Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1966 · Mike Nichols · Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 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 games being announced by name. (structure)
Get the Guests. Humiliate the Host. George and Martha do not have an argument, they run a ceremony, and they say the title of each round out loud before they play it.
Payoff: Nothing in the night changes anyone's circumstances. The talk is a form with rules, which is why it can escalate for two hours. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls the games gests: postures that expose the relation underneath instead of advancing any story.
Notice how close Wexler gets to Taylor's face. (camera)
Haskell Wexler shoots hard, grainy black and white in the year color had won, with a near-handheld camera pushing into faces and tracking people through cramped rooms. Nothing is softened.
Payoff: The most photographed beauty of the era is filmed at pore level. The look strips the star before the script strips the character. In the reading: icon of power. The reading calls these close-ups icons of power: faces where intensity gathers and never gets released into action.
Look at the clutter in George and Martha's living room. (setting)
Richard Sylbert fills the house with books, worn furniture and the sediment of a long marriage. It is lived in rather than decorated, and the film never leaves it for long.
Payoff: The house is the fifth character. Everything that happens has to happen inside somebody's actual life.
Listen for how rarely music plays under the fighting. (sound)
Alex North keeps the score sparse and elegiac, framing scenes rather than riding them. What fills the track instead is overlapping dialogue, ice in glasses and the hush of a house at two in the morning.
Payoff: The language carries all the weight. No music tells you when a line has landed.
Watch how Burton and Taylor carry their bodies. (performance)
Burton plays George slumped, dry and outwardly passive. Taylor, then thirty-three, put on weight and aged herself two decades to play Martha loud and splayed across the furniture.
Payoff: Decades of marriage are worn as physical fact. You read the history off the posture before anyone explains it.
Once you have seen it
Count every mention of the son and who makes it. (structure)
He is discussed, defended and invoked all night, and there is a rule about who may raise him with outsiders. George eventually delivers news of him as if reporting a fact.
Payoff: The most devastating thing in the film is the killing of someone who was never alive. In the reading: le faussaire. The reading calls George a forger: a man whose creative act is to fabricate a person and then unmake him in front of everyone.
Notice the takes getting shorter as the night gets worse. (cutting)
Sam O'Steen holds long on the dialogue builds early, then cuts harder and faster through the cruelest exchanges. The rhythm follows the drunken swing between lull and assault.
Payoff: A filmed play stays kinetic because the editing finds its pulse in eyelines and the timing of verbal blows.
Track who follows whom out of the room. (staging)
Nichols choreographs four bodies through doorways, the staircase and the division between rooms. Alliances form and dissolve in who leaves, who follows and who is left sitting alone.
Payoff: The blocking keeps score. You can see the realignments happening before anyone says anything about them.
Watch Honey on the bathroom floor. (performance)
Sandy Dennis plays the younger wife as brittle and retreating, absorbing damage aimed at other people. George Segal plays Nick stiffening into a careerist's smile as his own history gets used against him.
Payoff: The guests are the instruments. The older couple needs an audience, and the film shows you what being that audience costs.
Carry this in: Listen for the games being named out loud. Once you hear them announced, you cannot mistake the talk for an argument.