Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
1955 · Luis Buñuel · The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz 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 frame isolating one object completely. (camera)
When something catches Archibaldo's attention, a leg, a box, an object, Buñuel gives it the whole frame instead of keeping it inside a wider shot.
Payoff: Your eye goes where his obsession goes, before you decide to look there yourself. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls a piece of a person torn loose and overcharged with meaning a fetish, and the camera keeps performing that tearing for you.
Listen for the music box's waltz returning again and again. (sound)
The same tinkling melody recurs at key moments, functioning less like background music than like a cue that something in Archibaldo has just been triggered.
Payoff: The waltz is doing the work of a warning bell for an urge, not decorating a scene.
Notice the lighting stay bright and even, even in disturbing scenes. (light)
Buñuel and Jiménez light drawing rooms and Archibaldo's darkest fantasies in the same clean, high-key studio style, with no shadow cueing you to feel afraid.
Payoff: The evenness of the light is its own kind of joke, refusing to treat horror as different from a dinner party.
Watch Alonso's face for whether he's charming or unsettling. (performance)
He plays Archibaldo with the same urbane courtesy in every scene, whether he is making small talk or planning a murder, and never signals which mode you are in.
Payoff: The performance keeps you deciding, scene by scene, whether to laugh at him or step back.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the music box. Notice what is happening in the frame every time its waltz begins.
A Deleuzian reading of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz →
How The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz was received →