Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
1945 · Elia Kazan · A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 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 where each family member stands in the kitchen. (staging)
Kazan blocks the cramped flat so that who is near the stove, who drifts to the edge of a group, quietly states each person's standing.
Payoff: Money and shame get expressed through where people put their bodies, before anyone says a word. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture exposing a relation about money and shame, unspoken.
Watch how long the camera holds on Francie's face. (camera)
Shamroy's camera returns again and again to Peggy Ann Garner watching her father, holding well past the point where the scene's information has arrived.
Payoff: The feeling has nowhere left to go once the scene is over, so the camera just lets it sit there. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). The reading calls a face held like this a qualisign: a feeling registered with nowhere left to go.
Notice the single tree visible from the tenement window. (setting)
The ailanthus tree keeps appearing in the same view from the Nolans' window, returned to with obvious deliberateness across the film.
Payoff: One object ends up carrying the film's whole idea about growth against odds. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls this a symbol: one object condensing the film's whole idea of growth against odds.
Watch Johnny charm the room even when he's failed again. (performance)
James Dunn plays the singing waiter as tender and self-deceiving at once, never letting the charm curdle into something the film asks you to condemn.
Payoff: You are left loving a man the plot keeps proving cannot be relied on.
Listen for Johnny singing in ordinary domestic scenes. (sound)
As a singing waiter, his voice keeps surfacing in the household's everyday moments, tying his charm and his unreliability to the same instrument.
Payoff: The music that makes him lovable is the same music that means he isn't home earning a wage.
Once you have seen it
Notice what's missing from the courtyard view later on. (structure)
The tree the family could see from their window is taken out, and the same window now opens onto nothing but the courtyard.
Payoff: The frame loses an exit. What used to be a hopeful thing to look at is simply gone.
Compare Katie's practicality to Johnny's charm across the film. (performance)
Dorothy McGuire plays a flintiness that isn't natural temperament so much as years of having to be the reliable parent because Johnny could not be.
Payoff: What looks like coldness turns out to be exactly what poverty pressed into her over time.
Notice the scenes where nobody is actually doing anything. (structure)
The film lingers on ordinary unhurried moments, letting attention rather than plot carry entire stretches of the family's life.
Payoff: That is where the film does its real work, in time nobody is rushing you through.
Carry this in: Watch who stands where in that tiny kitchen. Kazan tells you the whole family's standing through the room itself.