Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Jabberwocky
1977 · Terry Gilliam · Jabberwocky 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
Notice something blocking part of the frame in almost every shot. (camera)
Gilliam keeps filling the foreground with a hanging carcass, a wheel, a beam, someone's back, so you often look through an object at the actual scene.
Payoff: You are placed in the mud with the clutter, not given a clean seat to watch the story from. In the reading: out-of-field (relative). Deleuze calls the space a shot implies beyond its edges the out-of-field; Gilliam keeps reminding you there's more clutter just past what you can see.
Notice the mud, rot, and dung built into every space. (setting)
Roy Smith's production design constructs the medieval world almost entirely from texture, straw, rotten timber, dung, rust, wool, so filth is a material fact, not a joke.
Payoff: The squalor is an argument about what pre-modern life actually was, not gross-out comedy for its own sake.
Notice small activities happening in the background of a scene. (staging)
Gilliam stages his crowds in distinct planes, with unrelated business running in the back of the shot while the foreground dialogue continues, Bruegel-style.
Payoff: The frame's edges are as active as its center, so you can find a whole different joke by looking away from the conversation.
Listen for heraldic music playing over ordinary or squalid events. (sound)
The score reaches for pomp and ceremony no matter what is actually happening on screen, opening a steady gap between what you hear and what you see.
Payoff: The mismatch between the music's grandeur and the image's filth is one of the film's most consistent jokes.
Watch Dennis stay earnest and rational no matter what happens. (performance)
Palin plays Dennis as a decent, business-minded young man surrounded by a broadly grotesque ensemble, never winking at his own absurdity.
Payoff: The comedy comes from his persistence in a world with no interest in reason, not from him being foolish himself. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this failure the crisis of the action-image: perceiving clearly no longer guarantees that acting will change anything.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the edges of the frame as much as the middle; the important thing is often happening just out of focus.