Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The War of the Worlds
1953 · Byron Haskin · The War of the Worlds 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
Watch the shots where the machine is out of frame. (camera)
Barnes and Haskin alternate two setups. A low wide angle with the craft above and people small along the bottom, then an eye-level view where the machine is gone and you get only light on faces and what people do next.
Payoff: Half the invasion is delivered by reaction alone, which is why it plays far bigger than the budget that paid for it. In the reading: index-of-lack. The reading calls that second shot an index of lack: a reaction that discloses a situation the film is not showing you.
Look at the colors that arrive with the machines. (light)
The human world is tan, khaki, asphalt gray. The invaders come in saturated: green-white beam, orange bloom, the sick green of the shields. Science fiction in 1953 was a black-and-white genre and this was shot in Technicolor.
Payoff: Color separates two orders of being. You can tell what belongs to Earth by how drab it is. In the reading: affective colour. The reading calls this affective colour: color absorbing the scene and its feeling rather than describing an object in it.
Listen to the heat ray's pulse and the machines' rising hum. (sound)
Paramount's sound department built these out of manipulated recordings, and they do more than the images to make the Martians unreadable. Leith Stevens keeps the brass score out of the way during the set pieces.
Payoff: The aliens are established as unknowable through sound. Nothing you hear from them resembles anything you can place.
Count the institutions that try and fail, one by one. (structure)
Curious townspeople, then police, then the National Guard, then the Army, then the Air Force. Each rung gets its own scene of preparation and its own scene of failure, in that order, without variation.
Payoff: The suspense is not whether the response will work. It is watching capable people run out of things they know how to do.
Watch the square dance and the town meeting scenes. (staging)
Before anything happens the film spends real time on ordinary American routine: a dance, a meeting, a church, a lab at Pacific Tech. Nothing about these scenes is heightened or strange.
Payoff: The film establishes exactly how ordinary the thing being dismantled is, so the scale of the machines has something to measure against.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the reaction shots. Notice who is looking, and through what piece of glass they are looking.