Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Dances with Wolves
1990 · Kevin Costner · Dances with Wolves 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 Dunbar does on the horse in the opening. (structure)
He spreads his arms and trots the open ground between two armies, offering himself to every rifle. Every shot misses. The men behind him read it as a charge and follow him.
Payoff: One action means two incompatible things at once, and he keeps arriving at meanings he did not intend. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. The reading calls this an index of equivocity: a single gesture that belongs to two incompatible situations at the same time.
Look at how much sky and grass fit around one man. (camera)
Dean Semler frames Dunbar tiny against the Dakota horizon, and the prairie always continues past the edge of the shot. The grammar comes straight out of John Ford.
Payoff: The landscape is not scenery. It is the thing pressing on him, and the film keeps saying so with proportion. In the reading: the encompasser. The reading calls this the encompasser: a situation so large it calls a man out of the ground rather than waiting on him.
Notice the dust hanging in the low golden light. (light)
Semler keys almost everything to late sun on the plains, warm and thick with dust. Even the night scenes are firelit and amber. The palette barely changes across three hours.
Payoff: The film bathes a world in farewell light from the first reel, so the mourning starts before the losses do.
Listen to the Lakota and read the subtitles. (sound)
The Native characters speak their own language at length, coached by Doris Leader Charge, and you get English at the bottom of the frame. Dunbar learns it slowly and so do you.
Payoff: You are put in the position of a learner, which is what stops these people from being a faceless enemy.
Compare Fort Sedgwick with the Lakota camp. (staging)
The army's places are squalid and strewn with refuse, manned by men falling apart. The camp is staged as a working society: lodge interiors, communal fires, a daily order that holds.
Payoff: The genre's usual moral coordinates are simply swapped, and the production design does most of the swapping.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the proportions. One man under all that sky, and the question of which world is calling him.