Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Crimes and Misdemeanors
1989 · Woody Allen · Crimes and Misdemeanors on Sightlines
4 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 which faces are lit and which stay dark. (light)
Sven Nykvist, who shot for Bergman for decades, works in warm pooled lamplight at low contrast. People surface out of shadow in the middle of a line and slide back into it.
Payoff: The lead character is an eye doctor, so what the light shows and withholds is doing moral work all film.
Notice how long a conversation runs in one shot. (camera)
Allen holds extended masters and reframes rather than cutting for coverage. Characters stay inside a single frame while a scene turns, so blocking carries as much weight as the dialogue.
Payoff: You watch the whole room react, which lets you see who is managing whom while they talk.
Listen for Schubert and jazz instead of score. (sound)
There is no composed underscore anywhere in this film. Records carry the feeling and most of the irony. Nothing swells during the tense scenes to tell you how to take them.
Payoff: With no music guiding your verdict, the judgment on these people gets handed over to you.
Follow how the doctor's story and Cliff's story alternate. (structure)
The doctor's story and Cliff's story run in parallel. Allen cross-cuts between them and lets you hold the two together.
Payoff: The connection is one you make between them, so the thinking happens in your head rather than in the plot. In the reading: relation-image (the mental-image, Thirdness). Meaning that sits in the relation a viewer keeps between two strands is what the reading calls a relation-image.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the lamps. Nykvist keeps deciding what you are allowed to see, in a film about an eye doctor.