Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Memoir of a Murderer
2017 · Won Shin-yun · Memoir of a Murderer on Sightlines
5 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 how rarely the camera pulls back to a wide shot. (camera)
The film stays close on Byung-soo's face and hands, declining the wide establishing shots that would let you reason about the space on your own.
Payoff: You are kept inside his head instead of given a vantage point above the story.
Notice how long the camera holds his confused face. (cutting)
Rather than cutting quickly for shock, the film holds on Byung-soo's stillness long enough that you feel the gap between recognizing something and understanding it.
Payoff: A pure quality gets offered here instead of an action. In the reading: qualisign (icon of quality). The reading calls a held face like this a qualisign: a pure quality offered instead of an action.
Notice the notebooks he keeps writing everything into. (setting)
The notebooks recur throughout the film, an outside archive for a memory he can no longer trust to hold anything on its own.
Payoff: The notebooks are his attempt to keep being himself on paper, since his own mind won't do it anymore.
Compare the warm and cool color tones across scenes. (light)
Memory sequences run warm while the present-tense investigation runs cooler and grayer, giving you a rough compass without ever confirming which register you can trust.
Payoff: The color tells you roughly where you are in time, but never whether what you're seeing actually happened.
Listen for when a flashback sounds different from the present. (sound)
Some flashbacks carry their own distinct audio texture and some do not, so there's no reliable sound cue for telling levels of reality apart.
Payoff: There's no reliable sound cue for telling which level of reality you're in.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch his face when he can't place what he's seeing. The gap between recognizing and understanding is the whole film.