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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where the dead body sits in the frame. The living are always blocked in relation to it.