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.
Once you have seen it
Track what Dunbar is wearing in each stretch of film. (performance)
The uniform goes piece by piece. He takes on Lakota dress and then the bearing that goes with it. Costner plays the change in posture rather than announcing it in the journal.
Payoff: You read his allegiance off his spine. Nobody ever has to say out loud that he has changed sides. In the reading: empreinte. The reading calls this an imprint: the mark a way of life leaves in a man, and the mark he leaves back in it.
Watch the buffalo hunt widen and then tighten. (cutting)
Neil Travis fuses a real stampeding herd, mounted riders and fabricated contact shots into one continuous motion. The sequence opens onto the whole plain, then narrows to one rider beside one animal.
Payoff: The scene was assembled in the cutting room, and it is the clearest proof the old action grammar still works.
Count how long Dunbar is alone before the Lakota arrive. (structure)
He repairs the post, feeds a wolf, writes in his journal and waits. There is no enemy and no order to follow. The film hands its hero nothing to act on for a long stretch.
Payoff: A Western sets down its own engine and lets a man just look, and the journal is him reading his situation.
Listen to how often John Barry's score swells. (sound)
Barry, who scored the Bond films and Out of Africa, writes big romantic symphonic cues and repeats them across three hours. The music never turns ironic and never withholds.
Payoff: The score commits to romance without hedging, and that unhedged sincerity is the film's whole register.
Carry this in: Watch the proportions. One man under all that sky, and the question of which world is calling him.