Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Sound of Music
1965 · Robert Wise · The Sound of Music 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 the first shot travel from the peaks down to one woman. (camera)
For most of a minute there is nobody in the picture: mountains, a lake, cloud shadow crossing grass in a very wide 70mm frame. Then the camera finds Maria alone in the meadow.
Payoff: The film states its terms before a word is spoken. There is a whole world, and one person inside it who does not fit anywhere yet. In the reading: the Open. The reading calls this the Open: a world shown as larger than the frame, with a single living center discovered inside it.
Count the locations and costume changes inside Do-Re-Mi. (cutting)
Reynolds moves Maria and the children across bridges, squares, gardens, and hillsides, changing clothes as he goes. Weeks of teaching are folded into one unbroken piece of music.
Payoff: The film's happiest sequence is built from a compression device, so you feel a season pass while hearing a single song. In the reading: montage-organic. The reading calls this organic montage: a sequence that grows by accumulation rather than by argument, a spiral instead of a line.
Notice that the songs happen in real Salzburg places. (staging)
Wise puts the numbers in the abbey, the villa grounds, the gazebo, and the hills, with actual weather and actual distance in the shot. Very little is abstracted.
Payoff: A musical usually asks you to suspend the world for three minutes. These numbers ask you to accept it instead.
Compare Andrews's restlessness with how still Plummer stands. (performance)
She is always in motion, arms out, walking fast, turning. He holds position, hands behind his back, in naval posture, and moves only when he has decided to.
Payoff: The household's problem is legible in two bodies. One person cannot stop moving and the other has forbidden movement in his own house.
Notice the villa's light hardening in the second half. (light)
McCord lights the early interiors evenly and warmly, with soft modeling on faces. As the political pressure arrives, the contrast increases and shadows get a job to do.
Payoff: The photography turns colder at the same rate the story does, so the sweetness is being withdrawn rather than simply interrupted.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the mountains. The film comes down out of them in the first minute and keeps returning to that high ground.