Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Hamlet
1996 · Kenneth Branagh · Hamlet 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 the hall lined with two-way mirrored doors. (staging)
Branagh sets much of the court in a vast mirrored state hall, where every figure is doubled, watched, and reflected throughout the film.
Payoff: There is no plain, unreflective space anywhere in this world for anyone to step into. In the reading: crystal-perfect (saturated crystal). The reading calls this a saturated crystal: an entire world built from nothing but reflections, with no plain outside to step into.
Watch Hamlet speak to be or not to be into a mirror. (camera)
He delivers the soliloquy to his own reflection in a mirrored door, unaware that Claudius and Polonius watch him from behind the glass.
Payoff: He is alone and under surveillance in the very same shot.
Notice the camera glide in long, unbroken tracking shots. (camera)
Thomson's Steadicam follows characters through the mirrored corridors in sustained motion, letting scenes of dialogue play out without a single cut.
Payoff: The camera keeps insisting the world is a smooth, traversable whole even while Hamlet cannot act within it.
Notice the fully lit, glittering white and gold court. (light)
Thomson keeps the court open and brightly lit rather than shadowed, a high-key splendor that runs against the story's rot underneath it.
Payoff: The brilliance of the light makes the corruption harder to see, not easier.
Watch reported events appear as inserted images, not spoken lines. (cutting)
The film dramatizes Hamlet's account of Priam's death and his memories of Ophelia as actual pictures on screen, rather than leaving them to the audience's imagination.
Payoff: The verse gets a literal body here instead of staying only in the words.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch every mirror in the film, and notice who stands on each side of the glass.