Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Silence
2016 · Martin Scorsese · Silence 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
Listen to the cicadas at the very start, then to the cut. (sound)
The film opens on black under a wall of insect noise. It does not fade out. It stops dead, and the title appears in the hole the sound leaves.
Payoff: Your ears keep reaching for something that does not come back. The whole subject gets performed before the first image.
Watch for the high shot looking straight down at the suffering. (camera)
Scorsese keeps placing the camera above the action, surveying without intervening. The vantage returns through torture, capture, and burial. Nothing in the film says whose it is.
Payoff: A divine point of view gets built out of a camera position, and then it is refused any answer. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls God here the absolute out-of-field: something the frame keeps implying that no camera move could reach.
Watch how often mist, steam, rain, or smoke fills the frame. (light)
Prieto works from available light through fog and rain, with interiors lit by fire and oil lamp. Something hangs between you and nearly every wide shot.
Payoff: The weather is the title made visible. You keep looking through something at people who are getting no reply.
Watch where Rodrigues is standing when villagers are punished. (staging)
The staging keeps putting the priest off to one side, hidden in undergrowth or seated apart at an interrogation. He watches people suffer for a faith he carried to them.
Payoff: His crisis is arranged as a problem of watching, and the blocking puts you in exactly his position.
Count how long a shot stays after the action inside it ends. (cutting)
Schoonmaker, who cut the whip-pans and pop-song montages of Goodfellas, holds shots here past comfort and lets scenes finish in stillness instead of on a cut driven by tempo.
Payoff: Nothing hurries you to the next thing. Time is left sitting in the shot and you have to stay in it. In the reading: temps mort. The reading calls those stretches dead time: passages that advance nothing and keep the unbearable in front of you.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Listen to what fills the space a score would occupy. Insects, surf, rain, breathing, and a foot on metal.