Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Hell's Angels
1930 · Howard Hughes · Hell's Angels on Sightlines
3 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
Watch for clouds kept in frame during every flying shot. (camera)
Hughes's cameramen waited weeks for cumulus because a plane against empty sky reads as motionless. Cloud gives your eye something to measure speed and altitude against.
Payoff: A simple choice about what's visible in the background is what makes the flying look real.
Notice the cutaways to a pilot's face during a dogfight. (cutting)
The same pass was filmed from three or four cameras at once, and the editors cut between them and back to a face to keep you oriented in the sky.
Payoff: No single shot contains the dogfight. It only exists once the pieces are cut together. In the reading: montage (the cut as the unit of meaning). The reading calls this montage: the event lives in the cut itself, not in any one shot on its own.
Notice how differently the ground scenes and flying scenes are shot. (staging)
The drawing rooms are static and posed, the camera waiting for each line to finish. In the air the camera sits in the slipstream, catching angles nobody composed.
Payoff: The film is really two different ideas of movement spliced into one reel. In the reading: any-instant-whatever. The reading calls the air footage any-instant-whatever: motion sampled freely, not built from posed, meaningful moments.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch for the cut from drawing room to sky. This film is two different ideas of movement sharing one reel.