Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Matter of Life and Death
1946 · Michael Powell · A Matter of Life and Death on Sightlines
4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 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 Earth is in color and the afterlife is not. (light)
Earth is shot in full saturated Technicolor while the celestial scenes run in a silvery, pearl-toned monochrome, both achieved within the same color process.
Payoff: You always know which realm you are in before a single line confirms it. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: which world you are in becomes a fact about the film stock itself.
Watch the pink membrane slide over the lens like an eyelid. (camera)
As the anesthetic takes hold, the camera itself appears to blink shut, telling you without a word that what follows happens behind this one eye.
Payoff: The film tells you, visually, that everything ahead might be happening inside one man's head.
Notice the enormous escalator and statues in the afterlife. (setting)
Junge's design gives the beyond the scale and order of a vast terminus, ranked statues and multitudes, rather than any soft cloud-and-harp convention.
Payoff: Heaven here looks like an efficient administration, not a paradise, and the joke is entirely visual.
Listen to how much of the opening is built on voices alone. (sound)
Peter's radio conversation with June, recited as his aircraft burns, plays almost entirely on sound, a dying man reciting poetry to a stranger he expects never to meet.
Payoff: You fall for these two people through voices in the dark before you ever see either face.
The 2 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch which world has color and which doesn't. That choice alone tells you where you are.