Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
1943 · Michael Powell · The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 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
Notice the mounted animal heads filling Candy's walls. (setting)
Alfred Junge fills the house with trophies from Candy's campaigns, one head at a time, until the walls hold his whole life instead of a home.
Payoff: The wall turns a man's life into furniture: decades of war reduced to decor on his own drawing room wall. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. The reading calls this crystal-decomposition: a life aging and going obsolete inside the very same frame.
Watch the camera crane away just as the duel starts. (camera)
Powell lifts the camera up and out of the gymnasium the moment the sabers are about to meet, leaving you with falling snow instead of blood.
Payoff: The film cares about the code two enemies share, not about who wins the fight. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this the gest: a posture that bares the shared code the fight itself would hide.
Watch how controlled and painterly the Technicolor stays throughout. (light)
Georges Perinal photographs Edwardian rooms and wartime London in a muted, careful palette instead of the garish primaries color film was accused of in this era.
Payoff: The restraint keeps Technicolor a tool for feeling, not spectacle, in one of the first films to use it this way.
Notice the film opens in 1943 before flashing back decades. (structure)
A framing present indicts Candy as a pompous relic, then the long flashback that follows spends three hours explaining, and complicating, that first impression.
Payoff: The structure asks you to judge a man first, then spends the rest of the film making that judgment harder.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the trophy wall. Powell and Pressburger turn forty years of a man's life into a row of mounted heads.
A Deleuzian reading of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp →