Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Prospero's Books
1991 · Peter Greenaway · Prospero's Books on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 2 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 Gielgud's voice speaking lines for other characters. (sound)
For most of the film Prospero speaks not only his own words but everyone else's too, while the other actors move their mouths around lines that originate in his voice.
Payoff: Every character on screen looks like a figure being written into existence rather than a person speaking for themselves. In the reading: speech act (legending voice). Deleuze calls a single voice that founds a fiction like this a speech act, a legending voice speaking the world into being.
Watch images stack, dissolve, and open like turning pages. (camera)
Greenaway composites framed images inside other images, so that a single shot can hold several inset windows and layers moving at once, rather than cutting between them.
Payoff: You watch the film think in layers instead of in sequence, which trains your eye to read a frame instead of just follow one. In the reading: the lectosign (readable image). Deleuze calls an image this loaded with text and layers a lectosign, a picture that asks to be read rather than simply seen.
Notice how many nude figures are arranged like Renaissance paintings. (setting)
Courtiers, nymphs, and putti fill the frame in poses that recall specific canvases, a teeming human frieze rather than an ordinary crowd of extras.
Payoff: The bodies are staged as art objects first, which tells you the film cares more about the picture than about the plot.
Listen for Nyman's driving, repetitive score under the imagery. (sound)
The minimalist, propulsive music keeps a forward pulse moving under images dense enough that they might otherwise stall.
Payoff: The score is doing the work of momentum that plot normally would, pushing you through pictures that could easily just sit still.
Watch handwritten calligraphy bloom and shimmer across the frame. (setting)
Text appears live inside the image, ink gathering into letters before the thing it names, a storm or a ship, actually appears on screen.
Payoff: The word arrives before the world does, so watching becomes an act of reading as much as of seeing.
Once you have seen it
Track the moment other characters start speaking in their own voices. (structure)
Only as Prospero approaches forgiveness do the other players finally speak for themselves, a release that arrives exactly as the author lets go of his control.
Payoff: The moment his voice stops speaking everyone else's is the moment the story actually starts to feel free. In the reading: the cracked crystal. Deleuze looks for the crack in a sealed world like this, the cracked crystal where the island's projection finally lets something escape it.
Watch the twenty-four books narrow down to two at the close. (structure)
The encyclopedic catalog that opened the film collapses into a book of Shakespeare's plays and the manuscript of the very play we have been watching, folding the film into its own source.
Payoff: The ending reveals the whole film as the object it was always building toward, a book closing on itself.
Carry this in: Watch whose mouth moves and whose voice you actually hear. They are rarely the same person.