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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Alvy tells you the story is over in the first minute. Watch whether he understands Annie or composes her.