Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Cabaret
1972 · Bob Fosse · Cabaret 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 every song performed on the Kit Kat Klub stage. (structure)
Nearly all the singing and dancing is confined to the club, never breaking into the kind of spontaneous number where a character just bursts into song in the street.
Payoff: Keeping music inside the club lets the film use songs as commentary rather than as an expression of anyone's true feelings.
Watch what the film cuts to right after a number on stage. (cutting)
Cabaret numbers are repeatedly crosscut with events happening outside the club, so a song and a piece of real violence land close together.
Payoff: The editing lets the stage act and the street rhyme with each other without a word of dialogue connecting them.
Notice the angular, almost ugly shapes the dancers make. (staging)
Hunched shoulders, splayed knees, jutting hips, and isolated hand gestures define the Kit Kat choreography throughout.
Payoff: The deliberately unglamorous movement makes the numbers erotic and repellent at the same time.
Compare the smoky amber glow of the club to the flat daylight outside it. (light)
Geoffrey Unsworth lights the club's interior warm and underlit, then shoots the exteriors cooler and flatter, drained of that glamour.
Payoff: The temperature drop from stage to street is built directly into the lighting, before the story confirms what's changed.
Watch how Joel Grey's Emcee reacts to everything with the same knowing grin. (performance)
He comments on the action through song and expression without ever appearing to have a fixed age, gender, or moral position.
Payoff: His fixed grin becomes the film's chorus, always watching, never quite taking a side.
Once you have seen it
Listen for the one song that escapes the club entirely. (sound)
Tomorrow Belongs to Me begins as a solo by a young man in a beer garden and grows into a song the whole crowd sings together.
Payoff: Deleuze calls a crowd rendered as one shared feeling a dividual, and the beer garden crowd becomes exactly that, united by a song the club never authorized. In the reading: dividual. The crowd singing as one voice outside the club is what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective compressed into a single feeling.
Watch If You Could See Her for the line that reframes it. (cutting)
A comic routine about a gorilla in a tutu ends with a line revealing the joke has been about antisemitism all along.
Payoff: Deleuze calls the moment an expected joke's chain of meaning snaps a demark, and that final line turns an ordinary bit into something that indicts the audience for laughing. In the reading: demark. The punchline that reframes the entire joke is what Deleuze calls a demark, a snapped chain of expected meaning.
Notice how little screen time actual Nazi violence receives. (structure)
Most of the historical threat stays at the edges of the frame, a body in the street, an armband, a rising song, rather than depicted directly.
Payoff: Keeping the violence peripheral makes the film's real subject the act of choosing not to look at it.
Carry this in: Watch the audience inside the club, the ones who watch and do nothing. That crowd is a mirror held up at you.