Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
2014 · Alejandro G. Iñárritu · Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 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 how long the camera goes without cutting. (camera)
Lubezki's camera tracks, cranes, pivots, and threads through doorways for minutes at a stretch, binding corridors, stage, and street into one continuous glide. Rhythm comes from bodies moving, not from cuts.
Payoff: You feel time pass as one unbroken stretch instead of an assembly of pieces, which is what keeps you inside Riggan's night. In the reading: the mobile section (plan). This is what the reading calls the mobile section: the shot as a stretch of duration, not a slice of space.
Listen for the solo drums, then look for the drummer. (sound)
Antonio Sánchez's jazz kit sets a nervous, syncopated pulse under almost everything. Every so often Iñárritu lets a drummer appear in a corridor, playing inside the world you're watching.
Payoff: The score keeps stepping into the scene, so you can never fully separate what surrounds Riggan from what drives him.
Listen for Birdman's gravelly voice when you see only a tired man. (sound)
A growling superhero voice and bursts of blockbuster orchestra erupt over images of Keaton slumped in a dressing room or a corridor. Picture and soundtrack tell different stories.
Payoff: You hear his grandiosity while you look at his exhaustion, and the gap between them is the whole character. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Sound and image refuse to match, which the reading calls audiovisual disjunction: two tracks running separate accounts of one man.
Notice how often corridors, wings, and dressing rooms come back. (staging)
The St. James Theatre is a labyrinth the film keeps circling: narrow hallways, the stage seen from the wings, the roof, the alley, the bar across the street. Even Times Square feeds back in.
Payoff: The building works like a trap with no outside, so the show and Riggan's life stop having separate rooms. In the reading: saturated crystal. The reading calls this a saturated crystal: an enclosed world where performance and life reflect each other with no exit.
Watch Keaton hold exhaustion, vanity, and hope inside a single take. (performance)
With no cuts to rescue them, the actors shift register within a shot. Keaton sags and rallies mid-sentence. Norton preens and turns dangerous on stage without a reaction shot to help.
Payoff: Posture and voice carry the changes that editing usually carries, so you read the people the way you would in a theater.
Once you have seen it
Watch for whips past dark walls and pans across doorways. (cutting)
Crise and Mirrione hid the seams there, matching motion, light, and screen direction. Once you know where to look, the film reveals itself as one of the year's most worked-over cutting jobs.
Payoff: The continuity is manufactured, which makes the few open cuts at the opening and close land like alarms.
Notice hours vanishing: a push past a window, Riggan sleeping. (structure)
Days of previews pass inside an apparently unbroken take. Iñárritu buries the ellipses in movement and dissolves, so the time jumps register only after the fact.
Payoff: The film compresses a week into one breath, and you accept it because the camera never seems to stop.
Watch Riggan go still while the city wheels beneath him. (camera)
When the Birdman fantasy takes over, he stops acting and the world does the moving instead. The same trick returns in the final passage, where the last look belongs to Stone.
Payoff: The film never rules on whether he flies, and the refusal lets a new Riggan be willed into existence.
Carry this in: Watch for the cut that never comes. The camera's refusal to blink is this film's nervous system.
A Deleuzian reading of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) →
How Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) was received →