Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch La Commune (Paris, 1871)
2003 · Peter Watkins · La Commune (Paris, 1871) on Sightlines
4 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 both television studios built inside the same building. (staging)
The entire nineteenth-century street and both anachronistic TV studios sit inside one disused factory in Montreuil, so the apparatus of representation is only a few meters from what it represents.
Payoff: Seeing the seams of the set is part of the point; the illusion is offered to you as an illusion.
Watch the camera arrive late to an argument already underway. (camera)
Saether shoots the whole film as live coverage, handheld and mobile, following reporters into crowds and whipping toward interruptions rather than composing a scene in advance.
Payoff: The camera's urgency borrows the grammar of real news, aimed at an event no camera could actually have covered. In the reading: puissances du faux. Deleuze calls a film that uses its own untruth openly, instead of hiding it, the powers of the false.
Notice the same event described two contradictory ways in a row. (cutting)
Watkins cuts between the Versailles anchor desk and the Popincourt street so the same events get two incompatible accounts in adjacent shots, with no third voice arriving to settle it.
Payoff: The film hands the job of deciding what's true to you, where it actually belongs. In the reading: falsifying-narration. Deleuze's falsifying narration lets two accounts stand as equally real; here the adjudication is left where it belongs, with you.
Listen for overlapping, unrehearsed speech instead of any score. (sound)
There is no composed music anywhere in the film; the track is filled by people talking over each other, recorded live in a reverberant shed, the soundscape of a meeting, not a drama.
Payoff: The lack of music strips away the one tool most historical films use to tell you what to feel.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the seams: the mic in frame, the shed's black walls. The illusion is offered as an illusion.