Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Before the Rain
1994 · Milcho Manchevski · Before the Rain on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 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 small people look against the open Macedonian hills. (camera)
Teijeiro's camera doesn't move in to protect anyone, keeping figures small against rock and sky, visible for miles and vulnerable for miles.
Payoff: You can see danger coming from a long way off, and so can everyone in the shot.
Notice how differently London and Macedonia are lit. (light)
Macedonia is high, flattening, unforgiving daylight, while London stays wet, close, and gray, seen mostly through glass and restaurant light.
Payoff: One place lets you see everything and stop nothing, the other lets you see nothing and still be involved.
Listen for what fills the silence whenever the monk won't speak. (sound)
Because Kiril has taken a vow of silence, the sound design carries what dialogue normally would, wind, footsteps, bells, the noise of men approaching.
Payoff: The film trains you to listen closely, so that when he finally does speak, it lands as an event. In the reading: pure optical and sound situations. Deleuze calls a moment with nothing to do but look and listen a pure optical and sound situation; Kiril's silence builds the film around that.
Watch how the armed men outside the cell are dressed like family, not soldiers. (staging)
Manchevski stages guns as household objects, held by boys and cousins at a family table rather than by anyone in uniform.
Payoff: The threat comes from people who know each other, which is harder to watch than any anonymous army would be.
Watch for the turtles, and for rain that keeps not arriving. (setting)
Small recurring images, turtles, a photograph, an unfallen rain, keep surfacing across the film's different settings and characters.
Payoff: These small repeats work as rhymes tying the film together, not as clues to a puzzle.
Once you have seen it
Watch for someone who dies in one section, alive in another. (structure)
The three panels, Words, Faces, Pictures, don't reconcile into a single timeline; an event described as past in one section hasn't happened yet in another.
Payoff: The impossible order isn't a puzzle to solve, it's the film arguing that this cycle doesn't run on a single line. In the reading: peaks of present (series of time). Deleuze calls two incompatible presents that both insist on being now peaks of present; the film holds them side by side instead of choosing one.
Watch how Aleksandar describes the photograph that made his career. (structure)
He realizes the picture wasn't a neutral record of a killing, the picture required the killing to happen, his presence with a camera was part of the cause.
Payoff: The film turns its own central tool, the photograph, into an accomplice rather than a witness. In the reading: demark. Deleuze calls an object that snaps its usual meaning and forces interpretation instead of recognition a demark; the photograph becomes exactly that for Aleksandar.
Carry this in: Watch for turtles, and for rain that keeps not arriving. The film's real clock is these small repeats.