Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Crimes and Misdemeanors
1989 · Woody Allen · Crimes and Misdemeanors 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 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.
Notice that the two stories never actually meet. (structure)
The doctor's story and Cliff's story run in parallel and cause each other nothing. Allen keeps the shape of cross-cutting and removes the convergence that usually justifies it.
Payoff: The connection is one you hold 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.
Watch Judah walk into his childhood Seder. (staging)
He does not appear as a boy. The adult stands in the room while his relatives argue about God and justice and keep passing the food. Allen never cuts away to the past and back.
Payoff: He goes to the past for a ruling rather than remembering it, and the table declines to give him one. In the reading: sheets of past (order of time / coexistence). A past you walk into as a region instead of retrieving as an episode is what the reading calls sheets of past.
Once you have seen it
Watch who gets to act and who only watches. (structure)
Judah decides and moves. Cliff sees everything clearly and converts none of it into anything. Ben keeps his faith and loses his sight. Landau and Allen play opposite relationships to action.
Payoff: The film sorts its people by what their seeing is worth, then leaves that arrangement standing without comment. In the reading: the seer (voyant). A man who perceives accurately with no adequate act available to him is what the reading calls a seer.
Listen to Levy's recordings knowing how he ends. (sound)
His voice runs over Cliff's black-and-white footage, warm and reasonable, explaining that people make their own meaning. Then he is gone and every calm sentence stays behind on the tape.
Payoff: The argument outlives the man who guaranteed it, which is the most unsettling thing on this soundtrack.
Watch the wedding coda as a story pitch. (structure)
Judah relates the murder as though it were a movie plot. Cliff objects that the killer has to turn himself in or the story means nothing. He thinks he is arguing ethics.
Payoff: The thesis arrives as small talk at a party, and Allen leaves it unresolved because resolving it would prove Cliff right.
Carry this in: Watch the lamps. Nykvist keeps deciding what you are allowed to see, in a film about an eye doctor.