The Lady Vanishes · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman writes her name in the steam on a train window. The camera holds it long enough for us to read it: Froy. Then the train enters a tunnel and the name is gone. Nobody wiped it away. The world did, in passing, at speed.

Almost everything Hitchcock is doing in The Lady Vanishes is in those five seconds. Iris saw the name. We saw it too. Within minutes a carriage of pleasant, well-dressed strangers will tell her the woman never existed, and the film will run for an hour on the gap between what we know and what the passengers will admit.

Gilles Deleuze spends most of Cinema 1 on films where perceiving leads to acting: someone sees a situation, does something, the situation changes. He calls that whole regime the movement-image, and he ends the book with Hitchcock, because Hitchcock adds a term nobody had made structural before. Deleuze calls it the relation-image. In plain terms: in an ordinary thriller the drama runs between characters. In Hitchcock it runs between the characters and the audience. He builds films out of relations only the viewer holds intact, so the viewer becomes the third party in the room, the one who knows.

That can sound like theory until you notice this film has no chase in it for most of its length. Nothing is pursuing anyone. The suspense is made out of testimony. Each cut back to another bland denying face tightens the same screw, and what is being tightened is a relation. Read it this way and the long middle stops being the wait between the disappearance and the fight. It becomes the actual subject.

Deleuze gives the relation-image two small tools, and this film uses both with unusual purity. A mark is an object that means something because of the chain it normally belongs to: a packet of Harriman's Herbal Tea means tea, means an Englishwoman abroad, means four o'clock, means she was here. A demark is that chain snapped, an object pulled out of its habit so it stops being furniture and starts demanding interpretation. Nuns do not wear high heels. When Catherine Lacey's shoes appear below the habit, thought has to start; the image can no longer be consumed at habit speed. The film is a chain of these things — spectacles, a tea label flattened against the glass, a name in condensation — small physical proofs that keep being taken away. They are taken from Iris. They are never taken from us. That asymmetry is the engine.

Then the symbol, Deleuze's word for the object that condenses a film's organizing relation: the magician's cabinet with the false back in the luggage van, the one Gilbert climbs into. A machine for making people disappear, exposed as a trick and then used as one. Hitchcock puts his own apparatus on screen as a prop and gets away with it because the scene is funny.

Deleuze also splits the action-image into two shapes. The large form: a huge situation bears down until one decisive act transforms it, which is the western, the epic, the disaster picture. The small form inverts that. An act, a gesture, a fragment discloses a situation that was hidden. The second half here is small form at its most literal, because the disclosing gesture is a door. Jack Cox shoots the corridor in depth, the receding compartment doors as a perspectival spine, so the train becomes a geography we can hold in our heads and the search proceeds threshold by threshold. Every shot leans on the space just out of frame behind the next door, which is Deleuze's relative out-of-field: the frame opening onto an implied adjacent room. Vetchinsky's set is a machine of too many doors. And the recurring gesture, as the film keeps proving, is the reveal that reveals nothing. Small form running at a deliberate loss. That is why the sequence turns frightening instead of merely brisk. The form promises disclosure every ten seconds and defaults.

There is a finer tool still. Deleuze calls an act that could belong to two different situations at once, with no way to decide between them, an index of equivocity. Miss Froy fussing over her tea is either an old governess's habit or a professional's cover, and Dame May Whitty plays the second identity without discarding the first, so the doubleness sits in the performance rather than in the plot's back pocket. Dr Hartz's courtesy is bedside manner, and it is the manner of the man arranging your death. Paul Lukas never raises his voice in either capacity. The film is full of behaviour that is legible twice and settles into one meaning only afterwards.

