Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Testament
1983 · Lynne Littman · Testament 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
Watch the camera hold on the room during the flash. (camera)
At the moment of attack, Littman and cinematographer Steven Poster keep the camera on the family inside the house rather than cutting to any image of the explosion or the world outside it.
Payoff: What actually happened stays entirely outside the frame, and stays that way for the rest of the film. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. Deleuze calls an outside no camera movement could ever reach the absolute out-of-field; here it is the whole outside world.
Watch the light shift from lamps to candles as days pass. (light)
The early scenes are warm and domestically lit, table lamps and kitchen windows; as power fails, the interiors cool toward candle, lantern, and gray daylight, a shift the film never announces.
Payoff: You feel the house losing its resources before anyone onscreen has to say so out loud.
Listen for the ordinary sounds of the town disappearing. (sound)
The full ambient bed of a working suburb, traffic, radio, television, telephones, is removed one layer at a time until only wind, footsteps, and voices remain on the soundtrack.
Payoff: There is nothing left to do about what is happening, only to notice how quiet it has gotten. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. Deleuze calls a moment where looking and listening are all that is left a pure optical and sound situation.
Watch what happens at the edges of the frame. (staging)
Catastrophe is repeatedly staged at the edge of the frame or off it entirely; adults confer in doorways while children play in the foreground, and the camera never privileges anyone over the room.
Payoff: The worst news in this film often arrives in the background of an otherwise ordinary scene.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the room, not the window. The film never once shows you what happened outside it.