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.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
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 →