Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch West Side Story
1961 · Robert Wise · West Side Story 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 camera come down from above Manhattan. (camera)
The film opens on a long overhead view drifting across the city grid, then descends until it lands in the particular blocks where the story happens. You see the whole island before you see the turf.
Payoff: From that height the disputed ground is a few indistinguishable blocks. The film shows you that first and never mentions it again.
Watch for the frame where walking becomes dancing. (staging)
The Jets are just moving down a sidewalk. Somebody snaps, the walk picks up a beat, the beat picks up the block. Nobody decides to start. Robbins builds it out of snaps, prowling formations, and leaps.
Payoff: The initiative leaves the boys and passes into everything around them, so the dance looks like it is moving them. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: motion drains out of the characters and the surroundings carry them instead.
Look at the color when the lovers first see each other. (light)
Daniel Fapp's palette is expressive rather than naturalistic. Saturated reds and oranges take over whole scenes, gels light the fantasy passages, and the world bleaches away to leave two people in it.
Payoff: Color here does not describe the room. It absorbs the scene and its feeling, which is why the shifts land as events.
Listen to how many people sing Tonight at once. (sound)
Five parties sing the same word simultaneously: the lovers, Anita, and both gangs. To one it means a wedding, to another a good time, to two more a killing. Bernstein stacks them instead of cutting between them.
Payoff: Five versions of the same night arrive in one instant, all true, none able to reach the others. That is the tragedy stated as music. In the reading: peaks of present. The reading calls this peaks of present: several contradictory nows held at the same time, with no way to rank them.
Look at the brick and chain-link in the street scenes. (setting)
Much of the early material was shot in a real New York district already scheduled for demolition to make way for Lincoln Center. The decayed brick, the playgrounds, and the cyclone fencing were all there.
Payoff: The ground these boys are dying over was condemned while the camera was running, which the film never says out loud.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the snapping fingers. Nobody in this film decides to dance. The block picks them up and moves them.