Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Mission
1986 · Roland Joffé · The Mission 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
Look at how small people are against the falls. (camera)
Menges shoots Iguazu as a force rather than a location. Figures climb, wade, and stand at the edge of it, and the water keeps taking up most of the frame and most of the soundtrack.
Payoff: The landscape is not scenery behind the story. It sets the scale everyone is measured against, and it produces the actions people take. In the reading: the encompasser. The reading calls the falls an encompasser: a milieu so total that it seems to summon the action out of the people inside it.
Watch Mendoza drag the net of armor up the cliff. (staging)
He asked for a penance equal to what he did, and he hauls the steel of his old life through mud and spray. The climb goes on long past the point where the idea is clear.
Payoff: Nothing in the plot advances while he climbs. The weight on his back is the whole of his history, made into something you can watch him carry. In the reading: the-gest. The reading calls this a gest: a bodily attitude that makes a whole social relation visible without changing the situation.
Watch the faces listening while Gabriel plays the oboe. (performance)
He climbs into Guarani territory and does not preach. He sits down and plays. Joffe holds on the people around him, and nothing happens except that they listen.
Payoff: The conversion in this scene is done by a melody and a set of faces. Feeling arrives before any argument does. In the reading: icon of quality (affection-image). The reading calls this a qualisign: a still reflecting face holding one quality, here simple attention, with nothing yet discharged.
Notice the difference between the jungle and the church interiors. (light)
Menges works in available light. The mission's greens and earth tones are open and horizontal. The colonial and ecclesiastical rooms are candlelit, shadowed, and built on verticals of rank.
Payoff: Two kinds of power are photographed differently. You can see which world a scene belongs to before anyone in it opens their mouth.
Listen for the three kinds of music Morricone keeps braiding. (sound)
A European motet tradition, an Indigenous percussive and vocal strand, and the solo oboe melody, layered against each other and sometimes at once. Under all of it runs the constant roar of the water.
Payoff: The score argues the film's case in sound. Two musical traditions are made to occupy the same piece, which is what the missions themselves attempted.
Once you have seen it
Notice how the film cuts between Gabriel and Mendoza at the end. (cutting)
Jim Clark runs the two responses in parallel: a procession carrying the monstrance into gunfire, and an armed defense of the mission. Neither line is allowed to interrupt or rescue the other.
Payoff: Both answers to the same catastrophe are shown at once, and both come up empty. The cutting refuses to say which man was right.
Track who is speaking in the voice-over. (structure)
Cardinal Altamirano is writing a letter to the Pope, and his account bookends and punctuates everything. He is the man who made the decision he is now reporting.
Payoff: You are told from the first reel that this is already finished. The film is weighing a ruin rather than building suspense about one.
Count the images built to look like a crucifixion. (staging)
It starts with a Jesuit lashed to a cross and sent over the falls, and the rhetoric returns through the penance and through the final procession. Joffe stages the destruction as a passion play.
Payoff: The film reads its own history through one image, repeated. Whether that ennobles the Guarani or displaces them is the argument it keeps provoking.
Watch how little Irons moves when Gabriel is challenged. (performance)
His conviction is played as stillness and restraint throughout, against De Niro's externalized swing from swagger to anguish to hardened resolve. The two are calibrated against each other from the start.
Payoff: Neither performance is written to win. They are set up as a debate in human form, and the film leaves the verdict to you.
Carry this in: Two men answer the same disaster in opposite ways. Watch which failure the film asks you to live with.