Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Hamlet
1948 · Laurence Olivier · Hamlet 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 his lips stay still while you hear his thoughts. (sound)
Olivier delivers several soliloquies as interior voiceover, the mouth closed and motionless while the words play as thought rather than speech aimed at anyone.
Payoff: The technique turns a stage address into something happening entirely inside his head. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Deleuze calls this split between the heard voice and the silent body an audiovisual disjunction, and the soliloquies are built from it.
Watch the camera wander empty corridors like it's thinking. (camera)
Dickinson's camera prowls staircases and arches and keeps returning to the same empty throne, moving the way attention wanders rather than the way a plot needs to travel.
Payoff: The castle starts to feel less like a place and more like the inside of a mind. In the reading: the noosign / cinema of the brain. Deleuze calls an image built to render thought itself a noosign, and Elsinore's architecture is laid out like one.
Watch faces carved out of total darkness. (light)
Dickinson lights the film in high-contrast chiaroscuro, close to film noir and German expressionist Gothic, so a face can emerge from black with almost nothing else visible.
Payoff: The lighting keeps pulling you toward faces as the film's real subject, more than the plot around them.
Watch how empty this castle actually is. (staging)
Furse's Elsinore is sparsely furnished and nearly deserted, more dreamscape than fortress, with almost no incidental crowd to fill out the court.
Payoff: The emptiness concentrates everything onto the one family at the center of the story.
Watch how long Olivier holds a silence before speaking. (performance)
He plays Hamlet athletic, melancholic, and ironic by turns, but the performance keeps returning to stillness, a held pause before any line lands.
Payoff: The pauses are doing as much work as the language, which is unusual for a filmed Shakespeare.
Once you have seen it
Watch how rarely seeing something turns into doing something. (structure)
Hamlet perceives the murder, the marriage, and the ghost's command with total clarity throughout, and almost none of it converts into an act until the very end.
Payoff: The gap between what he knows and what he does is the whole tragedy, not a delay before one. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this breakdown between perceiving and acting the crisis of the action-image, and Hamlet is one of its purest cases.
Watch how the film frames Gertrude's bed. (staging)
The curtained bed is lit and staged prominently in the scenes it appears in, sharpening a reading of the mother-son relationship the film never states outright.
Payoff: A piece of furniture is carrying an argument about the family that the dialogue leaves implicit.
Watch Olivier's face in the graveyard scene. (performance)
The register shifts toward something wrier and more resigned here than in the earlier soliloquies, holding on the skull and on his own stillness a beat longer than the scene requires.
Payoff: It plays like a man who has stopped fighting the paralysis and started to live inside it instead.
Carry this in: Watch the gap between what he knows and what he actually does about it.