Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
2008 · Mark Herman · The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on Sightlines
5 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 how low the camera sits, at a child's height. (camera)
Delhomme organizes nearly every setup around Bruno's eyeline and his size. Adults are seen from below. The wide explanatory views a war film usually supplies never arrive.
Payoff: You are held to what an eight-year-old can see from where he is standing, which is the film's entire method.
Count the window frames, banisters, and railings between you and Bruno. (camera)
Delhomme loads the compositions with barriers. Bruno looks through glass, through stair rails, over garden walls, and finally through wire. Something is almost always in the way.
Payoff: Obstruction arrives as a physical fact in the frame long before anyone in the house talks about it.
Watch the color cool down once the family leaves Berlin. (light)
The Berlin house is warmer and more open. The requisitioned house near the camp is grayer and closed in, with an ash tint in the air that nobody remarks on.
Payoff: The grading tells you what this posting is before any adult in the household will say it out loud.
Listen for what carries from the camp but is never shown. (sound)
Herman keeps the violence offscreen and half-heard. Household ambience stays hushed, and distant activity reaches the garden without ever being named or pictured.
Payoff: You are kept at the same distance Bruno is. That distance is the film's engine and the thing Holocaust educators object to.
Watch how ordinary Thewlis plays the father at home. (performance)
The commandant is affectionate with his children and efficient at his work, and Thewlis never marks the difference. The household runs smoothly around him: crisp uniforms, dinner parties, servants who are prisoners.
Payoff: The film only works if these read as recognizable people, and that is exactly what the argument about it turns on.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what gets placed between you and Bruno. Glass, banisters, garden walls, wire. He never gets a clear view.