Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Richard III
1995 · Richard Loncraine · Richard III 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 for the moments Richard turns and speaks to you. (performance)
McKellen breaks from the room's dialogue to confide his plans directly into the lens, again and again across the film.
Payoff: You end up laughing along with him before you have time to recoil from what he is actually doing. In the reading: the relation-image. The reading calls this a relation-image: meaning built from what only you and Richard share, making you his knowing accomplice.
Watch how Richard lights a cigarette with one hand. (performance)
McKellen turns the labor of ordinary tasks into a small, repeated performance of grievance, using his withered arm and limp as tools rather than mere afflictions.
Payoff: The disability the court reads as pitiable is the very thing he uses to lower their guard. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest, a posture that performs a social relation: pity bought on purpose, then spent as a weapon.
Notice the black uniforms and red-and-black banners throughout. (setting)
The production design grafts the visual language of 1930s fascism onto British establishment settings, court rooms, ballrooms, victory rallies, so the two worlds fuse without comment.
Payoff: The film asks you to imagine how easily a familiar country could be dressed in this costume.
Listen for an Elizabethan love poem sung as 1930s jazz. (sound)
A period dance number sets Christopher Marlowe's lyric to a swing arrangement in a nightclub scene, a small joke that mirrors the film's whole method of updating old text into modern idiom.
Payoff: The gag tells you exactly what the film is doing everywhere else: old words dressed in modern clothes.
Once you have seen it
Listen for Al Jolson singing over Richard's final scene. (sound)
Jones lets the cheerful old recording play straight through Richard's fiery collapse at Battersea Power Station, its grin never matching what is happening on screen.
Payoff: The mismatch is the joke: a man who believed his own performance falls to a song about winning.
Watch how the coronation is staged like a political rally. (staging)
Banners, a podium, and massed ranks arrange the scene as spectacle rather than ceremony, quoting the framing of totalitarian propaganda films directly.
Payoff: Power stops being exercised here and starts being displayed, the same trick every regime in this style has used. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls this an attraction-image, a moment when action stops being acted and becomes pure staged spectacle instead.
Notice the mortuary where Richard woos Lady Anne. (setting)
The scene relocates Shakespeare's open street wooing over a coffin into the sterile chill of a hospital mortuary, corpse present and cold.
Payoff: He wins her over the body of the man he killed, in the coldest room the film can find.
Carry this in: Watch every turn to camera, and notice you're the only one in the room who's told the truth.