Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
1988 · Terry Gilliam · The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 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
Watch the old man stand up during the play. (structure)
The film opens mid-performance of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen in a besieged city. A man in the audience says the actors have it wrong and that he is the Baron. Everything after is his correction.
Payoff: You are watching a man tell his own story against a rival version playing in the same building. In the reading: fabulation / legending. The reading calls this fabulation: a man caught in the act of legending himself, out loud, while you watch.
Notice that nobody ever travels between the episodes. (cutting)
Peter Hollywood cuts from besieged city to Sultan's court to the moon with no connecting journey. And then carries all the causation, the way it does when somebody tells you a story aloud.
Payoff: Inside each episode the coverage stays conventional, so the strangeness sits in the joins rather than the shots. In the reading: irrational cut / interstice (the AND). The reading calls these irrational cuts: joins that set two places side by side instead of connecting them.
Watch the edges of the frame bow outward. (camera)
Gilliam shoots wide and low. Ceilings rush away, architecture towers, people shrink under it, and the frame is packed edge to edge with incident. Rotunno shot Fellini before this.
Payoff: Brazil used this lens for claustrophobia. Here the same distortion delivers plenty, more to see than you can take in.
Look for the painted backdrop behind the moon. (staging)
Nearly every place keeps a proscenium: the court as tableaux, the forge as mechanical spectacle, a void behind the lunar set that is plainly painted. Ferretti built worlds rather than pretending to find them.
Payoff: The seams are not mistakes. The film records real objects that are frankly fake, and the record is honest. In the reading: crystalline description. The reading calls this crystalline description: an image that composes its own object rather than pointing at a real one.
Watch Neville's Baron get older and younger by scene. (performance)
Neville plays him with dignity rather than buffoonery. Vitality returns when somebody believes him and drains away when nobody does. Sarah Polley's Sally is the one who keeps believing.
Payoff: Belief works as a life-support system here. Watch the body and you can tell who is listening.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the seams. Everything impossible here was physically built, and the film wants you to see it was made.