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How to watch The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun

2021 · Wes Anderson · The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun 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

1. Watch for the moment a gray shot turns to color. (light)

   Most of the film is monochrome. Then one image, or one patch of it, blooms into color and the story moves on without explaining itself. The rule is never stated. You pick it up by feel.

   Payoff: The story does not change when the color arrives. The print process changes, and color marks what somebody felt rather than reported. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). An image you have to decipher rather than simply take in is what the reading calls a lectosign, a readable image.

2. Notice the frame change shape between and inside the stories. (camera)

   Yeoman shoots dead center, frontal, on axes square to the walls, then whip-pans ninety degrees to the next arrangement. The picture switches between the boxy Academy square and anamorphic widescreen as it goes.

   Payoff: A narrower frame works the way a narrower column works on a page. The same information arrives with a different weight.

3. Watch the camera glide sideways through a building with its wall removed. (staging)

   Stockhausen builds cafes, garrets, prisons, and newsrooms in cutaway, and Anderson tracks laterally past them room by room. Nothing waits in the next room, because the next room is already in the shot.

   Payoff: There is no suspense in the space next door. You get a whole building readable at a glance, like a magazine spread. In the reading: out-of-field-relative. Removing the wall cancels what the reading calls the relative out-of-field, the unseen adjacent space where cinema usually keeps its suspense.

4. Listen for how often someone is reading their own copy aloud. (sound)

   Sazerac lectures while he pedals. Roebuck Wright recounts a kidnapping from a television studio. Every story arrives already written and delivered by its author. Desplat's harpsichord and chamber figures stay under the voices.

   Payoff: The speaking body is almost never the acting body. You watch one thing while hearing a polished sentence about it.

5. Watch how flat the actors deliver strong feeling. (performance)

   Anderson's cast speaks fast and level. Del Toro plays hulking melancholy, Seydoux stays still and watchful, McDormand holds a rueful reserve. Nobody raises a voice to match what is happening to them.

   Payoff: The volume is wrong on purpose. You read these people by posture and diction instead of by what their faces admit.

Once you have seen it

1. Compare what Krementz narrates with what the picture shows. (structure)

   Her chapter is called Revisions to a Manifesto, which tells you what her neutrality is worth. Every narrator here has vanity and blind spots, and the prose is where both of them live.

   Payoff: The distance between an event and the sentence about it is the drama. That gap is how these writers get characterized. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. A voice telling one version while the image shows another is what the reading calls audiovisual disjunction: the two tracks pulled apart.

2. Watch the figures freeze into painted stillness. (staging)

   Anderson stops his actors into tableaux and converts a police chase into flat hand-drawn animation. Each device is the panel a magazine would actually print. Eisenstein used attractions as shocks. These are mounted and labeled.

   Payoff: The film keeps handing you exhibits rather than events. Every trick corresponds to something a printed page can do.

3. Watch the last room, where the writers compose the obituary. (structure)

   Howitzer has died and instructed that the magazine die with him. One final issue, then dissolution. Everything you have just watched is being assembled by people losing the thing that held them together.

   Payoff: The symmetry is not there to be admired. Someone believed that arranging things well was a form of care, and he is being buried.

4. Look at the bylines, cross-heads, and pull-quotes on screen. (setting)

   The magazine is modeled on The New Yorker, with Howitzer built from Harold Ross and William Shawn and the writers drawn from Baldwin, Liebling, Gallant, and Mitchell. The layout furniture is all reproduced.

   Payoff: This is an issue rather than a story. Once you see the apparatus you can read the sequence the way an editor would.

Carry this in: Wait for the color to bloom, and ask what it costs a person to keep that much feeling behind glass.

A Deleuzian reading of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun →

How The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun was received →