Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Mission
1986 · Roland Joffé · The Mission on Sightlines
4 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 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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Two men answer the same crisis in opposite ways. Watch what each of them carries.