Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Fabelmans
2022 · Steven Spielberg · The Fabelmans 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
Notice when the picture's texture changes into Sammy's own footage. (camera)
Janusz Kaminski shoots the family in warm window light and shoots Sammy's reels in a thinner, coarser texture. The film keeps announcing which order of image you are inside.
Payoff: You are never simply looking here. You are watching a boy look, and the image carries that looking inside it. In the reading: dicisign. An image that carries the fact of its own perceiving inside it is what the reading calls a dicisign.
Watch where the light in each scene is coming from. (light)
Kaminski sources light hard from windows and car headlamps, so it blooms and flares at the edges of the frame. Faces are lit by something inside the scene rather than by an invisible crew.
Payoff: Sourced light makes the past look gentle while the scenes inside it stay sharp, so the two never quite agree.
Watch Spielberg's camera glide while the family stays arranged in depth. (staging)
He blocks rooms so the Fabelmans sit at different distances from the lens, then moves the camera through them. Where each person stands, and how far from the others, reports on the marriage.
Payoff: Spielberg puts the family's condition into floor plan and distance, so you can read the trouble long before dialogue names it.
Listen for projectors, shutters and film winding through a camera. (sound)
The mechanical noise of the equipment stays loud and present. Living-room screenings get their own acoustics. John Williams keeps the piano thin so the machines can be heard working.
Payoff: The apparatus is audible throughout, which keeps you aware that somebody is making the pictures you are watching.
Watch Michelle Williams's hands when a room goes quiet. (performance)
Williams plays Mitzi as a trained pianist whose feeling comes out through her body before it reaches her speech. She moves toward warmth and then past it. Paul Dano's Burt watches without moving.
Payoff: The imbalance in the marriage is on screen continuously, so you feel it well before the story gets around to saying it.
Once you have seen it
Watch Sammy run the camping footage back and forth alone. (cutting)
Spielberg gives the disclosure to a machine and lets a fifteen-year-old operate it. Nothing was concealed in those frames. The boy only has to slow them, isolate them and look again in the dark.
Payoff: The footage stops telling him what to do and has to be deciphered instead, and it takes charge of him. In the reading: the readable image (lectosign). Footage that must be read frame by frame rather than acted on is what the reading calls a lectosign.
Watch Mitzi dance in the headlights while everyone else stands still. (staging)
She is lit by a light she did not place, in front of people who can only look. The dance carries her rather than being performed by her.
Payoff: She goes still inside herself while the motion passes through her, and every witness in the scene is reduced to watching. In the reading: movement of world. The dancer held still while the dance moves through her is what the reading calls the movement of the world.
Watch the beach film Sammy cuts of the boy who hurt him. (structure)
Sammy edits the bully into a hero, then has to stand in front of him after the screening. The cutting room remakes a person into an ideal, and the person cannot live inside it.
Payoff: The same instrument that exposed his mother can flatter an enemy, so you see the tool working in both directions.
Look at where the horizon sits in the very last shot. (camera)
David Lynch's John Ford hands Sammy a rule about the horizon line, and the film obeys it on its way out, adjusting the frame itself. The joke is also a lesson in composition.
Payoff: The film closes by showing you what it has done all along: decide what the edges of a picture include.
Carry this in: Watch for the moments when somebody stops doing anything and simply looks. The film is built out of them.