Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Extraordinary Stories
2008 · Mariano Llinás · Extraordinary Stories 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
Listen for the voice describing danger while the image shows something ordinary. (sound)
The narration knows the plot in full while the camera holds on a man eating in a hotel room or someone walking across a field.
Payoff: Sound and image never illustrate each other here; each runs as its own complete track. In the reading: heautonomy. Deleuze calls this heautonomy: sound and image become self-standing wholes that only communicate across the gap between them.
Notice how the flat horizon line dominates every frame. (camera)
Mendilaharzu frames the flat Buenos Aires province so the horizon becomes the main graphic element, with people reduced to small punctuation within it.
Payoff: The land itself becomes the film's real subject, more than any of the three men crossing it.
Watch actors perform ordinary tasks in real, unmodified rooms. (staging)
The three men wait, walk, read, and drive in actual hotel rooms and offices, never given a shaped, dialogue-heavy scene to perform.
Payoff: With the sound turned off, this would look like a documentary, not an adventure story.
Track how the film leaves each story right at its peak. (cutting)
The film cross-cuts between the three men not to build suspense but to keep supply going, abandoning a strand exactly when your appetite for it is strongest.
Payoff: You are kept perpetually inside a story and never let arrive at the end of one. In the reading: condemnation-of-the-plot. Deleuze calls this the condemnation of the plot: a story kept alive as pure fuel, never allowed to resolve.
Listen for the narrator admitting uncertainty or ignorance. (sound)
More than one voice tells the story in a nineteenth-century, storytelling register, comfortable saying meanwhile, confessing it does not know what a character is thinking.
Payoff: This is not failure to know the story. The narrator may be inventing it as he speaks. In the reading: puissances du faux. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false: not lying, but making true and false undecidable to create something new.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the moments the picture seems to know something the narrator hasn't mentioned yet.