Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Breaking the Waves
1996 · Lars von Trier · Breaking the Waves 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 close the camera gets to Watson's face. (camera)
Robby Muller's handheld lurches in, reframes, and zooms past the distance a prestige picture would keep. Close-ups run well past the usual limit. The face becomes the film's main landscape.
Payoff: Feeling gathers on that face faster than the story can use it, so watching her is the film's actual business. In the reading: affection-image. A face where intensity collects without discharging into action is what the reading calls an affection-image.
Listen to the pop songs on the chapter cards. (sound)
Each chapter opens with a painted Kirkeby tableau and a record by Bowie, Cohen, or Elton John. The village in the story has banned exactly that kind of feeling. No scene is scored.
Payoff: The music comes from a world this community refuses, so you sit outside its time while the camera shoves you inside its rooms. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. Sound and image telling two different stories at the same moment is what the reading calls audiovisual disjunction.
Look at the inside of the meetinghouse. (staging)
Whitewashed walls, bare benches, no bells, no ornament. The elders sit at the front and pronounce on people. Von Trier strips every interior in this film of comfort and decoration.
Payoff: The room states the faith being practiced in it, so you see the doctrine before an elder says a word.
Watch Bess talk to God in two voices. (performance)
Watson answers her own prayers out loud, dropping into a stern voice for God and back again. She came from the stage with almost no screen work and plays faith and desire as one drive.
Payoff: Belief here is physical and unguarded, so you never get to file her faith separately from her body.
Notice that the cut waits for Watson to finish. (cutting)
Anders Refn cuts on emotional logic rather than continuity. A shot is held until its charge has transferred, then dropped without ceremony. Bess is almost never cut around.
Payoff: The film runs on her nervous system, so the tempo of the editing is a readout of her state.
Once you have seen it
Watch Dodo's face while she watches Bess. (performance)
Katrin Cartlidge plays the sister-in-law as the one person who understands exactly what is happening. She sees it clearly. She fails to stop it, in equal measure, all the way through.
Payoff: She holds your position in the film, seeing everything and able to change nothing about it.
Watch where the bells at the end come from. (structure)
This congregation forbade bells for centuries. At the close they sound over the fjord from somewhere no camera can locate. Von Trier gives you no source and no verdict on it.
Payoff: Two accounts stay true at once, grace and cruelty, and the film refuses to tell you which one you watched. In the reading: powers of the false. Two incompatible accounts both left standing is what the reading calls the powers of the false.
Watch how much shelter Bess loses in each chapter. (structure)
Home, church, hospital ward, street. The protected rooms are taken from her one at a time, and the world outside them grows more hostile in steady increments across the seven chapters.
Payoff: The film moves in one direction only, and the chapter breaks let you measure how far down it has gone.
Carry this in: Watch Bess's face and little else. The film is built never to leave it before she has given it everything.