Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Papillon
1973 · Franklin J. Schaffner · Papillon 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 how the film lights the cells against the outdoors. (light)
Koenekamp shoots the colony in hard tropical sun with long horizons. Then he drops the solitary block into near-total darkness where a shaft of light or the grille that food arrives through becomes the only event in the frame.
Payoff: Freedom is coded as light and distance and punishment as blackness and stone, so you can read a man's situation from the exposure.
Watch McQueen's posture and weight rather than his dialogue. (performance)
He carries long stretches with almost nothing to say, and plays the years through stance, gauntness and a draining vitality. Hoffman works the opposite way, all detail, stooped walk and thick spectacles and fastidious calculation.
Payoff: Two acting methods carry the friendship, so the bond is built in bodies and never explained in a speech.
Notice how the film marks months and years going by. (cutting)
Swink cuts for accumulation rather than pace. Ellipses jump across long stretches, and then the film slows to sit with the physical cost of what was skipped. The escape sequences stay classically clear.
Payoff: Time is the antagonist here, and the editing makes you feel attrition instead of telling you how long it has been.
Listen to what you can hear inside the solitary block. (sound)
Outside there is constant clamor, labor, surf, insects, machinery. Inside there is almost nothing. Goldsmith's waltz theme arrives against that quiet as the one lyrical thing in the film.
Payoff: Silence works as a punishment you can hear, and the melody keeps returning as a reminder of what the images will not give.
Count the different enclosures the film moves him through. (staging)
Transport ship, labor gang, infirmary, isolation block, leper colony, island. Schaffner builds the film as a series of containers to be tested, and blocks Papillon alone in the frame even when men surround him.
Payoff: The structure is architectural. Each new place is another wall, and his separateness inside a crowd is the shape of his resistance.
Once you have seen it
Look for the butterfly on his chest and in the dream images. (setting)
The tattoo gives him his name and the film keeps returning the emblem in imagery otherwise committed to rust, sweat and rot. It is the one decorative element in a picture built on texture and grind.
Payoff: A fragile flying thing is planted on a body the state is trying to wear out, and the film lets the contrast stand.
Watch the dream trial and listen to the charge he faces. (structure)
He is not accused of the murder he denies. He is accused of a wasted life, and he does not contest it. The film has spent two hours establishing that this is the only verdict he cares about.
Payoff: The scene states what the story is actually about, which is whether the years can be taken from him rather than whether he was guilty.
Notice how often water or jungle closes off the frame. (camera)
Koenekamp stages escape and pursuit so the environment dwarfs the men. River, surf, canopy, horizon. The ocean is photographed as both the way out and the wall, and the widescreen keeps it in view.
Payoff: Nature does the guarding in this film, which is why the escapes read as arguments with a landscape rather than with men.
Watch the commandant who addresses the convicts when they arrive. (performance)
That is Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten and a co-writer of the screenplay, playing the official who tells a shipload of men that France has disposed of them.
Payoff: A man the state once punished delivers the state's speech, which gives the film's view of institutions a signature in the frame.
Carry this in: Watch the light. Schaffner gives freedom distance and daylight, and gives punishment darkness and stone.