Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch A Midsummer's Night Dream
1959 · Jiří Trnka · A Midsummer's Night Dream 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 the puppets' faces: they never change expression. (performance)
Trnka's puppets are carved with one fixed look and never move a feature, from the first scene to the last, no matter what happens to them.
Payoff: A face that can't change lets you project the feeling onto it yourself instead of being told what to feel. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). This is what the reading calls a qualisign: a face holding one pure quality, with nothing gathering behind it to break.
Watch for shafts of light through the forest foliage. (light)
Instead of the flat, even lighting most stop-motion of the period used, Trnka builds pools of illumination ringed by deep blue-black shadow and backlit haze.
Payoff: That directional light gives a miniature set on a table a real sense of depth and air.
Notice how the widescreen camera scans sideways through the trees. (camera)
The CinemaScope frame invites your eye to travel horizontally, tracking and panning across receding planes so figures are discovered rather than presented centered.
Payoff: The wide frame asks you to scan the image for activity instead of just reading it.
Listen for how the score carries scenes with no dialogue. (sound)
Václav Trojan's music does the work speech normally does: marking character, shifting tone between the three worlds, and carrying comedy across long wordless passages.
Payoff: The score isn't accompaniment here. It's effectively telling half the story on its own.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what moves past the faces, not the faces themselves. Trnka put all the feeling into light, color, and motion instead.