Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Annie Hall
1977 · Woody Allen · Annie Hall 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 Allen talk straight to you before anything starts. (structure)
Alvy stands against a blank wall, tells two jokes, and says the affair is already over. He keeps turning back to the camera through the rest of the film to explain himself.
Payoff: The story is finished before it begins. What you watch is a man sorting through it, not living it.
Watch the subtitles during the conversation on the terrace. (staging)
Alvy and Annie make brittle small talk about photography while printed text shows what each of them is actually thinking. Two channels run at once and they do not match anywhere.
Payoff: The gap between what people say and what they mean is put on screen literally, and it is both the joke and the ache. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: the words and the image telling two different stories at the same moment.
Notice how long a scene runs without cutting. (camera)
Gordon Willis holds full-figure two-shots and lets the actors wander out of frame or speak from an empty doorway. There is very little shot-reverse-shot in the film at all.
Payoff: The bodies have to carry the awkwardness in real time, which is why the nervousness reads as real.
Look at what Annie wears: vest, necktie, baggy trousers. (setting)
The wardrobe is credited to Ruth Morley but came largely from Keaton's own closet. The clothes are mannish and layered, nothing like what a romantic lead was dressed in at the time.
Payoff: The costume gives Annie a self that predates Alvy's account of her, and it outlived the film entirely.
Watch Alvy pull McLuhan out from behind a poster. (staging)
Stuck in a cinema line behind a man holding forth, Alvy simply produces Marshall McLuhan to correct him. No cut announces that this is imaginary. The film just does it.
Payoff: The picture stops pretending to record and starts supplying what only a picture could supply. In the reading: crystalline description. The reading calls this a crystalline description: an image that conjures its object rather than reporting one that was there.
Once you have seen it
Watch adult Alvy walk into his own childhood classroom. (structure)
He does not observe a flashback from outside it. He stands among the seated children and argues with the teacher. The same thing happens at the family table and out on the old street.
Payoff: The past is a place he can walk around inside, and he visits it in whatever order the grief assigns. In the reading: sheets of past. The reading calls these sheets of past: whole regions of the past kept intact and moved through, rather than slotted into a timeline.
Track how the film moves between times without warning. (cutting)
Allen and Ralph Rosenblum found this film in the cutting room, pulling a love story out of a sprawling assembly about a man's mind. The order is emotional, not chronological.
Payoff: The form was built after the fact, by feeling, which is exactly how Alvy builds his account of Annie.
Listen to Annie sing early on and then later. (sound)
There is no orchestral score, only standards and source music. She starts timid and half-drowned by the room. By the second song she is poised and everyone is listening.
Payoff: The singing charts her growth on its own, with no dialogue needed to announce that she is changing.
Listen to Keaton's pauses and where her sentences break. (performance)
Annie starts a thought, abandons it, laughs at herself, tries again. The halting delivery is the character, and it steadies as the film goes on. Allen keeps his own patter fast and defended.
Payoff: You can hear confidence arriving in her speech, and you can hear that Alvy's never changes at all.
Carry this in: Alvy tells you the story is over in the first minute. Watch whether he understands Annie or composes her.