Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Bacurau
2019 · Juliano Dornelles · Bacurau 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
Notice the wide horizontal frame and the sudden zooms. (camera)
Cinematographer Pedro Sotero shoots the sertao in scope format recalling 1960s and 70s Westerns, then breaks the wide calm with sudden zooms and whip-pans.
Payoff: The style keeps warning you a genre film is coming, even during the quiet scenes.
Watch how often the town is shown as one group. (staging)
Staging repeatedly favors group compositions, the town acting and moving as one ensemble body rather than separate characters with separate arcs.
Payoff: You are following a community, not a set of individual protagonists. In the reading: dividual. Deleuze calls a group filmed and felt as one body a dividual; you are tracking a body, not protagonists.
Notice the town museum and what it holds. (setting)
A small museum of relics from past massacres and resistance sits alongside the school and clinic as one of the town's key spaces.
Payoff: The town keeps its own history on display, not buried. In the reading: story-telling / legending. Deleuze calls a community narrating its own history into existence fabulation; the museum is that story kept on shelves.
Notice the high aerial shots looking down at the town's roofs. (camera)
The film occasionally lifts to a drone's-eye view before dropping back to ground level with the people who live there.
Payoff: Height itself becomes a point of view you are meant to distrust.
Notice how unhurried the first act is before anything happens. (cutting)
Editor Eduardo Serrano keeps the opening almost ethnographic, spending time in the funeral, school, clinic, and brothel before any genre machinery engages.
Payoff: The patience makes you know the town as a place before anything threatens it.
Once you have seen it
Notice the flying-saucer-shaped drone hovering above the hunt. (setting)
The film dresses cutting-edge surveillance technology in kitsch 1950s science-fiction styling, an old pulp costume on a new colonial ritual.
Payoff: The anachronism forces you to ask why the future looks like an old B-picture. In the reading: demark. Deleuze calls an object that breaks the chain of what you would expect a demark, a thing that stops you anticipating and makes you read.
Notice which early rooms turn out to hold weapons. (structure)
The school, the clinic, and especially the museum, introduced as ordinary community spaces, are revealed to be part of the town's hidden defense.
Payoff: Ordinary community spaces turn out to double as a hidden defense the hunters never suspected.
Notice how differently the town and the hunters are filmed. (performance)
The villagers are shot grounded and communal; the hunters, led by Udo Kier's Michael, are shot mannered and grotesque, refusing to blend into the naturalism around them.
Payoff: The camera itself tells you who belongs to this place and who only came to take from it.
Carry this in: Watch the whole first act like an inventory. Every ordinary room you are shown will matter later.