After the disappearance the cutting changes: shorter takes, point-of-view inserts, Iris's face intercut with the placid faces that deny her. Deleuze's term for an image that shows us somebody in the act of perceiving, so we feel the camera standing just behind as a second perceiver, is the dicisign. It explains the suffocation of this stretch. We are not quite with Iris. We are one step behind her, watching her see, so every denial lands twice: on her, and on our own certainty. Later, with an optical printer, Hitchcock lays Miss Froy's face over the nun's, and the image stops being evidence and becomes a mind.

The luggage van is where the comedy's furniture turns predatory. Raked shadows, one hard source, a magician's props throwing shapes. This is the German inheritance from the two years the young Hitchcock spent at UFA, and it is exactly what Deleuze means by expressionism: light and shadow as a gradient, objects given a non-organic life of their own. The debts are specific and traceable. The Lodger (1927) supplied the chiaroscuro and the engineered subjective device; the glass ceiling that let an audience 'hear' pacing overhead becomes the POV grammar that puts us inside Iris's unverifiable perceptions. Lang's Spione (1928) supplied the structure, a secret in transit, a train as the mechanism of the plot's violence, an organisation that can erase a person, which Hitchcock compresses into a single carriage. Rome Express (1932) supplied the Gaumont-British house set itself, the full-length corridor with practicable doors, and the habit of introducing passengers as a cross-section rather than a cast list. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) proved with its Albert Hall cymbal crash that music can be performance, clock and secret at once, which is what Miss Froy's tune completes. The 39 Steps (1935) gave him Mr Memory, a formula stored in a human head, and the bickering couple trapped in a compartment; both are transplanted nearly intact. And Secret Agent (1936) held an organ note down with a dead man's body, announcing a murder as pure sound. That experiment matures here into the nun's scream buried under a trackside band: noise used to erase evidence rather than deliver it. The same move as the tunnel and the window.

One thing in this film is out there and cannot be located on any map. Bandrika is invented because British censorship discouraged showing real foreign governments unflatteringly, so the antagonist has no name and no country. The Bandrikan dialogue is left untranslated, and the English travellers sit inside a wall of speech they cannot read, which establishes the film's anxiety acoustically before the plot gets near it. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, the next compartment, from an absolute one, a beyond that can't be given a place. The film opened in October 1938, weeks after Munich. Todhunter waves a white handkerchief out of the carriage door and is shot for it. Charters and Caldicott, who have spent the whole picture refusing to notice anything that is not a Test match, end it firing a revolver. What the film is about is the thing it is forbidden to show, and it points at it continuously.

So what did it do to the art? It proved a feature could be built out of knowledge rather than pursuit, with the audience's certainty as the load-bearing structure, sustained for an hour while the villain visibly does almost nothing. Every disbelieved-woman film descends from that, a form that took its lasting name from Gaslight two years later and runs through Bunny Lake Is Missing to Flightplan. So does the confined-transport thriller: Night Train to Munich, made two years on by Carol Reed from a Launder and Gilliat script with Lockwood and the same two cricketers, then Strangers on a Train, the sleeper car in North by Northwest, Murder on the Orient Express, Transsiberian, Snowpiercer. All of them return to a grammar this film fixed: closed society, forward motion, geography measured in doors.

The second achievement is stranger. On a stage barely ninety feet long, Hitchcock manufactured the entire sensation of unstoppable forward motion out of miniatures, rear projection and a carriage rocked by hand. The opening alpine village is plainly a model and he does not hide it. The movement is fabricated, which is the honest condition of all cinematic movement, and the film is cheerful about it.

And there is a fault line here, if you want to look for it. Hitchcock discovered that a person can perceive perfectly and get nothing for it, that seeing is not convertible into acting unless somebody else agrees to ratify it. In 1938 he still closes that gap with a brawl in a luggage van and a revolver. Later cinema would find it unclosable and build a whole regime out of people who can only watch. The last joke already suspects as much: Gilbert, safe at the Foreign Office, cannot remember the tune. The information nearly evaporates. What survives is that two people heard it and can still say so.

Watch it again for the objects. Count how many times a proof is handed to you and taken away from her.