Lawrence of Arabia · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man strikes a match, holds it, watches the little flame, and puffs it out. The screen answers with a hard cut to the sun heaving up over the desert rim — the whole of Arabia catching fire in a single frame. Anne Coates's cut is the most studied in cinema, and rightly: flame to sun, England to Arabia, the snuffing of the man T.E. Lawrence was and the ignition of the one he means to become. Hold onto that match. The entire film is the question of who lit it.

Start with what Lean built before he broke it. For two-thirds of its length Lawrence of Arabia is the purest large-form action-image the English cinema ever made — Deleuze's name for the regime where a vast situation presses on a man until he answers it with a decisive act that changes the world. The desert is the encompasser, the synsign: a milieu so total it seems to summon the deed. Aqaba has to be taken, so Lawrence crosses the Nefud that cannot be crossed and takes the port from its undefended landward side. Lean stages this as respiration-space — the film breathes between immensity and line. We get the bleached emptiness, riders reduced to commas against the dunes; then the camera drops to the sand and the cavalry charge fills the 2.20:1 frame edge to edge in one horizontal rush. Wide milieu, taut vector, wide milieu again. That alternation is the lung of the heroic epic, and Lean's command of it is why the form has never been done better.

But watch what the desert is doing to the image. Freddie Young shoots through telephoto lenses so long that distance turns tactile — Lawrence's first emergence in the Nefud is a shimmer, a man dissolved in heat-haze, arriving for minutes out of nothing. The sound drops away; ambient noise is stripped until the score has to fill a void. This is no longer landscape-as-setting. It is any-space-whatever — Deleuze's term for a space that has stopped serving action and become pure affect, an emptiness you feel rather than cross. asw-emptiness: the white field that means exposure, smallness, the threat of being unmade. The desert that calls forth the hero is the same desert that will hollow him out. The form carries its own undoing.

And it undoes him. At Deraa, and again at the massacre of the retreating Turkish column, the action-image breaks. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: the moment a character can no longer react adequately to what he sees, when situation and response come unhooked. Lean keeps the camera at a slight distance and does not look away as Lawrence's men kill the wounded — and Lawrence, who wanted this, watches. He becomes a seer, Deleuze's voyant: not the agent who resolves a situation but the one condemned to behold it, caught in a pure optical situation with no act available to discharge it. The sensory-motor circuit that drove the first half — see, decide, act — seizes. What's left is a man looking at what he has done, and a viewer placed beside him as witness with nowhere to act either. An epic of action curdles, in real time, into a cinema of pure seeing.

Underneath all of it runs the deepest current. The film opens on Lawrence's death — the motorcycle crash, then strangers at the memorial who can only repeat the reputation — and asks not how he died but whether anyone knew him. That structure is lifted straight from Citizen Kane, and like Welles, Lean uses the framing death not to solve a man but to prove him unsolvable. Because Lawrence is a forger — Deleuze's faussaire, the figure who doesn't discover his truth but fabricates it, shifting identity as he goes. O'Toole plays him as someone who doesn't understand himself yet always knows he is being watched; the slight narrowing of the eyes when he's caught performing is the whole performance. He is legending himself in the act — Deleuze's fabulation — and the film never lets us behind the legend to a stable man, because there isn't one. This is the power of the false as a creative principle: truth and pose made undecidable, and that undecidability is the character. The man and his myth occupy the same frame and cannot be told apart — a crystal-image, the actual person and his own legend reflecting each other with no way to say which is the source.

What did this do to film? It proved the largest possible canvas — 65mm, roadshow, three and a half hours — could be spent not on certainty but on doubt. The visual grammar came from Ford: The Searchers taught the cut between the lone figure and the geological vastness, scale as a psychological fact. The format came from Ben-Hur, the production discipline from Kwai, the roadshow ritual from Intolerance. El Cid, its sibling, was already monumentalizing a hero with telephoto lenses and Rózsa's silences-before-surges on the same Almería sand. Lawrence took all of it and aimed the machinery at a man who isn't there. Every later epic that distrusts its own hero — that builds a colossus in order to watch him crack — is working in the space this film opened.

Strike the match again. You still can't see whose hand it is.