Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
1972 · Rainer Werner Fassbinder · The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 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 you never leave one room for the whole film. (setting)
Every scene takes place inside Petra's bedroom atelier. There is no exterior shot, no street, no other location to cut away to.
Payoff: The film builds its own world with no outside, and you feel the walls the same way the characters do.
Watch mannequins and clothes block your view of faces. (camera)
Ballhaus frames the women through and behind objects in the room rather than giving you a clean, open shot of whoever is speaking.
Payoff: The décor keeps getting between you and the people, the way status and pretense do in the scenes themselves.
Look at the painting hanging over the bed. (setting)
A large reproduction of a Baroque painting of sprawled, nude figures hangs above the bed throughout, visible in scene after scene.
Payoff: The room has commissioned its own commentary on desire before a single line of dialogue makes the point.
Watch Marlene, who never once speaks. (performance)
She works, watches, and reacts throughout the entire film in total silence, registered only through posture and expression.
Payoff: One woman's total silence is loud enough to change how you hear everyone else's talking.
Track Petra's costume and wig from scene to scene. (setting)
Her gowns, wigs, and make-up change between scenes and grow more elaborate or more disordered as her composure rises and falls.
Payoff: You can read her state of mind off her wardrobe before she says a word about how she feels.
Once you have seen it
Watch for any shot of a street or a door leading out. (structure)
There is none. The mannequins, the painting, and the mirrors keep reflecting the room back on itself with no exterior ever entering the frame.
Payoff: The film is not just about a trap. Its whole visual structure refuses you a way out too. In the reading: the perfect crystal (saturated). The reading calls this a perfect crystal: an enclosed, mirror-saturated world with no exit built into it.
Watch who kneels on the floor and who stays standing. (staging)
Fassbinder arranges the women's bodies into tableaux of dominance and submission, the floor itself becoming a board where position states the relationship.
Payoff: You do not need dialogue to know who has power in a scene. The blocking already told you. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that displays a social relation instead of a private feeling.
Watch Marlene's face while everyone around her talks. (performance)
She registers an entire interior life through looking alone, present in nearly every scene yet never acting to change what happens around her.
Payoff: The film we watch is implicitly also the film she has been silently watching the whole time. In the reading: the seer (voyant). The reading calls her a seer: a witness offered nothing to do but look and endure.
Carry this in: Watch the floor. Watch who kneels on it, and watch Marlene in the corner.