Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Atomic Blonde
2017 · David Leitch · Atomic Blonde on Sightlines
5 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
Look at what color each location is lit in. (light)
Sela blocks the film in cold blues and teals for dread, hot pinks and reds for sex and violence, sickly amber for East Berlin. The grading is aggressive and deliberate.
Payoff: The color tells you what a scene is for before anything happens in it. Berlin reads as a comic panel, not a city. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: a hue that absorbs a whole scene and does its feeling for you.
Watch whether you can see both fighters' whole bodies. (staging)
Leitch came out of stunt work and blocks combat for legibility: readable space, full-body framing, and exchanges that escalate through exhaustion rather than through cutting.
Payoff: You can follow every fight. Believing the violence depends on seeing it happen, which is this film's argument with 2000s action.
Watch how tired Lorraine gets during a fight. (performance)
She stumbles, gasps, loses weapons, and grabs whatever is lying on the landing. Theron plays Lorraine opaque everywhere else, so the body carries most of the characterization.
Payoff: Fatigue is the performance. You learn who she is from what she endures, because she tells you almost nothing. In the reading: cinema of the body (attitudes & postures). The reading calls this a cinema of the body: posture and depletion carrying time instead of a body achieving things.
Listen for where the 1980s songs come from in a scene. (sound)
Nena, Bowie, New Order, Depeche Mode. Many tracks are anchored in clubs and radios inside the film, and Ronaldsdóttir cuts to their rhythm. Bates scores the gaps between them.
Payoff: The songs set the period and the attitude, and they do structural work. Watch how often a track change marks a scene change.
Notice the debrief room the film keeps returning to. (structure)
The film returns to a room with MI6 and CIA handlers, and cuts between what Lorraine tells them and what you see.
Payoff: You are watching an account being given. Keep track of who is listening. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: a voice and an image quietly telling two different stories.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the fights all the way through without looking away. Fatigue, not choreography, is what the film is showing you.