Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Funeral
1996 · Abel Ferrara · The Funeral 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
Watch faces emerge from near total darkness. (light)
Kelsch lights most interiors as if by a single practical source, so a face has to surface out of black rather than sit in even light.
Payoff: The darkness reads less like style than like a world with no grace left in it.
Notice how often the coffin sits in the frame. (staging)
The open casket recurs as a fixed point, and conversation, accusation, and mourning are staged again and again in its literal presence.
Payoff: Every conversation in the film happens in front of the dead, whether or not anyone mentions it.
Watch the present wake keep breaking into flashback. (cutting)
The film keeps cutting from the gathered, grieving present back into the past, so the story circles rather than moves in a straight line.
Payoff: The past keeps getting revisited without ever quite explaining the thing it's being asked to explain. In the reading: sheets of past. The reading calls this sheets of past: a mind wandering a whole region of memory, hunting for a cause it never finds.
Watch Ray's face stay almost completely still. (performance)
Walken delivers the family's fatalism in a low, even voice, barely moving, as if reciting something he memorized long ago.
Payoff: His stillness carries the whole argument better than any speech he actually gives. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). The reading calls this a qualisign: an immobile face expressing one quality fully, with nowhere left for it to go.
Listen for long silences around the coffin. (sound)
Delia's score stays sparse and melancholy, leaving most of the film to murmured conversation and sudden eruptions rather than constant scoring.
Payoff: The quiet makes every outburst land harder because nothing has been cushioning you beforehand.
Once you have seen it
Watch Chez's composure break apart without warning. (performance)
Penn plays his eruptions as something surfacing from underneath the family's business and manners, not as a single character trait.
Payoff: His breakdowns read as something the family itself produced, not a flaw that landed on him alone. In the reading: originary world. The reading calls this the originary world: raw drive breaking up through the social surface of rooms and family business.
Notice how the revenge plot ends up consuming the family itself. (structure)
The hunt for Johnny's killer resolves into near-total destruction of the family rather than any kind of victory or relief.
Payoff: The ending completes the family's own rule rather than defeating an outside enemy.
Watch the wives name what the brothers won't say. (performance)
Sciorra and Rossellini's scenes state plainly that the men's fatalism is a story they tell themselves, a critique the brothers never make of themselves.
Payoff: The film's clearest argument against its own men comes from the two people watching them most closely.
Carry this in: Watch where the dead body sits in the frame. The living are always blocked in relation to it.