Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Patton
1970 · Franklin J. Schaffner · Patton 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
Watch Scott walk up into the frame in front of the flag. (camera)
The stripes fill the screen flat as a painted backdrop. Patton climbs into view from the bottom and talks straight at you for six minutes. No date, no battle, no place to stand.
Payoff: He is performing himself before the film gives you any facts. You meet the legend first and the man afterward. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a man caught in the act of turning himself into a story while you watch.
Count how often Schaffner shoots Scott from below. (staging)
Patton gets the tank, the hill, the ruin. Subordinates sit or stand in the lower part of the frame. Almost every composition he walks into rearranges itself so he is above it.
Payoff: The camera height is a diagnosis. This man cannot picture a room in which he is anyone's equal.
Look at how much desert fits inside one battle shot. (camera)
Koenekamp shot in 65mm Dimension 150, so horizon, armor, and men all stay sharp in the same field. Then Schaffner cuts tight, and the whole war becomes one face.
Payoff: The scale is not decoration. The desert calls the man and his tanks into existence, and the film keeps measuring him against it. In the reading: the encompasser. That vast field is what the reading calls the encompasser: a landscape that produces the action instead of sitting behind it.
Listen to the pitch of Scott's voice, high and nasal. (performance)
Scott made no attempt at physical replica. He built from the inside, and the clipped reedy voice is the choice everything else hangs on. It can turn magnificent and ridiculous inside one sentence.
Payoff: The voice keeps you off balance. You cannot settle on admiring him, because the instrument keeps undercutting the man using it.
Listen for the trumpet march and what plays underneath it. (sound)
Goldsmith gives Patton a recognizable military fanfare, then keeps sliding stranger, more ambivalent material underneath. The unresolved textures come up whenever the film sits with his belief in reincarnation or his out-of-date soldiering.
Payoff: The score never lets the heroism resolve. Listen for the moments the music refuses to agree with the picture.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Count the low angles. Then mark the exact scene where a room becomes large enough to shrink him.