Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Singin' in the Rain
1952 · Stanley Donen · Singin' in the Rain 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
Count how few cuts a dance number actually gets. (cutting)
Adrienne Fazan places cuts at musical and choreographic joints and otherwise leaves the take running. Bodies stay in frame from head to feet. Nothing is faked by assembly.
Payoff: You are watching what the dancers really did, in one space, in real time. The difficulty stays visible, which is where the pleasure comes from.
Watch how little ground Kelly covers during the title number. (performance)
He folds the umbrella, hooks a lamppost, stamps in a gutter, tips his face into the downpour. He barely travels. The rain, the awnings, and the whole soaked street supply the motion.
Payoff: Nothing is being accomplished for three minutes. The plot sets itself down and lets a man be carried by weather. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the dancer goes quiet at the center while the world around him does the moving.
Listen to what the hidden microphone picks up on set. (sound)
The 1927 sequences turn recording into the joke. A mic buried in a bush catches every rustle and heartbeat, and a reel slips out of sync until the words land on the wrong mouths.
Payoff: A 1952 talkie is laughing at the birth of talkies. The film keeps showing you the machinery it is made of. In the reading: hyalosign (the crystal-image). The reading calls this a crystal: cinema filming its own reflection until the thing and the image of it cannot be pulled apart.
Look at what ordinary object each number turns into equipment. (setting)
An umbrella, a couch, a plank wall, a curb, the rooms of a house. Kelly choreographs for whatever the set already contains and uses the depth and width of the frame as part of the routine.
Payoff: The numbers happen in a world you could walk through. That solidity is what keeps them funny rather than abstract.
Look at how the rain catches light on the night street. (light)
Rosson had to make individual droplets and splashes read against a dark backlot street without losing the figure in it. The rest of the film runs bright and high-key so every color and body stays legible in motion.
Payoff: The clarity is a technical decision, not a given. You can see the water and the man at once, which is the entire shot.
Once you have seen it
Track whose voice comes out of whose mouth. (sound)
Kathy dubs Lina inside the story. In production Reynolds was herself dubbed in places, reportedly by Hagen, the actress playing the fraud. The curtain rises on a moral about borrowed voices while the soundtrack is borrowing.
Payoff: The film exposes a stolen voice with a soundtrack full of them. Watch for how often body and sound are quietly mismatched. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: a voice pulled loose from the body you see, then handed to a different one.
Listen to how precisely Hagen controls that terrible voice. (performance)
Lina's squawk never slips and never varies more than the joke needs. Hagen calibrates vanity and stupidity so exactly that the character stays funny for a whole film without becoming noise.
Payoff: The least authentic person on screen is the most technically controlled performance in the film. That irony is the picture in miniature.
Watch what O'Connor uses the soundstage walls for. (staging)
Make 'Em Laugh turns a working set into an obstacle course. He runs up flats, takes real falls, and commits fully to every collision, and the camera keeps him whole in the frame throughout.
Payoff: The gag is the physical risk, uncut. Everything funny in the number depends on you being able to see there is no trick.
Time how long the Broadway Melody ballet halts the story. (structure)
Charisse, an enormous scarf, and abstract color arrive, and the plot stops entirely. Nothing in the number advances Don's problem or the romance. It is display for its own sake.
Payoff: The film pauses to be pure showmanship. Whether that reads as the peak or the detour is the argument people have been having since 1952.
Carry this in: Watch the numbers whole. Kelly built them so the camera stands back and lets the bodies do the work.