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.
Once you have seen it
Look at the brass fumie and how worn its surface is. (setting)
The plate of Christ that suspects are ordered to step on has been rubbed smooth by other feet. The interrogations are staged around it with fixed distances and translators between two cosmologies.
Payoff: A state has converted belief into a physical act that takes one second, and the object carries the record of everyone who performed it. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls that arrangement a gest: bodies placed so the whole relation between a state and a soul becomes visible.
Listen for where the music ends and the weather begins. (sound)
There is no orchestral score. The Kluges' music is derived from natural sound and blended back into it, so insects, surf, wind, and tone share one layer with no seam to find.
Payoff: Scorsese gives up the curated needle-drop that shapes nearly all his other work and composes the emptiness instead.
Track who is narrating and when the voice changes hands. (structure)
The first half comes from Rodrigues's letters in voiceover. As his certainty erodes the narration loses authority with it, and the last movement belongs to a Dutch trader's commercial ledger.
Payoff: The film pulls you out of the man whose interior life it spent two hours building, at the point you most want to stay.
Watch the last shot move inside the coffin. (camera)
After the cremation the camera goes in and discloses a small crucifix in the dead man's hands. Endo's novel has no equivalent image anywhere in it.
Payoff: Scorsese supplies evidence the book withheld and leaves you to rule on it. That argument has never closed.
Carry this in: Listen to what fills the space a score would occupy. Insects, surf, rain, breathing, and a foot on metal.