edge of the frame and felt as a change in the whole, the practice Bacurau shares of letting a national backdrop seep in until it distorts the mundane.
- demark — The mother's unexpected encounter breaks the customary chain and forces interpretation; she reads it as a curse and fights off the premonition of ruin (the film's occult facet).
- fabulation / legending — Four dreams tended simultaneously — Mars One, the football contract, a new love and a new life, the curse — each a story a person tells about a future that does not yet exist.
- people-are-missing — A Black working-class family on the Belo Horizonte periphery, filmed far from Rio's postcards and favela clichés, chosen as Brazil's Oscar submission — a national self-description made in the year the nation elected against them.
- free-indirect-discourse-political — Filmes de Plástico is a collective from Contagem filming Contagem, and the domestic ensemble grammar descends from Ela Volta na Quinta's casting of the director's own non-professional family members.
- the-gest — The son's body at the football trials, carrying the father's entire economic hope and being assessed on the one advertised exit route from the periphery.
- attitudes & postures — The naturalistic, non-professional performance grammar the household inherits from Ela Volta na Quinta — everyday bodies carrying duration rather than delivering beats.
- affective colour — Martins's neon-tinged night photography, warmth without softness, absorbing the periphery's evenings into a single felt quality.