Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Only Lovers Left Alive
2013 · Jim Jarmusch · Only Lovers Left Alive 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
Look at what Adam keeps in his Detroit house. (setting)
Vintage guitars, valve amplifiers, reel-to-reel tape, scientific curios, stacks of records, a jury-rigged generator. Nothing in these rooms is new. The house is a hoard of what he decided was worth keeping.
Payoff: The centuries arrive as objects instead of as flashbacks, so the past sits in the room as furniture. In the reading: sheets of past / order of coexistence. Whole regions of the past coexisting in one room rather than being cut to is what the reading calls sheets of past.
Notice how long conversations run before anything happens. (cutting)
Affonso Goncalves cuts for mood rather than propulsion. Scenes continue well past the point where a genre film would already be somewhere else. Events are rare, and the quiet stretches are most of the picture.
Payoff: Duration carries the meaning here, so the still passages are the film and the incidents are the interruption. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Stretches held open where nothing advances are what the reading calls dead time.
Watch the warm interiors against the cold blue streets. (light)
Le Saux shoots almost everything at night on lamplight, candles, and sodium glow. Rooms go amber and umber with pale skin against deep dark. Outside stays blue and unwelcoming.
Payoff: The color divides the film into what these two have kept and what they have to go out into.
Watch how little Swinton and Hiddleston move. (performance)
Eve stays serene and unshockable. Adam stays slumped and interior. Their ease plays as long familiarity rather than heat, and the overhead shot of the two asleep turns their bodies into a pattern.
Payoff: Time registers in posture and tiredness, so you can see the centuries in how these two sit and lie. In the reading: cinema of the body (attitudes and postures). Posture and tiredness carrying time with no dialogue needed is what the reading calls a cinema of the body.
Listen for the lute under the guitar drone. (sound)
Jozef van Wissem plays Renaissance lute while Jarmusch's band SQURL lays heavy electric drone over it. Two eras sound at once instead of taking turns. Jarmusch writes with sound as much as script.
Payoff: The score stacks periods the way the rooms do, so you hear the film's structure before you notice it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the hands on book spines, guitar necks, and each other. That is where the centuries in this film show.