Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Unforgiven
1992 · Clint Eastwood · Unforgiven on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 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 how small the riders are against the prairie. (camera)
Jack Green shoots wide-angle establishing shots in anamorphic width that shrink the figures into the land. The classical Western used the same equipment to do the opposite.
Payoff: The scale relationship is reversed, so nobody in this country gets to look heroic against a horizon.
Count how many times Munny fails at something physical. (performance)
Eastwood plays Munny as an old body: he cannot mount his horse, cannot shoot straight, ends up in the mud. What he has left is stillness, and he spends it carefully.
Payoff: The body keeps arguing with the legend, scene by scene, long before anyone tests the legend directly.
Look at how dark the saloon interiors are. (light)
Green lights the interiors from near-candlelit sources, so faces move in and out of legibility through pools of darkness. Outside, the dusk silhouettes do the same work.
Payoff: You often cannot see clearly who is doing what, which is this film's position on gunfights.
Notice how much of the film has no music. (sound)
Lennie Niehaus leaves long stretches unscored, and when the music comes it is sparse piano and strings. Rain, wind and the pauses in the talk carry everything else.
Payoff: The elegy is built out of absence, in the places where Morricone would have sung.
Watch how often violence is promised and then postponed. (cutting)
Joel Cox lets scenes go slack and refuses to deliver on genre schedule. The repeated anticipation trains you out of your reflexes, so the abruptness when it comes is partly an editing effect.
Payoff: You stop expecting the film to behave, and the dread accumulates in the gaps instead.
Once you have seen it
Watch Beauchamp's notebook while Little Bill beats English Bob. (staging)
Little Bill performs sovereignty for the writer while he works Bob over in the street. The dime-novelist takes it all down, then transfers his pen to whoever is holding power.
Payoff: You watch a legend being written over a body, which is what this genre has always done. In the reading: the discourse-image. The reading calls this a discourse-image: an action turned into a demonstration, posing a question the film will not close.
Watch Harris play English Bob as a performance. (performance)
Richard Harris plays a self-mythologized gunfighter, theatrical in every gesture, with Beauchamp's book keeping the story running. Little Bill's methodical violence takes the act apart in public.
Payoff: One made-up man gets dismantled by another man who is also lying, with no solid ground underneath. In the reading: le faussaire / the forger. The reading calls Bob a forger: a man assembled out of stories, undone the moment real violence touches him.
Watch the Kid after he does what he wanted. (performance)
Jaimz Woolvett plays bravado and posturing until the act happens, then shaking, tears, and the exchange about having it coming. He gives the gun away.
Payoff: No Western before this let its would-be gunslinger arrive at that admission and then stay there. In the reading: consciousness of cliches. The reading calls this a consciousness of cliches: a character who can feel how hollow the genre's images have gone.
Look at Little Bill's unfinished house and leaking roof. (staging)
He is building it himself, badly, and Eastwood keeps staging scenes inside it while the rain comes through. The man who imposes order on a town cannot raise a shelter.
Payoff: His claim to civilization is contradicted by the carpentry in every scene he plays at home.
Carry this in: Watch the man with the notebook. He follows whoever is holding the gun.