Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Enter the Void
2010 · Gaspar Noé · Enter the Void 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 screen blink when Oscar blinks. (camera)
The opening stretch locks the camera to his eyeline completely, the frame going dark and reopening every time his eyes close.
Payoff: You are not watching Oscar see the world. You are inside the seeing itself. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: a shot where you feel the camera itself as a second body perceiving alongside a character.
Notice the neon has no visible source in each shot. (light)
Debie floods Tokyo in magenta, electric blue, and acid green light that comes from nowhere in particular, closer to atmosphere than to any single lamp.
Payoff: Light stops belonging to objects and starts behaving like something you could get high on.
Listen for the absence of any orchestral score. (sound)
Noé builds the soundtrack from drones, throbbing low end, and distorted club music instead, with the mix muffled or ringing depending on Oscar's state.
Payoff: The sound is built to be felt physically rather than heard as accompaniment.
Notice the tabletop model of the neighborhood that recurs. (setting)
The miniature city appears again and again as its own motif, a designed hallucination standing in for the real Tokyo the film keeps returning to.
Payoff: Even the film's version of the city admits it is a constructed toy, not a document.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the blink in the opening minute. It is the whole argument the film will make.