WITNESS: power in small moments

Peter Weir is a master, and Witness demonstrates that as well as any of his films: every technique perfectly calibrated for its artistic and emotional hefts, from the use of colour and camera movement in this (fully clothed, insanely hot) barn scene to the jump cut in this phone conversation.

Seeing it after quite a while, my first time on a big screen, was striking. It had never occurred to me read Book and Sarah’s coming together in the field as a fantasy fulfilment, but the thought was a delicious jolt in the theatre: this scene feels so different from everything else! A film otherwise so deliberate in its pacing smash cuts into their passion, a restraint of weeks broken with no more foresignal than a closeup of Sarah laying her head covering aside . . . it’s so perfect they can’t believe they’re not dreaming.

Witness knows how intimate and powerful small things are. It understands how every day, touches and looks affect us far beyond the proportion of their literal impact, and conveys them beautifully.

Hands

Weir knows the bruising strength and soft nurturing and raw sexual potential of hands.

He takes great pains to show them making birdhouses, canning vegetables, fixing cars, touching in a dance or a goodbye.

And if you think the barn-building / quilt-sewing / meal-prepping / luncheon scene isn’t several smaller euphemisms dressed up in a trenchcoat and making one larger euphemism . . .

I don’t know how to help you.

Breasts

Breasts are wonderful, funny, beautiful, strangely categorised things.

Even as I now don’t consider anyone’s breasts ‘nudity’, they can still feel as such. A whirl of things including social conditioning and a scarcity of occasions certainly add to the implications of a woman’s bare chest as nudity. In terms of situations real and celluloid (which is of course its own reality), how and when breasts are depicted can make seeing them — like certain depictions of hands, necks, tongues, the inside of a thigh — as charged and electric as something much more explicit.

Anyways, nudity is not irrelevant, but certainly not required, for eroticism and sexuality. Breasts don’t have to be nudity to be exciting, sensual, thrilling.

That’s a lot of table-setting and disclaimers to introduce the fact my first ‘movie nudity’ was Witness.

It blew Young Me’s mind, and still looms large in my memory.

Eyes

Witness also knows the power of a gaze.

The film’s name is neon signpost to this film’s understanding and employment of the power of a gaze; how Weir’s camera looks at Ford; how it hurts to be stared at like a sideshow or an Other; how seeing one event can change the course of not only your life but all those around you.

It culminates in the naked ways Sarah and Book look — first in the mirror, then directly — and avert their eyes in this scene.

This wordless scene is loaded, full of the power of Sarah’s stare, of Book lowering his gaze and indeed his whole head. She stays looking at him, waiting, until he can bring himself to look up again, and only then does she turn away.

What struck me the first time was how Sarah presented herself: look at me.

I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

What strikes me now is Sarah knowing herself enough to hold Book’s gaze with both her body and her eyes.

acknowledge we are different, but equals. show me you understand the way you stopped to stare undercut that. but accept how I’m willingly giving you what you want. then tell me, again, you know what we both want.

She stares him in the eyes until he can’t any more

Everything conveyed with nothing spoken.

All in the body: hands, breasts, eyes.

Witnessing each other.