Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Farewell My Concubine
1993 · Chen Kaige · Farewell My Concubine 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
Watch the opera makeup go on: white ground first, then red. (performance)
Chen returns to this application again and again across the film, shooting the paint and the layered costume with the same reverence he gives the finished performance.
Payoff: Watching the labor behind the transformation is watching what the finished performance actually costs someone.
Watch the color of the opera scenes shift over the film's decades. (light)
Gu Changwei's palette starts in reds and golds on the opera stage, then modulates toward colder, grayer registers as the film moves through Chinese history.
Payoff: The color itself is telling you how much of the old world is still left before anyone says a word about it.
Watch how differently the city looks in each period. (setting)
The production reconstructs successive eras of Beijing with meticulous detail, from the training compound to Republican teahouses to the changed public spaces after 1949.
Payoff: The physical world keeps changing around these two men, which tells you a whole history is passing without a single caption.
Listen for the opera's singing and percussion structuring a whole scene. (sound)
Peking opera's stylized vocal delivery provides the recurring musical motif of the title story, interwoven with Zhao Jiping's score across the film.
Payoff: The same opera keeps returning across the decades, so you start to hear it as a clock as much as a performance.
Notice how rarely the film breaks a scene into quick cuts. (cutting)
Pei Xiaonan's editing favors sustained, performance-length scenes over rapid montage, letting a piece of stage business play out at its own length.
Payoff: Cutting a performance down to its meaning would falsify the labor that actually produced it, so the film doesn't.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how Dieyi carries his body in ordinary scenes. The training never leaves him, on stage or off.