Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Cold War
2018 · Paweł Pawlikowski · Cold War 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
Watch what happens each time the screen fades to black. (cutting)
Jaroslaw Kaminski leaps months or years across a fade. You get the before and the after and never the leaving, the reunion or the falling out itself. Fifteen years run in eighty-eight minutes.
Payoff: The film hands you the gaps and asks you to fill them. That work is where the ache comes from. In the reading: interstice / the "AND". The reading calls this the interstice: a join between two images across a gap you cannot measure.
Notice how low in the frame the people stand. (camera)
Lukasz Zal shoots in the boxy Academy ratio, which forces height into every shot. Figures sit near the bottom edge under looming ceilings, walls and skies, with the emptiness left above them.
Payoff: The composition puts the weight of the state and the decade directly over their heads.
Listen for the same folk melody in three different arrangements. (sound)
Dwa serduszka arrives first as a raw field recording of village singing. It becomes a swelling state showpiece, then a smoky French jazz ballad in Paris. The same tune, new owners each time.
Payoff: What happens to the song is what happens to the lovers. Both get bent into new shapes by whoever is paying. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls the song a symbol: one thing that condenses the film's whole organizing relation into something you can hear.
Watch who is on the stage and who is watching. (staging)
The film keeps putting performance at the center: the folk ensemble on its proscenium, Zula at a microphone, the recording booth in Paris. The power between the two of them shifts inside those setups.
Payoff: Their relationship gets negotiated in public, with an audience present and the state or the market in the room.
Watch Kulig's body and Kot's stillness in the same scene. (performance)
Joanna Kulig plays Zula loud, guarded and reckless, and sings her own numbers. Tomasz Kot plays Wiktor contained and watchful, a man whose love keeps coming out looking like coldness.
Payoff: The mismatch is the engine. You can watch two temperaments fail to occupy one room.
Once you have seen it
Watch the ruined chapel at the start and at the close. (setting)
The film opens there and returns to it. Nothing is staged inside it and nothing is resolved there. It is an emptied place the picture keeps coming back to.
Payoff: The architecture of the film is a return. Whatever they decide, the same ruin is waiting. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls it an any-space-whatever: a place emptied of action until it becomes pure feeling.
Count how many times they reach for each other and fail. (structure)
Each cycle costs more. They cross, defect, marry, return. The state, the border and the pull of home reabsorb every decision either of them manages to make.
Payoff: No act they take resolves anything, so the film slowly turns two people with plans into two people who watch.
Watch Zula's dance to Rock Around the Clock. (performance)
She throws herself into it drunk, in a Paris bar, in front of everybody. Nothing is decided by it. No plan, no escape. A body puts out a despair it cannot fix.
Payoff: The scene exists to be witnessed rather than to move anything. The West arrives as a record on a jukebox.
Listen for music nobody on screen is playing. (sound)
There is almost none. Nearly everything you hear is being performed inside the film: a rehearsal, a stage number, a club, a jukebox. Pawlikowski denies himself the usual emotional underlining.
Payoff: Nothing tells you how to feel. Somebody has to sing it before you are allowed to have it.
Carry this in: Count what you are never shown. Pawlikowski keeps the leavings and the ruptures in the dark between two shots.