Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Cross of Iron
1977 · Sam Peckinpah · Cross of Iron 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
Listen for a children's song playing over the opening images. (sound)
The film opens with archival photographs of the Nazi era set against the German children's song 'Hanschen klein,' the two elements running together without comment or explanation.
Payoff: You are handed two things that refuse to explain each other, right from the first frame. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. The reading calls this gap an audiovisual disjunction: sound and image keep their own separate stories instead of confirming one another.
Watch the camera stay low and close inside combat. (camera)
John Coquillon keeps the handheld camera at the soldier's own disoriented height rather than a commander's map view, filling the frame with smoke and churned earth.
Payoff: You are never given a clearer view of the battlefield than the men actually have.
Watch combat cut between slow motion and normal speed. (cutting)
Peckinpah intercuts multiple camera speeds within a single burst of violence, stretching a fall or a death against the ordinary tempo happening around it.
Payoff: A single moment of killing gets held long enough to look both grotesque and beautiful.
Compare Stransky's immaculate uniform to his men's filthy gear. (staging)
Peckinpah stages command posts as arenas of manners and composed framing, and forward positions as a handheld democracy of mud, where competence rather than rank decides who lives.
Payoff: Costume and camera style are arguing about class before a single line of dialogue does. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls Stransky's bearing a gest: a physical posture that exposes his caste rather than expressing a private feeling.
Watch how little Steiner reacts to talk of medals. (performance)
Coburn plays Steiner laconic and weathered, contemptuous of the honors his superiors keep offering, while Schell's Stransky visibly covets the same decoration Steiner treats as worthless.
Payoff: One man wants the medal desperately. The other cannot be bothered to want it at all.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who is ever shown the whole battlefield here. Nobody is, not even the men with maps.