Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Middleman
1976 · Satyajit Ray · The Middleman on Sightlines
4 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 the camera presses Somnath against crowds and corridors. (camera)
Soumendu Roy shoots handheld in the streets and interview rooms, gray and even in tone, holding on Somnath's face past the point of comfort as he waits in queue after queue.
Payoff: The camera makes you feel the same crowded, waiting pressure Somnath is stuck inside.
Notice the film is shot in flat, unbeautified black and white. (light)
Ray shoots in monochrome in 1976, when color had become the commercial default across Indian cinema, a deliberate refusal of visual warmth or glamour.
Payoff: The plain gray look is itself a kind of judgment on the world the film is showing you.
Notice who sits, who stands, and who is made to wait. (staging)
Ray stages every office and anteroom through gradations of physical space that map social power exactly, a chair itself becoming an argument about who holds authority.
Payoff: You can read the whole hierarchy of a scene before a single line of dialogue explains it. In the reading: the gest. Deleuze, following Brecht, calls a posture that makes a social relation visible the gest; here a chair does that work.
Listen for how rarely music arrives to tell you what to feel. (sound)
Ray composed his own score but uses it sparingly, letting the ambient sound of the city and the flat rhythm of transactional speech carry most of the film's mood.
Payoff: The scarcity of music matches a story that refuses to editorialize about what's happening to Somnath.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who sits and who stands in every room. A chair here is an argument about power.