Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Macbeth
1948 · Orson Welles · Macbeth 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 the witches mold a small clay figure at the very start. (setting)
Before any dialogue, three witches shape a crowned clay man and stand him up in the mud.
Payoff: The film opens by showing you a man being made before he's shown making a single choice. In the reading: impulse-image. Deleuze calls a character driven by force beneath choice rather than decision an impulse-image, and the effigy states that thesis outright.
Notice how often a face emerges out of total darkness. (light)
Faces are lit so they surface from pure black and sink back into it, rather than being steadily illuminated throughout a scene.
Payoff: The lighting keeps making people feel provisional, as if the dark could take them back at any moment.
Notice that every room looks carved out of raw, dripping rock. (setting)
The sets are crude, womb-like caverns rather than a real castle, with dripping walls and primitive forked idols.
Payoff: The world itself looks unfinished and pre-civilized, long before the plot turns savage. In the reading: originary world. Deleuze calls the raw, pre-moral realm underneath a story's surface an originary world, and these caverns put it in plain view.
Listen for voices that seem to float apart from the actors. (sound)
The dialogue was recorded before filming and the actors performed to playback, so the sound sits just slightly off from the images.
Payoff: The mismatch gives the verse an eerie, prophetic quality, as if it arrived before the moment it describes.
Watch how long a single shot runs after the king is killed. (cutting)
Welles stages the murder and its immediate aftermath in one sustained, unbroken camera movement instead of cutting between reactions.
Payoff: The camera fuses staging and movement into a single gesture instead of assembling the moment out of separate pieces.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the light on faces, surfacing from black and sinking back; the darkness feels like it could take anyone.