Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind
1977 · Steven Spielberg · Close Encounters of the Third Kind 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 light pour down on Roy's truck from above, not headlights. (light)
Zsigmond backlights the encounters with diffusion and lens flare so they read as artifacts a camera barely holds, not staged spectacle.
Payoff: This dazzles you before you understand what is happening, turning a plot event into a felt sensation.
Notice Roy's hands compulsively sculpting the same shape everywhere. (performance)
Dreyfuss pushes mashed potatoes into a mountain, smears shaving cream, hauls dirt through a window, each time chasing a form he cannot name.
Payoff: This is not eccentricity; it is a mind clawing to give shape to something it received but cannot yet read. In the reading: symptom. Deleuze calls this a symptom: an act that betrays a drive the person carrying it out cannot yet translate into words.
Notice Barry Guiler kept low in frame, looking up. (performance)
Spielberg repeatedly frames the child lower than adults, lit from the front, face steady and unafraid toward the light.
Payoff: Most alien-contact films frame that gaze as terror; here the same gaze reads as pure recognition. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). Barry's untroubled upward face is the film's qualisign, a close-up standing for one quality, wonder, with nothing else in it.
Listen for the five-tone phrase returning through the film. (sound)
The same five notes appear as a lesson and as a code, returning in different places and voices.
Payoff: The motif is not just score. Notice who is listening each time it plays.
Notice how crowded and overlapping the Neary living room looks. (staging)
Spielberg stacks children, television, and argument into the same frame at home, before the film opens into wide empty landscapes and sky.
Payoff: The cramped domestic frame makes the later openness feel like release, not just a change of location.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch every face that tilts upward toward light throughout the film.