Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Chimes at Midnight
1965 · Orson Welles · Chimes at Midnight 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 film open on two old men walking in snow. (structure)
Falstaff and Shallow cross a wintry field talking about bells they heard long ago, before a single scene of the story proper has begun.
Payoff: You are told before anything happens that what follows is already memory. In the reading: mnemosign / image-souvenir. The reading calls this bracketing device a recollection-image: the whole story that follows gets bent backward into memory before it even starts.
Compare the cluttered tavern shots to the bare court scenes. (light)
Edmond Richard shoots the Boar's Head close and deep-focus among warm bodies, then shoots Henry IV's court as cold geometry, high ceilings, distant figures, shafts of light on stone.
Payoff: The warmth of one world and the cold of the other are facts of the lens, not just the dialogue.
Watch Henry IV shot from below against tall stone walls. (camera)
Gielgud's king is repeatedly filmed from a low angle surrounded by architectural verticals that dwarf him even while he occupies the throne.
Payoff: He has everything the crown can give him and no air to breathe in it. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The reading calls a frame this sealed a closed set: information-dense and total, caging Henry in his own legitimacy.
Listen for voices that feel slightly detached from the bodies speaking. (sound)
Nearly the entire film was post-dubbed, and the slight mismatch between movement and speech gives the whole picture a dreamlike, floating quality.
Payoff: Even the basic sync of image and voice keeps reminding you this is a memory.
Watch Welles play Falstaff's appetite as a form of affection. (performance)
Welles performs Falstaff not as a comic grotesque but as a man of real intelligence whose enormous appetites are inseparable from his enormous capacity to love.
Payoff: The comedy and the tenderness are coming from the exact same place in him.
Once you have seen it
Watch Hal walk past Falstaff without turning his head. (structure)
At the coronation Falstaff presses forward as a small hopeful figure, and the new Henry V passes him in profile without acknowledgment, in an immense echoing exterior space.
Payoff: An entire friendship ends in the smallest possible gesture: a head that simply does not turn. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. The reading calls Falstaff's world a crystal in decomposition: an order too finished to survive, filmed rotting from the inside.
Watch the battle cut into shards that never form a map. (cutting)
Welles fragments the Shrewsbury battle into rapid close-ups, mid-shots, and wide shots that refuse to resolve into any coherent sense of where anyone actually is.
Payoff: You feel the crushing confusion of it instead of understanding the tactics of it.
Watch Falstaff play-act Hal's father in the tavern. (staging)
Falstaff and Hal rehearse the coming interview with the king as a joke, and the joke collapses at its center when Hal, still in character, says he will banish him.
Payoff: The line between playing at rejection and rehearsing the real thing turns out to be very thin.
Carry this in: Watch the tavern's warmth and the court's cold. The film argues its whole point in that difference.