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 The unresolved textures come up whenever the film sits with his belief in reincarnation or his out-of-date soldiering.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.
Once you have seen it
Watch the camera hold during the field hospital slap. (camera)
Schaffner does not cut away and does not cushion it. The shot stays, the act is plain, and then there is silence with nowhere for the film to move.
Payoff: Holding is the judgment. The war movie's usual momentum stops, and you are left looking at something you cannot move past.
Notice when the rooms start to be bigger than Patton. (staging)
Once politics takes his command, Schaffner puts him in vast headquarters and diplomatic corridors. Others sit at tables. Patton stands at the edge, and the composition no longer arranges itself around him.
Payoff: The same staging that crowned him now strands him. The frame registers his obsolescence before he says a word about it.
Count how many times you actually see Rommel on screen. (structure)
Patton wants a duel with an equal and says so out loud. The film almost never supplies the opponent. His great rivalry is conducted against a book, a map, and an absence.
Payoff: The matchup he lives for is half invented. Without an opposite to measure him, his own scale is the only thing holding him up. In the reading: binomial. The reading calls the hero-versus-equal pairing a binomial, and this film withholds one half of it on purpose.
Track how long Bradley's narration stays with the film. (structure)
Malden's voiceover frames the early stretches as a colleague's measured account. It thins out and then goes away entirely as Patton grows past anyone else's ability to describe him.
Payoff: Losing the narrator is a structural move. Once no one else is telling this story, you are left alone with his version of it.
Carry this in: Count the low angles. Then mark the exact scene where a room becomes large enough to shrink him.