Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
2009 · David Yates · Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 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
Look at how little color is left in Hogwarts. (light)
Bruno Delbonnel works in slate gray, cold blue and a green like water left standing too long. Interiors get lit as though from a single candle, and figures go black against blown-out skies.
Payoff: The feeling sits in the air of the room rather than on anybody's face. In the reading: affective colour (colour-image). Color that stops describing a scene and starts absorbing it is what the reading calls the colour-image.
Watch where Harry stands inside the recovered memories. (structure)
He and Dumbledore walk around in the past, choose where to stand, leave, come back, and set one visit against another. Nobody in those rooms can see them or react to them.
Payoff: The past here is a place you move through, not a clip that plays and hands you a fact. In the reading: sheets of past / order of time. The reading calls these sheets of past: coexisting regions of time you walk through instead of a flashback slotted in.
Count how often a joke sits right beside a threat. (cutting)
Mark Day cuts between love potions, Ron and Lavender, Hermione's jealousy, and Quidditch practice. The registers alternate rather than build toward each other.
Payoff: The comedy is not relief from the dread. It is the same school year, seen from inside.
Watch Slughorn's face when a conversation turns personal. (performance)
Jim Broadbent plays vanity and social discomfort in a man who hates being asked questions. Tom Felton plays Draco with restraint, letting strain register in how he moves.
Payoff: The supporting parts carry the film's weight while the leads handle most of the comedy.
Notice how empty the castle looks this year. (staging)
Stuart Craig's Hogwarts has gone cold and underpopulated. The film opens with an attack on a Muggle bridge and later brings the war into the Weasleys' house, while the school's routines carry on.
Payoff: The institution keeps its manners while it comes apart, and the design shows you both at once. In the reading: crystal in decomposition. An ordered world with its surface intact and its inside going is what the reading calls a crystal in decomposition.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where the camera puts Harry. Beside people, behind them, standing in the corner of someone else's memory.
A Deleuzian reading of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince →