Buffalo '66 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man walks out of prison and the first thing he needs is a bathroom. He can't find one. He paces the frozen lot, doubles back, asks, is refused, nearly walks back into the cell he just left because at least it had a toilet. This is the opening of Buffalo '66, and it is the whole film in miniature: a body that cannot discharge itself, a man freed into a world that gives him nowhere to act. Vincent Gallo could have started with the kidnapping. He started with a man who can't pee.

Deleuze has a name for what's broken here. He called it the crisis of the action-image. In the older cinema — the cinema of cause and effect, the Westerns and crime pictures — a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the action resolves the situation. Billy can't do that. He perceives everything (his shame, his parents' indifference, the bookie he owes, the placekicker he blames for five lost years) and none of it converts into an adequate act. So he does the only thing his broken wiring can produce: he grabs Layla off the street and orders her to play his wife. Kidnapping here isn't a thriller engine. It's a short-circuit. It's what a man does when the line from feeling to doing has been cut, and the only intimacy he can picture is one he takes by force. The film drains the crime of suspense on purpose, because suspense belongs to the action-image, and Billy no longer lives there.

Where does he live instead? In a bleached, depopulated Buffalo that Gallo and cinematographer Lance Acord shot on reversal stock — high contrast, dense blacks, skies blown out to flat overcast, skin gone slightly sick with cold. Deleuze would call this an any-space-whatever: a space that has stopped being a stage for action and become pure affect, fragmented and emptied. The blown-out windows behind every figure aren't a setting Billy moves through toward a goal. They're a void he's pinned against. The wintry emptiness is the film thinking in light.

Then there are the family scenes, and here Gallo invents something exact. He poses everyone frontally, dead-center, symmetrical, as if for a snapshot — and the snapshot is literally the motif, the posed family photo that organizes the whole house. Deleuze, borrowing from theatre, calls a posture that exposes a social relation a gest. The dinner table is nothing but gests: people holding the attitudes of a loving family while the love is visibly absent, a portrait they keep failing to take. The mother (Anjelica Huston) resents Billy's birth for making her miss the one Bills game they ever won. The father (Ben Gazzara) performs tenderness as menace. Nobody acts; everybody poses. This is the debt Gallo owes Ozu's Tokyo Story — the low, balanced, near-frontal family tableau — pressed into American cruelty.

Memory in this film never arrives as a normal flashback. Instead a smaller picture opens up inside the frame, a window of the past surfacing in the present like a thought you can't stop. Deleuze called the dated image of a former present a recollection-image, but Gallo's version does something stranger: it doesn't cut away, it overlays. Past and present share the screen at once, indistinguishable, each feeding the other — the condition Deleuze located at the edge of the crystal-image, where you can no longer separate what is from what was. Billy lives inside that crystal. His parents' house and his childhood wound are simultaneous, layered, untellable apart.

And because Billy can only endure, the person who carries the film's seeing is Layla. Ricci plays her with a watchful, almost beatific passivity — she looks, she registers, she does not act. She is what Deleuze called the seer (voyant): the figure who replaces the agent once action fails, who can only behold. The film's most beautiful moment is given entirely to her: under a spotlight in a bowling alley, to King Crimson's "Moonchild," she tap-dances. The world goes still around her and the movement passes into the music and the light — the dance absorbing the dancer. Nothing is achieved. It's pure optical and sound situation, a release of feeling the characters can't otherwise reach.

Gallo didn't invent this grammar; he assembled it from a precise lineage and made it American. The held, undramatized duration — scenes run past comfort, the dinner, the bathroom hunt — is Akerman's Jeanne Dielman and Bresson's Pickpocket, the locked-off frontal take as the drama itself rather than a flourish. The blank, model-like body carrying time is Bresson's cinema of the body. Gazzara and the raw, self-lacerating masculinity in unbroken takes come straight out of Cassavetes' The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The prog-rock needle-drop as interior monologue is Scorsese's Mean Streets transposed to Yes and King Crimson; the indulged-and-indicted loner is Taxi Driver.

What Gallo did with all this matters. He took the time-image — the European art-cinema break Deleuze diagnosed, the cinema of seers and dead time and emptied space — and smuggled it inside a kidnapping comedy with movie stars. He proved the stalled, watching, post-action sensibility could live in a genre shell and an indie romance, not just in Antonioni. And he proved it photographically: Acord carried this bleached frontal stillness forward into Sofia Coppola's films, where any-space-whatever became a whole mood of a generation. Watch Buffalo '66 again for the thing it knows in its first minute — that the hardest thing a wounded man can do is not commit a crime, but stand still and let himself be seen.