Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Trial of the Chicago 7
2020 · Aaron Sorkin · The Trial of the Chicago 7 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 handheld camera and grainy image in every convention flashback. (camera)
Papamichael shoots the street scenes loose and desaturated, reaching for 1968 news-footage texture, against a fixed, classical courtroom camera.
Payoff: The visual split makes institutional order and street disorder feel like two different kinds of reality colliding.
Watch the opening montage cut between four different groups preparing. (cutting)
Baumgarten cross-cuts Hayden's SDS, the Yippies, Dellinger's pacifists, and Seale's Panthers before the trial even starts.
Payoff: The coalition's internal contradictions are visible before a single argument is made in court.
Notice who is allowed to stand and speak in the courtroom. (staging)
Sorkin's blocking treats the room theatrically: a fixed judge, a procession of witnesses, and a clear hierarchy of who gets silenced.
Payoff: The physical arrangement of the room enacts the question of who counts as a legitimate speaker.
Watch how Sacha Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman treats testimony like a performance. (performance)
He answers the prosecution with jokes and timing built for the gallery, not for winning the case on the merits.
Payoff: He turns the trial into political theater, which is exactly the argument the film wants to have.
Listen for Pemberton's score shifting from driving percussion to plaintive strings. (sound)
The percussive cues track courtroom momentum and rhetorical sparring; a softer register surfaces underneath for the human cost.
Payoff: The score tells you when the film wants you to feel procedure and when it wants you to feel consequence.
Once you have seen it
Track how each testimony cuts into a flashback of that event. (structure)
Baumgarten uses the act of speaking as the hinge into the convention footage, then cuts back to puncture or complicate the official account.
Payoff: The gap between what is said and what you're shown is a relation-image: the viewer holds both versions the courtroom cannot. In the reading: the mental-image / relation-image. Sorkin makes you the knowing third party, assembling a meaning no character in the room can see.
Wait for Bobby Seale bound and gagged at the defense table. (performance)
Sorkin stages this real event as the trial's moral floor, the literal silencing of the one Black defendant.
Payoff: Deleuze's gest is a posture that exposes a whole social relation; Seale's bound body exposes whose speech was never going to count. In the reading: the gest. The film's faith that speech can act curdles the instant it looks at Seale's chair.
Notice the reading of the American war dead near the end. (structure)
This late sequence is built as an editorial crescendo, echoing the opening montage's logic of convergence but pointed at feeling instead of information.
Payoff: It's Griffith's organic-American montage, a convergent rescue rebuilt as emotion, resolving what the verdict alone cannot. In the reading: montage-organic-american. Sorkin reaches for the oldest American montage form to deliver a catharsis the trial's outcome withholds.
Carry this in: This is a movement-image film: it bets that the right words, spoken at the right moment, can still change what happens.