Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Lord of the Flies
1963 · Peter Brook · Lord of the Flies 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
Notice how blown-out and bright the sky often looks. (light)
Tom Hollyman shoots in hard, uncorrected tropical light with blown skies and sudden flare, compositions grabbed rather than carefully built.
Payoff: The roughness reads as reportage, like the camera caught this rather than staged it.
Listen for how the boys' voices sit apart from their mouths. (sound)
Nearly all the dialogue was re-recorded afterward, so the voices carry none of the room tone or ambience of the spaces they occupy.
Payoff: The sound never quite fuses with the image, which keeps the whole film faintly unreal. In the reading: audiovisual-disjunction. Deleuze calls this audiovisual disjunction: two tracks that decline to fuse into one settled world.
Notice how few props this film actually uses. (staging)
Brook stages on bare ground with almost no set, letting a handful of objects, the conch, the spectacles, do nearly all the scenography.
Payoff: Every object you see is doing real narrative work, not just filling the frame.
Listen for the choir singing over the opening images. (sound)
Raymond Leppard's score opens with sacred boy-choir music laid over images of the English institutions that made these boys.
Payoff: The music sets a tone of innocence and order before anything on the island has gone wrong.
Watch how unrehearsed the boys' group behavior looks. (performance)
Brook built situations and photographed the boys' actual hierarchy, exclusion, and pleasure rather than directing conventional performances.
Payoff: What you're watching often looks like real children being children, not actors playing a script.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the props, not the boys. The conch and the spectacles are the whole government.