Nineteen Eighty-Four · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Big Brother's face is a printed poster. Coarse screen, high contrast, pasted to brick, and weathered. Rain has been getting into it.

That one decision tells you what kind of dystopia Michael Radford was building in the spring of 1984, while everything else in the genre rendered the future in chrome and neon. Airstrip One is bomb-damaged brick and institutional grey-green. The Party here is not advanced. It is old, and it never left. Allan Cameron's design reconstructs London around 1948 and sets the film inside it: a future that looks like a deprivation you have already lived through.

Winston's work is the other half of the idea. He corrects the record so that it always agrees with the present, speaks the new version into the speakwrite, and drops the old page into a pneumatic tube. Nothing is left over.

Deleuze has a term for what that does to an image, and it repays the two minutes it takes to learn. Ordinarily a description points at something that exists first; the account comes second, and you can hold one against the other. Deleuze calls a description crystalline when it stops pointing and starts substituting, when it erases the object it was supposed to be about and occupies its place. Winston's rewritten article is not a lie about the event. It is the event, because no other copy survives. Radford shoots this as clerical routine. Paper, tube, next item. That is why the lens is worth having: it moves the horror off the propaganda, which is loud and easy to see through, and onto the filing.

The larger concept is what Deleuze called the powers of the false, and he mostly admired it. His model was the artist as forger, the storyteller who makes a truth instead of reporting one. Orwell's addition, which Radford keeps whole, is that same power drawing a salary. By the time the interrogation reaches two plus two, the question is not whether Winston will agree. It is whether anything is left in him that could check.

That puts the film in an odd relation to cinema's oldest promise. Film spent decades trading on Bazin's claim that a photograph carries some of the being of the thing photographed. Radford makes a film about dismantling that, then shoots it in the most evidentiary idiom available, the grain and rubble and real weather he took from Peter Watkins's The War Game, which proved that an unfilmable British catastrophe is believable only in newsreel texture. He aims that texture at a world where nothing survives to be checked against, and he shot on the calendar dates the novel names. The film is not predicting. It is checking.

Then there is the rectangle. The telescreen sits in nearly every composition of Winston's private life, or just outside it, and Roger Deakins hems him into shallow depth against it. Deleuze separates two kinds of off-screen space: the relative kind, a room next door you could walk into, and the absolute kind, a beyond that is nowhere you could go. The telescreen makes the second one into policy, since total surveillance needs no perfection, only the credible possibility of being watched at any moment. The watcher is never in a location; he is a permanent maybe, and every frame has to carry him. Listen to the sound. Announcements, production figures and martial music run under everything at low level until you stop hearing them, exactly as the characters stopped. When the junk-shop room finally gives you silence, it lands like a physical event. You notice you are hearing yourself not be overheard.

In the older cinema, the one Deleuze called the movement-image, a man perceives a wrong and acts, and his action changes the situation. Winston perceives everything with total accuracy and has no lever to pull. Deleuze's name for what remains when the link between seeing and doing is cut is a pure optical and sound situation, and for the person stuck inside one, the seer: someone who can only look and endure. The film is engineered to produce him. A hidden room, a forbidden book, a secret brotherhood, a sympathetic ally, every part in the conspiracy-thriller kit is issued and then revealed to have been a component of the trap. Tom Priestley cuts against acceleration throughout, holding takes, letting transitions go unhurried, so the film accumulates duration where a thriller would accumulate suspense. Deleuze's temps mort, dead time, is not a lapse here. It is the subject. The Ministry of Love section runs far past the length a conventionally shaped drama would allow, and the famous inversions arrive as stages in a procedure.

Deleuze also gives the figure for the enclosure: crystalline worlds where present and dream can no longer be told apart, whose real interest lies in whether they crack. This one has no crack. Charrington's warm cluttered room, the only space in the film where time has been allowed to accumulate, turns out to be stagecraft, patiently maintained. The countryside with Julia is the single passage of green and sun, and the bleach-bypass leaves it blanched, a memory of nature rather than nature. Even the inner life is interior: Radford declines to mark the dreams as dreams, and the place where there is no darkness, dreamt, comes back as a lit cell. That drained, derelict landscape is what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever, space that has stopped functioning as a setting for anyone's action. Neorealism found such spaces in the rubble of a real war. Radford rebuilt the rubble and moved the future into it.

Bodies carry the argument. Crowds are choreographed to abolish individual silhouette, at the canteen, at calisthenics, at the Two Minutes Hate; the blocking does the ideological work and nobody has to say anything. It is Lang's arrangement of the worker columns in Metropolis, bodies as architectural ornament, put back to work sixty years on. Deleuze's word for a collective compressed into one affective unit is the dividual. The cruellest touch is that the crowd, shot loose and documentary-adjacent, gets an energy the individual in his rigid frame never gets. Against that, John Hurt, playing a man conserving strength, his face trained over a lifetime to show nothing, which is why the diary scenes carry such furtive relief. What finally breaks him is not an argument. It is rats. Deleuze's cinema of the body holds that when action drops away, posture and exhaustion take over the work of carrying time. Hurt's depletion is the clock this film runs on.

The debts are specific. Nigel Kneale and Rudolph Cartier's live 1954 BBC version invented the grammar: the telescreen as an actual video image inside the frame, Room 101 as a bare cell instead of a torture set. Radford keeps both and strips out the declamation the live studio forced on Peter Cushing. Alphaville is the permission to build a future out of unretouched present-day streets shot at night; Fahrenheit 451 set the flat-affect register for a wall screen treated as household furniture. The look has a literal parent in Kazuo Miyagawa's silver-retention printing on Otoo, skipping the bleach so silver stays in the emulsion, which Deakins adopts here in one of the first significant English-language narrative uses. That process went mainstream a decade later in Se7en and Saving Private Ryan, and the idea underneath it, that a dystopia should look degraded and continuous with our own recent past, runs on to Children of Men.

What Radford did to the form is smaller and stranger than it sounds. He put two tempos in one film and refused to reconcile them. The state's images are fast, loud and rhetorically shaped; lived experience is slow and cannot articulate itself. Every cut between them shows you who owns the clock.

Watch it again for the rectangle. Count how often the telescreen is not actually in the shot and Winston behaves as though it is. Then notice that you are doing it too.