Chimes at Midnight · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Two old men trudge across a field of snow, talking about the bells they heard at midnight long ago. That image opens the film and the film returns to it at the end, and everything between — the tavern, the rebellion, the battle, the coronation — happens inside the parenthesis it makes. Welles is telling us before a word of plot arrives that what we are about to watch is already over. We are not going to witness this world. We are going to remember it.

That single decision is the key to the whole picture, and Deleuze gives us the word for it. A flashback that carries a date — "this happened, then" — is what he calls a recollection-image: a slice of former present recovered for the story. Welles does something stranger. By bracketing the entire middle of the film inside two old men in winter, he turns the whole of it into analepsis. The young Hal, the warm crush of the Boar's Head, Falstaff in his glory — all of it is bent backward into the past tense of the opening shot. You are watching the memory of a life while the life is still being lived on screen. This is why the film aches even in its comedy.

The ache has a name too. Deleuze, writing about Visconti, describes the crystal-image in its mode of decomposition: an old, ordered, aristocratic world filmed in the very act of rotting from inside, too beautiful and too finished to survive. Chimes at Midnight is one of cinema's purest examples, and Welles builds the rot into the photography itself. The tavern is shot close and cluttered, the camera fluid among warm bodies in deep focus; the court of Henry IV is cold geometry — high ceilings, shafts of light on stone, Gielgud filmed from below against architectural verticals that dwarf the king even on his throne. Notice that this is not decoration. The warmth of Falstaff's world is a physical fact of the lens, not a claim in the dialogue. And the whole festive, appetitive order it photographs is already condemned. Falstaff is the last man of a dying England, and the film knows it from the first frame of snow.

Welles inherits that low-angle court geometry directly from Gregg Toland's work on Citizen Kane — the same grammar of ceilings pressing down on power. But here the closed, information-dense frame (Deleuze's cadre, the frame as a sealed system) does specific work: it cages Henry IV in legitimacy. He has everything the throne can give and no air to breathe in it. Cut to the tavern and the frame loosens into bodies and laughter. The film argues its theme in the difference between two kinds of shot.

Then there is the sound, and this is where the elegy turns uncanny. The international co-production forced Welles to post-dub almost everything in controlled sessions, and a lesser director would have hidden the seam. Welles made it the point. Voices float slightly free of the bodies that speak them; figures move in spaces their speech doesn't quite inhabit. Deleuze would call this an audiovisual disjunction — the moment image and sound stop guaranteeing each other and the picture has to be read rather than simply watched. The effect is dream. These people are speaking to us across the gap of death, which is exactly right for a film that is one long act of remembering. Over it all runs Ralph Richardson, reading Holinshed's chronicle in a voice of measured historical distance — the device Welles first found for the lost narrator of The Magnificent Ambersons. The Spanish plateau of the Bardenas Reales, an emptied semi-arid waste standing in for England, becomes what Deleuze calls a stratigraphic image: a depopulated landscape with an absent past speaking over it. History, then Shakespeare's drama, then Welles's film — three removes from the events, layered like rock.

The Battle of Shrewsbury breaks the spell deliberately. For five minutes Welles cuts the clash into shards — close-up, mid-shot, wide — that refuse to assemble into any readable map of who is where. This is montage in Eisenstein's pathetic key, the shock-collision of shots, and Welles names his debt plainly: the selective slow-motion that isolates a single death inside the anonymous grinding mass comes straight from the Odessa Steps, and the multi-angle refusal of a stable battlefield from the ice fight of Alexander Nevsky. But Welles turns the device to a new argument. Soviet montage built toward a revolutionary new quality. Shrewsbury builds toward nothing. War here is not a problem to be solved from above; it is a body crushed in mud. The sequence drains chivalry of its meaning in real time, and every Spielberg landing-craft and muddy medieval melee since owes it the grammar.

Which leaves the rejection. At the coronation, in an immense echoing exterior, Falstaff presses forward — a small fat hopeful figure — and the new Henry V passes him in profile without turning his head. Deleuze calls a posture that lays bare a whole social relation a gest: not an action that changes a situation, but an attitude that exposes one. Hal does nothing dramatic. He simply does not turn. And in that withheld movement an entire world — appetite, friendship, the bells at midnight — is sentenced to death so that history can proceed. The film never recovers, and neither, you suspect, does Hal. Welles compresses four and a half plays to arrive at this one averted face. Watch the snow again at the end and you understand: the whole film was Falstaff's, remembering himself, before the prince he loved learned how not to look.