Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Clouds of Sils Maria
2014 · Olivier Assayas · Clouds of Sils Maria 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 how rarely the camera cuts away from both faces. (camera)
Assayas and Le Saux hold Maria and Valentine together in a single frame during rehearsal, in profile or three quarter, instead of cutting to isolated close ups of each.
Payoff: Keeping both faces in one shot is why you can never quite tell if a line belongs to the play or to the women themselves. In the reading: Crystal-image (hyalosign). Deleuze calls an image where the real and its double stay this close a crystal image, too fused to pull apart.
Notice the rehearsals happen outdoors, never on a stage. (staging)
Maria and Valentine read the play on hiking trails and rocks above the valley, with no proscenium, lighting cue, or black box to mark where the text begins.
Payoff: With nothing to announce that a scene has started, the mountain becomes a place where the play and the two women's actual lives can overlap.
Listen for Baroque music arriving during the mountain scenes. (sound)
Handel's Water Music and other Baroque selections play over the Engadine footage, an unusually formal, ceremonial choice against the plain, naturalistic dialogue of the rehearsals.
Payoff: The music treats the mountain almost like a ceremony, which sits strangely and deliberately against how ordinary the talk sounds.
Watch Valentine's eyes drift away when she is talking. (performance)
Stewart plays Valentine with deflected eye contact and sentences that trail off, a looser idiom than Binoche's polish that reads as a real generational gap between them.
Payoff: Her loose, unfinished way of talking is doing real work here, not just texture, since her position in the argument keeps being underestimated.
Track how often Maria is in a train, car, or hallway. (setting)
Trains, cars, hotel corridors, and chalet terraces recur constantly, and even the one house that reads as home belongs to a dead playwright, not to her.
Payoff: Nothing around Maria actually belongs to her, which leaves her unusually open to being taken over by somebody else's old text.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch whether you can tell which lines belong to the play and which belong to the two women. You will lose track.