Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Performance
1970 · Nicolas Roeg · Performance 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 how often a mirror or reflection is in the shot. (camera)
The film keeps finding mirrors and frames within frames, fragmenting and doubling bodies until you're not always sure whose reflection you're looking at.
Payoff: The visual language is already telling you identity here won't stay put. In the reading: hyalosign (the crystal-image). Deleuze calls an image where the real and its reflection can't be told apart a crystal-image, and this film is built from them.
Watch the color shift from cold and hard to warm and hazy. (light)
The gangster world is shot in a cold, hard palette, and once Chas enters Turner's house the color turns warm, drugged, and claustrophobic.
Payoff: You feel the shift into a different kind of film before the plot explains it.
Notice how differently the two households are furnished and lit. (staging)
The London underworld is staged hard-edged and territorial, while Turner's house is cluttered, candlelit, and full of cushions and drugs.
Payoff: The film stages two entirely different ways of being a man before it lets them collide.
Watch how the opening cuts between a car and an unrelated scene. (cutting)
The film opens by intercutting a speeding car with an erotic scene, announcing early that it will cut on rhyme and suggestion rather than plain continuity.
Payoff: The rhyme between the two images tells you this film will connect scenes by resemblance, not just by what happens next.
Notice how differently trained and untrained the two leads seem. (performance)
Fox plays Chas with conventional actorly control while Jagger plays Turner as barely modified star persona, languid and self-aware.
Payoff: The mismatch in acting styles becomes part of the film's argument that personality itself is a kind of performance.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the mirrors throughout; the film never lets you be sure whose reflection you're looking at.