Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Basquiat
1996 · Julian Schnabel · Basquiat on Sightlines
4 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 often Basquiat is filmed head-on against his own paintings. (camera)
Fortunato frames him frontally again and again, so his face and the canvas behind him sit on the same plane, held longer than the scene requires.
Payoff: The picture behind him becomes a second face, so you are always watching the man and his work as one image.
Notice Basquiat is almost always the only Black person in the room. (staging)
The film blocks him alone in gallery basements, collector dinners, and restaurant tables full of white faces, and never points this out with dialogue.
Payoff: The isolation is not a plot point, it is staged, and the film trusts you to see it without being told. In the reading: people-are-missing. The reading calls this people are missing: an artist with no audience of his own, so the paintings have to invent one.
Listen for bebop and Charlie Parker running under the punk soundtrack. (sound)
The score alternates Cale's sparse viola and piano with a dense mix of bebop and the no-wave, post-punk music of the downtown scene Basquiat actually lived in.
Payoff: The two musical worlds map the two lives pulling at him, the jazz lineage he claimed and the street scene that made him.
Watch how scenes start late and end before anything is resolved. (structure)
Berenbaum's cuts skip explanation, and years pass marked only by a change of address, so the rise plays as a pile of events rather than one causing the next.
Payoff: The looseness keeps the film from turning Basquiat's rise into a simple lesson about ambition. In the reading: weak-links. The reading calls this weak links: causes loosen until events just sit next to each other instead of driving one another.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the walls behind Basquiat throughout. Schnabel built this film out of paintings he made himself in another man's name.