Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Empire of the Sun
1987 · Steven Spielberg · Empire of the Sun on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how small Daviau keeps Jim inside the wide frame. (camera)
The anamorphic width is used to shrink him. Crowds on the Bund, runways, dust, sky. Spielberg gives the boy the whole horizon and almost never lets him fill it.
Payoff: Scale is doing the storytelling. A boy who cannot change anything is photographed at the size of his power over it.
Watch the light come from behind people and flare the lens. (light)
Daviau builds the picture out of backlight, flare, and white: shafts through camp windows, glare off canopies, blasts that blow the frame out. The same beam blesses and threatens.
Payoff: Light here is not telling you where the sun is. It is telling you what Jim feels, and he feels awe at terrible things. In the reading: lyrical abstraction. The reading calls this lyrical abstraction: light and whiteness used as a spiritual quantity, revelation and menace arriving in one beam.
Listen for the boys' choir arriving over the violence. (sound)
Williams sets the Welsh lullaby Suo Gan against engines, gunfire, and crowds. The voice enters exactly where a war film would normally hand the scene to noise.
Payoff: The music takes the boy's side. It converts what you are seeing into rapture, and nothing on the soundtrack argues back.
Count how often the camera shows Jim looking at something. (camera)
Kahn cuts on the boy's gaze and his fixations: planes, food, Basie. You spend the film not simply seeing what Jim sees but watching him see it.
Payoff: The film's account of the war is a boy's account, and it keeps showing you the boy so you never forget whose it is. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: the camera perceiving him perceiving, its own presence felt in how the looking is arranged.
Watch the gates, fences, and windows Jim stands behind. (staging)
Spielberg stages nearly every passage against a barrier: the villa's walls, the crowd's crush, wire, shutters, the shell of a derelict plane. The boy keeps looking upward and outward through them.
Payoff: Confinement is built into the compositions, so you feel the camp before the camp arrives and long after he adapts to it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Jim stand still while the Mustangs move around him. (camera)
During the airfield raid Bale is planted, arms wide, while planes, fire, and men pour past him. The camera holds the boy fixed and lets the world do the traveling.
Payoff: Terror and rapture fuse in one figure who does nothing. The most exciting sequence in the film contains no act by its hero. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still and everything around him supplies the motion.
Notice how long the camp stretches run without an event. (structure)
After the set pieces, Kahn lets whole passages pass with barter, waiting, and weather. Years go by in a rhythm that refuses to mark them.
Payoff: Captivity is measured by erosion rather than by incident, which is why the film feels longer in the camp than the calendar says.
Count the objects Jim hoards, trades, and worships. (setting)
Chocolate, tins, magazines, shoes, aircraft. In the camp's black market a thing is worth what hunger says it is, and the boy becomes expert.
Payoff: Appetite replaces motive as the film descends. Watching what he values tells you how far he has traveled from the villa.
Watch Bale's face during the reunion rather than the parents'. (performance)
The scene is staged for catharsis and Bale withholds it. Nothing comes back into the face. Spielberg keeps the camera on a boy who has already spent what a reunion would use.
Payoff: The ending confirms a loss instead of repairing one, which is why audiences expecting Spielbergian uplift in 1987 came out unsettled.
Carry this in: Jim can only watch the war. Notice that the film agrees with him and never sends in an adult to correct what he sees.