Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sisters
1973 · Brian De Palma · Sisters 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 screen split into two panels at once. (cutting)
For long stretches the frame divides down the middle, one side showing what a character does, the other showing who is watching or arriving, both playing out in real time.
Payoff: You end up watching two things happen at once and feeling the gap between what each side knows. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. Deleuze calls the unseen space a frame implies the out of field: De Palma puts it on screen instead of leaving it implied.
Watch Grace watch Danielle's apartment through a lit window. (staging)
Sandor photographs the apartment across the courtyard flat and frontal, like a small stage seen from a fixed distance, before anything happens inside it worth reporting.
Payoff: The film shows you spectacle before it shows you evidence, and asks you to notice the difference. In the reading: dicisign. Deleuze calls this a dicisign: a shot that shows a character caught in the act of looking, not just what she sees.
Listen for the score arrive before a scene turns scary. (sound)
Herrmann's shrieking strings and cold Moog sustain announce horror ahead of the image, telling you how to feel before the scene has proved anything.
Payoff: The music is doing openly what most scores try to hide: deciding your reaction for you.
Notice the fake game show that opens the film. (structure)
Before any plot begins, a hidden camera prank plays a woman undressing for studio laughs, seating you at the viewfinder well before there is a story to justify it.
Payoff: The film puts you in the position of a voyeur before it ever asks you to sympathize with one.
Once you have seen it
Watch whose story the film follows after Philip is killed. (structure)
About a third of the way in, the character the film has been following dies, and the story hands itself entirely to the woman who only watched from across the courtyard.
Payoff: The film swaps its protagonist mid stream, taking a Hitchcock trick and pushing it further than expected.
Watch the film drop to black and white and warp. (light)
In the hypnosis sequence the color drains out and the lens turns fisheye, faces bulging and corridors bending, marking the shift from what Grace witnessed to what is being implanted in her.
Payoff: The style itself tells you to stop trusting this as a straightforward memory. In the reading: sheets of past. Deleuze calls this sheets of past: a region of memory a person can be lowered into rather than simply recall.
Watch where that hide-a-bed sofa ends up by the finish. (setting)
The sofa that swallowed the evidence travels by rail to a Quebec station platform, watched over by a private detective stuck on top of a telephone pole with no one left to tell.
Payoff: He finally has the truth, and there is no one left in the story to receive it.
Carry this in: Watch what Grace can see and what the police on screen cannot.