Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Executioner
1963 · Luis García Berlanga · The Executioner 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
Notice several people talking over each other in one long take. (staging)
Berlanga stages entire scenes with multiple characters talking across one another inside a single deep-focus shot, without cutting to isolate anyone.
Payoff: No one in these scenes is ever alone with a decision, the crowd is always right there.
Notice how many people stay legible in a single wide shot. (camera)
Tonino Delli Colli shoots in wide, deep-focus compositions that keep many figures visible at once, with the camera reframing and traveling rather than cutting between them.
Payoff: You get to watch everyone's reaction to a decision at the same time it's being made.
Listen for the chatter that keeps drowning out anything serious. (sound)
The soundtrack is built from overlapping, naturalistic family and official babble, noise that functions as an instrument of the film's argument about how ordinary life drowns out conscience.
Payoff: The noise of everyday life is exactly what keeps the moral question from ever getting asked out loud.
Watch how genial and grandfatherly the old executioner seems. (performance)
José Isbert plays Amadeo as a doting, garrulous grandfather worried about his pension, never once as a villain, which is the film's darkest joke.
Payoff: The executioner looks exactly like somebody's kind, worried uncle, which is precisely the point.
Watch José Luis fail to refuse at every single chance. (performance)
Nino Manfredi plays José Luis as sympathetic and fundamentally passive, a man whose tragedy is that he never quite says no to any single step.
Payoff: You stay on his side even as you watch him fail to stop any of it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how the crowd talks over every decision. Nobody in this film is ever alone with a choice.