Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Weekend
1967 · Jean-Luc Godard · Weekend 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 the camera glide sideways past the jam without cutting. (camera)
For nearly eight minutes the camera tracks laterally past stalled cars, picnickers, and wreckage at one even, unbroken speed, refusing the relief of a cut no matter what comes into frame.
Payoff: The refusal to cut is the point. Nothing anyone does changes what happens next. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: seeing no longer leads anywhere, so continuity itself goes numb.
Watch for blunt capital-letter cards interrupting the story. (cutting)
Guillemot breaks the film with full-screen intertitles in blunt capitals that comment on and dispute the scene's own chronology, splitting continuity apart.
Payoff: The screen stops showing and starts asking to be read instead. In the reading: the readable image. Deleuze calls this a lectosign, an image that has to be read rather than simply watched.
Listen for dialogue buried under noise, static, or overlap. (sound)
Sound design frequently buries or overlaps dialogue with ambient din, and music enters and cuts off abruptly rather than smoothing scenes.
Payoff: The soundtrack keeps reminding you that you are watching something built, not something overheard.
Watch strangers stop the story to speak straight at the lens. (staging)
Characters like the two refuse collectors lean on their truck and deliver long monologues straight at the camera about colonialism and class while the couple sulks nearby.
Payoff: Action gives way to people just talking, turning the screen briefly into a lectern.
Watch how little feeling crosses Corinne and Roland's faces. (performance)
Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne play Corinne and Roland as flatly venal, affectless bourgeois, performances pitched deliberately against sympathy or emotional depth.
Payoff: Their blankness keeps you from rooting for either one, and that distance is deliberate.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the long traffic-jam shot straight through. Nothing you see in it changes what happens next.