Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wind Rises
2013 · Hayao Miyazaki · The Wind Rises 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
Listen for engine sounds that are actually human voices. (sound)
Miyazaki had propellers, steam, and the earthquake's rumble performed by human mouths rather than recorded machinery, so a throat is inside every engine.
Payoff: You can't say exactly where the person is, but a person is somewhere in every machine sound. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls this an absolute out-of-field: a presence inside the image with no location anywhere in its space.
Notice how often something is moved by wind, not a person. (setting)
Hats lift, paper drifts off a drafting table, hair blows flat across faces, and grass combs itself in waves, all without anyone in the frame causing it.
Payoff: The title tells you in advance: here, the world does the moving, not the people in it. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the world moves and the people mostly stand still inside it.
Listen to how flat and unhurried Jiro's voice stays. (performance)
Hideaki Anno, a director rather than a trained actor, delivers every line with the same quiet, almost sleepwalking reticence, no matter what happens around him.
Payoff: He sounds most present exactly when he's drawing or dreaming, not when he's talking to people.
Notice the drafting tables, slide rules, and engineering tools. (setting)
The film treats calculating and drawing with the same close attention Ghibli usually gives cooking or cleaning in its other movies.
Payoff: Engineering gets filmed here as a craft, with its own physical labor, not an abstract idea.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the dream scenes with Caproni are never marked as dreams. (structure)
No change of lens, color, or focus separates them from the waking scenes, and Jiro never actually met the man, so there's no memory being replayed.
Payoff: You can never fully tell which side of the film you're standing on. In the reading: dream-image (onirosign). The reading calls this a dream-image: unmoored from any memory, structural to the film rather than decorative.
Notice how many times Caproni asks the same question. (structure)
Whether it's worth building beautiful things that get used to kill comes back again and again across the dream meetings, and the film never settles it.
Payoff: Not answering isn't a dodge here. It's the film's actual position on the question.
Watch how the film skips past Naoko's worst moments. (structure)
Her decline is tracked through absence and ellipsis rather than deathbed scenes, the hardest turns happening in the cuts rather than on screen.
Payoff: The film withholds exactly the scenes another movie would have built its whole trailer around.
Carry this in: Watch what's moving in each shot, and notice how rarely it's the man doing the moving.