Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sleeper
1973 · Woody Allen · Sleeper 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 how often the camera holds Allen's whole body in frame. (camera)
David Walsh shoots the physical comedy in wide and full shots rather than close coverage, so falls and pratfalls keep their full geography.
Payoff: You can see exactly what happens to him, which is the difference between a gag landing and a gag getting lost. In the reading: the movement-image. Deleuze calls this the movement-image: perception flowing straight into action, the oldest and cleanest circuit in cinema, which is exactly what a pratfall performs.
Notice how bright and clean the future's architecture looks. (light)
Walsh shoots 2173 in hard daylight and clean whites rather than the shadowy menace dystopias usually reach for.
Payoff: The brightness makes the regime look antiseptic and a little absurd rather than frightening.
Watch how long a shot holds before the next gag. (cutting)
Rosenblum's editing lets each sight gag run to the beat of its own completion rather than cutting away early for pace.
Payoff: The timing itself is doing the comedy. A cut half a second sooner would kill half these jokes.
Watch how many jokes come from a single oversized object. (staging)
The vegetable-field sequence builds an entire set piece from one giant banana peel and one sustained location, rather than cutting between many props.
Payoff: A whole scene of physical comedy can run on a single prop if the staging gives it room.
Listen for traditional jazz clarinet under futuristic scenes. (sound)
Allen scores the future with forty-year-old New Orleans jazz he plays himself, rather than anything electronic or futuristic-sounding.
Payoff: The music argues for old human pleasures against the regime's sterile design, before a single line says so.
Once you have seen it
Notice how each mishap reveals a new piece of the future. (structure)
Miles doesn't study 2173 and then act. He grabs the wrong gadget, wrestles the wrong suit, and the world gets revealed to us through each blunder.
Payoff: The plot barely holds together on its own. It exists to string these small disclosures together. In the reading: action-image-small-form. Deleuze calls this the small form: a gesture or mishap discloses the situation, rather than a big situation demanding the act.
Notice how many unrelated places the chase strings together. (structure)
Miles moves from hospital to rooftop to vegetable patch to the Leader's inner sanctum, spaces with no other reason to connect except that he's running through them.
Payoff: The chase itself draws the line connecting places that otherwise share nothing. In the reading: line of the universe. Deleuze calls a route like this a vector: a zig-zag line linking spaces that don't otherwise belong together.
Watch what Miles says he actually believes in at the end. (structure)
Asked to declare faith in science or revolution, he answers with neither, naming only sex and death as durable and real.
Payoff: The line undercuts both the old order and the new one in a single joke.
Carry this in: Watch the geography of each gag. The camera waits for his whole body to finish the joke.