Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Hamlet
1964 · Joseph Papp · Hamlet 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 the camera never reverses to show the audience. (camera)
Minnix's cameras stay fixed out front for the whole broadcast, trading a wide view of the staging for closer singles that isolate a face, but never cutting to what sits behind the actors.
Payoff: The two thousand people on the grass are never shown, only implied, present in every shot by their total absence from it. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls this the absolute out-of-field: a space the frame cannot reach at all, not even by a pan.
Notice how flat and dark the stage design looks on screen. (camera)
The scaffolds and raw textured surfaces Ming Cho Lee built for the Delacorte were designed to read from the twentieth row, and the television camera flattens them into undifferentiated black.
Payoff: What was legible live becomes something you have to work to decipher, rather than simply see, on the small screen. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls this a lectosign: an image that has lost its obviousness and has to be interpreted rather than seen.
Listen for the open night air around every line. (sound)
Stage microphones pick up wind, insects, aircraft, and an audible audience along with the verse, giving the soundtrack a rough, unfiltered outdoor texture.
Payoff: This is the sound of a live public event, not a studio recording cleaned up for a screen.
Watch how wide and continuous each actor's movement is. (staging)
The staging is built for a thrust stage, actors placed in depth and on levels with gestures scaled to be read from far away, not for a close camera.
Payoff: The scale that reads as excess on your screen was built for a live crowd, not for you.
Listen for the plain, unaccented way the actors speak the verse. (performance)
Papp cast his American company to speak Shakespeare in their own voices instead of imitating English models, and that plainness is audible across the whole ensemble.
Payoff: The American accent is a deliberate choice, not a limitation, arguing Shakespeare belongs to any voice that can carry it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the black behind every face. That absolute darkness is two thousand people who paid nothing to be there.