Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Das Boot
1981 · Wolfgang Petersen · Das Boot 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
Listen for the sonar ping traveling along the hull. (sound)
The ping sweeps the outside of the boat and every man stops moving. The mix then magnifies a dripping valve, a boot on a deck plate, a breath. The sound becomes the situation itself.
Payoff: The threat reaches the crew as noise long before it is ever visible, so you listen the way they have to.
Watch the camera run the full length of the boat. (camera)
Jost Vacano carries a gyro-stabilized rig down the spine of the U-boat, past bodies that block the lens. Nothing is composed for you. The camera squeezes through the same gaps as the men.
Payoff: The photography puts you inside the crew rather than in front of them, so the space is felt instead of surveyed.
Watch the green instrument glow and the amber over the bunks. (light)
Vacano works in low-key light that appears to come from the boat itself: sickly panel glow, harsh white in the control room, gloom across the hammocks. The set looks used rather than lit.
Payoff: The lighting keeps the submarine a working machine, so the film never starts to look like a stage.
Count how often men squeeze past each other to move. (staging)
Pipes, valves, hammocks slung between torpedoes. The blocking gives nobody private space, and the camera's route teaches you where the control room sits relative to the bow and the engines.
Payoff: Knowing that geography is what keeps the attack scenes legible when the cutting speeds up and the lights fail.
Watch the beards, the pallor and the grime accumulate. (performance)
Petersen shot in sequence and kept the cast out of sunlight. The exhaustion on screen is real and it tracks the patrol. Jürgen Prochnow's Captain visibly ages across the voyage.
Payoff: The men stop performing and start carrying time, so their bodies report how long this has been going on. In the reading: cinema of the body. Bodies bearing duration as fatigue and posture instead of acting on a situation is what the reading calls a cinema of the body.
Once you have seen it
Notice how much of the film is spent waiting. (structure)
Hannes Nikel lets tedium, drink and homesickness run long between engagements, then holds the silence during an attack until it is unbearable. The longer cuts lean harder into that.
Payoff: Time is the crew's real opponent, so the boredom is doing the same work on you as the depth charges.
Listen to the hull groaning as the boat goes deeper. (sound)
Rivets pop, joints shriek, water forces through the seams. The boat announces its own limits in sound while the depth gauge says the same thing silently. Klaus Doldinger's score stays out of these passages.
Payoff: Every dive costs the boat something it cannot get back, and you can hear the machine wearing down. In the reading: entropy / line of slope. The boat and the men grinding irreversibly toward exhaustion is what the reading calls a line of slope.
Watch what happens once the boat reaches La Rochelle. (structure)
They survive crush depth and limp home, and the harbor gives them nothing for it. An air raid finishes in minutes what the Atlantic could not finish in weeks.
Payoff: The film refuses you the relief of having endured, which is what the whole patrol has been building toward.
Watch Prochnow's Captain when the propaganda talk starts. (performance)
He does not argue. Posture, silence and one dry line carry open contempt for the leadership that sent these boys to sea. Herbert Grönemeyer's Werner watches him and learns it.
Payoff: The politics arrive through bearing rather than speeches, so nobody in the film has to state a position aloud.
Carry this in: Listen to the steel. The boat tells you how much trouble it is in before any man does.