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
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
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.
Listen for how still Walbrook stays during his long speech. (performance)
Anton Walbrook explains, at full length and near stillness, why a German has come to fight for England, and Powell lets the speech run uncut.
Payoff: A held body and an unbroken sentence carry the whole weight of Theo's moral choice.
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.
Once you have seen it
Watch how the three women in Candy's life share one face. (performance)
Deborah Kerr plays Edith, Barbara, and Angela across forty years. Candy keeps falling for the same idealized woman, and Kerr's single face makes memory and present look alike.
Payoff: Candy is chasing one image of the unreachable, refracted through three different women. In the reading: hyalosign / crystal-image. The reading calls this a crystal-image: present and memory fused in one face until neither ranks above the other.
Notice the ending returns to the same ambush that opened the film. (structure)
The mock-war prank that began the picture in 1943 is the same moment we end on, now fully explained by everything the flashback showed about who Candy became.
Payoff: What looked like a joke on a pompous old man becomes, by the end, an elegy for him.
Track how fast the trophy wall montage jumps between wars. (cutting)
One mounted head after another stands in for a whole campaign, so decades of Candy's life pass in a single sequence of glass eyes and dates.
Payoff: The years arrive as objects rather than scenes, which is its own kind of sadness.
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 →