Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The War Game
1966 · Peter Watkins · The War Game on Sightlines
4 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 the camera flinch, search, and lose focus. (camera)
The camera behaves like a reporter caught off guard: it jostles, searches, zooms, and refocuses as though the crew were improvising under duress during a real event.
Payoff: You are made to feel a camera struggling to keep up, not a shot composed in advance. In the reading: dicisign. Deleuze calls an image where you sense the camera itself as a limited body a dicisign; the film's realism runs on it.
Listen to the narrator's calm, newsreader voice throughout. (sound)
A measured, professional narration delivers escalating horror in the exact even tone normally used for weather or cricket scores, and it never once rises to match what it describes.
Payoff: The flatness of the voice against the horror of the image is itself doing the arguing. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Deleuze calls sound and image telling two different stories at once audiovisual disjunction; the gap between them carries the meaning.
Watch ordinary households prepare with almost nothing. (staging)
There are no model cities or special effects. The staging stays at household scale, a bucket of sand by the stairs, families being billeted, ordinary objects standing in for a catastrophe too large to picture.
Payoff: The film makes an abstraction like megadeath local enough to actually look at.
Watch faces directed toward shock, not toward acting. (performance)
The non-professional cast are directed toward states, shock, disorientation, exhaustion, rather than characterizations, dissolving the line between someone performing and someone simply enduring.
Payoff: An untrained face that does not resolve into a performance is what makes this feel like a document.
Once you have seen it
Watch the film stop to ask people about strontium-90. (structure)
Partway through, the film pauses its reenactment to interview ordinary Britons about fallout and radiation, and most cannot answer, exposing public ignorance as part of the catastrophe itself.
Payoff: The public that would need to exist to make an informed choice about this simply is not there. In the reading: the people are missing. Deleuze calls this the people are missing: the film registers that an informed public does not exist yet and has to be built.
Watch for statistics stamped over the worst images. (cutting)
The cutting layers casualty statistics and citations directly over the images, so each atrocity arrives with its documentary source already attached, footnoted while you are still looking at the body.
Payoff: The film keeps stopping you from simply feeling the horror; it makes you read it too.
Watch the children's faces held in close-up near the end. (performance)
In the closing passages the camera holds tight, unflattering close-ups on children's faces, faces that give nothing back, no visible feeling discharging into any action or word.
Payoff: A face that will not resolve into an expression is harder to watch than one that breaks down.
Carry this in: Watch the calm of the narrator's voice. It never once matches what it is describing.