Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Gerry
2002 · Gus Van Sant · Gerry 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 two men's heads bob in near-lockstep as they walk. (camera)
Savides holds a long tracking shot in tight profile so their gait against the shifting ground turns almost musical and hypnotic.
Payoff: The rhythm of walking becomes the film's real subject before any plot ever arrives.
Watch the men shrink to specks against the open desert. (camera)
Savides repeatedly holds extreme long shots where the two figures are dwarfed by huge planes of sky, sand, and salt.
Payoff: The scale keeps reminding you how little control two people have out here. In the reading: any-space-whatever (emptiness). The reading calls the salt flats an any-space-whatever: a space stripped of its normal function, reduced to pure emptiness and feeling.
Listen for footsteps and breathing in the long stretches of silence. (sound)
For long passages there's no music at all, only amplified footfalls and wind, with Arvo Pärt's spare pieces arriving only at a few key moments.
Payoff: The rare music lands like a grace note precisely because the film has earned the silence around it.
Watch the early, loose banter give way to labored, cracked-lip silence. (performance)
Damon and Affleck start with in-jokes and shorthand, then the performance shifts entirely into trudging, stumbling, and depleted bodies as the ordeal wears on.
Payoff: You watch two personalities get emptied out by pure physical extremity, with almost no dialogue explaining it.
Watch the sky change color behind the two silhouetted men at dawn. (light)
The men go still while the sky itself does the moving, cycling through gradations of light with no dialogue to explain what it means.
Payoff: The film lets nature carry the feeling that no line of dialogue could. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the characters fall still and the world itself takes over the motion.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch their feet, not their faces. The walking is the plot, and the film wants you to feel every step of it.