Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Wizard of Oz
1939 · Victor Fleming · The Wizard of Oz 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 the doorway when Dorothy opens it. (light)
Kansas is sepia, flat and naturalistic. The camera holds while she steps through, and three-strip Technicolor floods in with sets, costumes and lighting all coordinated for maximum color.
Payoff: You are not told that Oz is magical. The saturation hits your eye, and that sensation is the magic. In the reading: affective color (color-image). The reading calls this affective color: color that does not tint a place but is the place and its feeling.
Notice how each costume tells you a character instantly. (setting)
Adrian's costumes and the makeup give the Scarecrow his slump, the Tin Man his funnel, the Lion his nervous mane. Every silhouette and palette reads as a type at one glance.
Payoff: These four became cultural shorthand because they were built to be legible in a single look.
Look at how frankly painted and built Oz is. (staging)
MGM's art department stages Oz as discrete tableaux: the spiraling road, the green glow of the Emerald City, the poppy field, the witch's gothic castle. None of it pretends to be a location.
Payoff: The film embraces its own construction, which is how it reads as a fable instead of a place.
Listen for the song tunes returning under the dialogue. (sound)
Herbert Stothart threads Arlen and Harburg's melodies through the underscore, so the songs keep sounding when nobody is singing. Each number states one character's wish outright.
Payoff: The music binds an episodic journey together, which is why the film never plays as a string of stops.
Watch Dorothy at the window while the tornado passes. (camera)
She holds still at the spinning window and the world streams past her: the barn, the cow, Miss Gulch on her bicycle turning into a witch on a broom.
Payoff: The movement belongs to the world rather than to the girl, and the film keeps working this way. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the person goes still while the world takes over the moving.
Once you have seen it
Watch which Kansas faces come back in Oz. (structure)
The farmhands return as Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion, Miss Gulch as the Witch, a traveling humbug as the Wizard. The dream frame is the film's invention and not Baum's.
Payoff: Everything in Oz is assembled out of what she already had, which is what makes the return home mean something. In the reading: dream-image (onirosign). The reading calls Oz an onirosign, a dream-image: a circuit of fantasy attached to no dated memory at all.
Watch Garland stay still while everyone around her exaggerates. (performance)
Bolger, Haley and Lahr bring vaudeville and music-hall bigness, and Margaret Hamilton plays the Witch in sharp angles. Garland keeps Dorothy plain and sincere at the center of it.
Payoff: The film needs one person to be believable, and it puts that entire job on her.
Notice how smoothly footage from different directors fits together. (cutting)
Thorpe, Cukor, Vidor and Fleming all shot parts of this picture, and Blanche Sewell's editing knits them into one voice. The style was assembled in post as much as on set.
Payoff: What looks like a single vision is a studio's departments delivering continuity by system.
Look at the machinery behind the Wizard's giant face. (staging)
The great head is smoke, amplification and projection worked by a small frightened man. He then hands out a diploma, a medal and a ticking heart in its place.
Payoff: The props are fake and the brain, courage and love they confer still work on the people who get them.
Carry this in: Watch the color do the storytelling. Kansas is the color of an old photograph and Oz is the color of a wish.