Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch To Kill a Mockingbird
1962 · Robert Mulligan · To Kill a Mockingbird on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 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
Notice how high the adults look in almost every shot. (camera)
Harlan puts the lens about four feet off the ground, at Scout's height, and keeps it there. Atticus reads as a tower. The courthouse steps read as a monument. Grown men lean into the frame from above.
Payoff: You are not watching a child, you are watching from where a child stands. The film's lesson about other people's points of view is built into the camera. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign, a camera perceiving someone in the act of perceiving. You feel the lens kneeling.
Listen for a single piano picking out the opening notes. (sound)
Bernstein builds the main tune around what sounds like a child's hand finding one note at a time. He then keeps the score almost entirely out of the courtroom and saves it for the summer games and the night scenes.
Payoff: The music belongs to how a child half-understands things. Where the film gets serious, Bernstein steps back and lets the words carry it.
Watch how slowly Peck moves and how long he listens. (performance)
Peck plays Atticus with almost no actorly display. He folds his glasses on, he takes his time answering, he stands still when someone insults him. The decency arrives as ordinary daily habit rather than as speeches.
Payoff: Peck refuses to signal virtue. The character reads as steady because the actor never asks you to admire him.
Look at the difference between the daytime and the Radley nights. (light)
Harlan lights the daytime scenes warm and diffused, so Maycomb looks remembered rather than observed. The nights go low-key, with deep blacks and hard edges around the Radley place and the back of the courthouse.
Payoff: Two kinds of black and white in one film. One belongs to a summer nobody wants to leave, the other to a Gothic story the children tell each other.
Listen for the grown woman's voice telling you all of this. (structure)
Kim Stanley narrates as the adult Scout, and the film opens on a child's keepsake box. Everything you see has already happened and has been turned over for years by the person describing it.
Payoff: The gap between the child living it and the adult naming it is the film's engine. You watch someone learn what she could not yet understand. In the reading: mnemosign / image-souvenir. The reading calls the whole film a recollection-image, a past present recovered through remembering rather than lived again as action.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Notice the height of the camera. Mulligan keeps you at four feet, seeing Maycomb the way a child looks up at it.