Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Prince of Egypt
1998 · Simon Wells · The Prince of Egypt on Sightlines
A man stands at the edge of the water holding a stick. He is small. The crowd behind him is enormous, the cliffs are more enormous, and the thing in front of him has no top edge at all. He raises the stick. Then he does nothing, for a long time, while the sea goes vertical.
Two beats: the act, and the stillness after it, when the world takes the movement out of his hands. Most of what makes The Prince of Egypt strange and good lives in the gap between them.
Start with the first beat, because Deleuze has a name for it and the name is unfashionably flattering. This is the large form of the action-image: a vast situation presses on a person until they absorb enough of it to act, and the act changes the situation. Deleuze's shorthand is S–A–S′, situation to action to altered situation. Exodus is nearly the pure case. DeMille knew it in 1956, and this film re-choreographs his staging beat for beat, Moses raising the staff before massed crowds, the sea as a climax-shaped set-piece. What Deleuze adds is a word for the situation itself: the encompasser, the milieu that surrounds a character and calls the act out of them. Here the encompasser is architecture. The temple flythroughs (a 3D camera move flown across hand-painted 2D walls, the Beauty and the Beast ballroom trick scaled up) exist to make Egypt something you can be inside of and dwarfed by. Egypt isn't scenery. Egypt is what leans on him.
Then the duel. Deleuze calls the structural spine of the large form a binomial: force against force, the hero and the thing that answers him. Usually that means hero and villain. Chapman, Wells and Hickner's reframing, scripture played as a fraternal tragedy between two brothers raised as princes and split by what each is responsible for, puts love on the other side of the duel instead. Rameses isn't wicked. He is the encompasser with a face, a man who cannot stop being Egypt. That is the film's invention, and it is why the ending lands as grief rather than triumph.
The large form also has a rhythm Deleuze calls respiration: the film breathes between huge milieu-space and the taut line the action draws through it. This is the Lean debt, and it is specific. Lawrence of Arabia taught the film to treat a desert as a duration rather than a location. Heat-haze, horizon lines, figures reduced to marks. Those vistas alternate against the tight fast line of the chariot race. Wide, then narrow, then wide.
When Moses flees into that desert, the breathing stops. The space stays vast but quits organizing anything; there is nothing to do in it and no one to do it to. Deleuze's phrase is any-space-whatever, a space that has given up its job of hosting action. It is the one long stretch where a character can only look. It is also the only place a burning bush could happen.
The bush does two things at once, and both deserve naming.
First, light. Deleuze separates the cinema of shadow, where a gradient makes things sinister, from what he calls lyrical abstraction, where light and white are handled as a spiritual alternative. Gustave Doré's engravings are the film's stated art-direction source, and Doré's signature move is God's light breaking through cloud. Animated, that becomes a field of luminance, and what it stages is not a monster in the dark. It is a choice. Moses can accept or refuse.
Second, where the voice comes from. Deleuze distinguishes the relative out-of-field, what sits just past the frame edge, from the absolute out-of-field, a beyond that can't be assigned any location at all. He builds the idea from Dreyer and Bresson, where a door or a blank wall implies an elsewhere no camera could ever reach. Every religious film needs that second thing and most settle for the first, hiding God in a thunderhead. The Prince of Egypt does something better. Val Kilmer voices Moses, and Val Kilmer voices God. The Outside speaks in the exact timbre of the inside. Deleuze would call this an encounter with the unthought, the point where thought meets something it cannot resolve and doesn't get to. Is that revelation, or a man alone in a desert hearing himself? The film refuses to settle it, and refuses in a family movie, deliberately.
The plagues are a music problem before they are a story problem. Eisenstein separated montage that grows, an accumulating spiral, from montage that jumps, a collision producing a new quality; Deleuze keeps both and calls the second pathetic. Ten escalating afflictions cut to Hans Zimmer is the spiral. The last one is the jump, where quantity turns into something else entirely. The ancestor is Fantasia, where 'Night on Bald Mountain' established that you could animate to a symphony for awe rather than for gags, and Bambi, which had already proved that painterly hand-drawn weight could carry grief with no joke to relieve it.
Which brings us back to the stillness at the water. Deleuze has one more idea, from his pages on musicals: the movement of world. The dancer stops being the source of the motion and the world dances instead. The figure goes still; everything around it takes over. That is normally an observation about Minnelli ballrooms. This is a musical, and it uses the device for theology. When the songs arrive, characters stop acting and the world moves through them. When the sea opens, Moses has already done his one small thing, and then he just stands there, a hand-drawn figure two inches tall against a digitally-assisted wall of water. The miracle is measured by how long he doesn't move. The crowd behind him works the same way, rendered not as individuals but as one enormous feeling, what Deleuze calls a dividual, a mass registering as a single affective unit. Animation can do that natively. This film noticed.
What did it change? It took the epic register American animation had ceded to live action and proved a hand-drawn feature could hold it for ninety minutes without apologizing through a comic sidekick. It made the song a movement of world instead of a number. DreamWorks Animation exists because Katzenberg wanted grown-up animation and opened with Exodus; Brenda Chapman went on from here to become the first woman to direct a major American animated feature outright. And the ballroom trick of flying a camera through paintings left this film sized for temples and oceans, which is the scale all digital animation works at now.
Watch it again for the hands. Not the sea. The hands, and the pauses on either side of them. The film's whole argument about what a person is for is in how long it lets someone stand still.
Concepts in play
- action-image, large form (S–A–S′) — Exodus staged as global situation → decisive act → transformed world; Moses raising his staff before massed crowds, re-choreographed shot-for-beat from The Ten Commandments (1956)
- the encompasser — Egypt rendered as an architectural pressure via the temple flythroughs — a 3D camera move across 2D painted walls, the CAPS/Beauty and the Beast ballroom technique scaled up
- binomial (the duel of forces) — The film's reframing of scripture as a fraternal tragedy: two brothers raised as princes, set at odds by their chosen responsibilities, so the opposing force is love rather than villainy
- respiration-space — Lean's desert as epic emptiness — heat-haze scale, tiny figures against vast horizon lines — alternated against the taut line of the chariot race
- any-space-whatever (espace quelconque) — The Midian desert exile: widescreen vistas of monumental distance where the space no longer hosts action and Moses can only look
- lyrical abstraction — The burning bush built on Doré's engraved light breaking through cloud, staged as a luminous field offering a choice rather than a shadow-threat
- out-of-field, absolute — God present as an elsewhere with no locatable position — Doré's light through cloud as the technique for signalling it
- the unthought / the outside — Val Kilmer voicing both Moses and God: the divine voice a man might mistake for his own, leaving revelation and interiority undecidable
- montage, organic and pathetic — The plagues as an escalating accumulation cut to Zimmer's symphonic score, reaching a qualitative jump — the Fantasia / 'Night on Bald Mountain' precedent of music-image spectacle over gag cartooning
- movement of world — The musical numbers (Schwartz's songs, 'When You Believe') and the parting of the sea, where the hand-drawn figure goes still and the digitally-assisted immensity carries all the motion
- dividual — The massed crowds before the sea rendered as a single affective unit rather than as individuals, in the Doré register of crowded monumental staging