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.
Once you have seen it
Notice Valentine's disappearance is never explained. (structure)
Valentine vanishes on a hike with no discovery scene, no body, and no explanation. The film simply moves on without her, and never brings the question back.
Payoff: The film refuses you the payoff a mystery usually promises, and that refusal turns the second half into a study of absence. In the reading: Cracked crystal (line of flight). Deleuze says every crystal has a flaw something escapes through, and Valentine walking out of the frame for good is that crack.
Notice the film cuts in old black and white cloud footage. (cutting)
As the two women watch the cloud pour through the pass, Assayas cuts to Arnold Fanck's 1924 silent footage of the same phenomenon, decades of images stacked in one sequence.
Payoff: The people go still and the cloud does the moving, so for once the world itself carries the scene instead of the actors. In the reading: Movement of world. Deleuze calls this movement of world: the characters go still and motion migrates entirely into the environment around them.
Watch which one of them is holding the phone in each scene. (staging)
Valentine is the one who always carries the phone, screens the gossip, and reads aloud the role of the woman who destroys her employer, never the other way around.
Payoff: Who holds the phone and who reads which part quietly maps the wage relation running underneath the whole friendship.
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.