Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Faces
1968 · John Cassavetes · Faces on Sightlines
5 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
Watch a face held in close-up after the joke ends. (camera)
Al Ruban's camera presses in close on pores and sweat and holds there well past the point of comfort, refusing to cut away to something easier to look at.
Payoff: You are given time to watch a feeling arrive on a face before anyone decides what to do about it. In the reading: affection-image. The reading calls this an affection-image: a face lifted out of the moment to hold a feeling that has not yet become an act.
Watch someone laugh a beat too long at nothing. (performance)
Characters keep laughing harder and longer than any joke actually earns, a performed good time that the camera stays on until the laugh stops working.
Payoff: The laughter is not relief here, it is the sound of people working hard not to feel something. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a forced posture of sociability that exposes what a character cannot say out loud.
Listen for how often people talk over each other. (sound)
Dialogue tumbles and overlaps constantly, jokes and sales-patter filling the air, as if noise itself is being used to keep any real feeling from getting a word in.
Payoff: How much someone talks turns out to measure how much they are trying not to say.
Track the film cutting between Richard's night and Maria's. (cutting)
The editing keeps returning between Richard's evening with Jeannie and Maria's evening with her friends, cross-cutting two separate escapes from the same collapsing marriage.
Payoff: Two different nights start to rhyme as the same loneliness playing out in two separate rooms.
Notice how ordinary and lived-in every room looks. (setting)
Much of the film is shot in Cassavetes' actual home, bodies crowding real sofas and doorways rather than composed sets, collapsing the distance between performance and life.
Payoff: The ordinariness of the rooms makes the extraordinary breakdown happening inside them harder to look away from.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch a face after it stops performing; the film's real subject is what happens right after the laugh curdles.