Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Easy Rider
1969 · Dennis Hopper · Easy Rider 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
Watch the sun smear across the lens and stay there. (light)
Kovacs leaves the flares in instead of killing them, which was not how a 1969 feature was shot. Low sun rakes the highway and long lenses flatten the riders against the mesas behind them.
Payoff: The light is not arranged for the actors. It reads as weather the camera happened to be inside of, and that is the point.
Time how long a riding sequence runs with only a song. (cutting)
Cambern cuts long stretches of highway to Steppenwolf, the Byrds, and the Band, shaped for rhythm rather than information. Nothing in these passages advances the story. They are the film's largest unit.
Payoff: You are handed motion in place of plot. The film asks you to look and listen while the road resolves nothing. In the reading: pure optical and sound situations. A stretch that gives you pure seeing and hearing with nothing to do is what the reading calls a pure optical and sound situation.
Watch for the stutter of the next shot before a cut lands. (cutting)
Cambern punches brief bursts of the upcoming image into the present one, back and forth, before the transition completes. It was found in the cutting room and copied everywhere afterward.
Payoff: The join stops being invisible. The cut becomes a nervous gap you can feel instead of glue holding two scenes together. In the reading: irrational cut / the interstice. An edit that bonds two images across a gap instead of smoothing them together is what the reading calls an irrational cut.
Look at the flag on the gas tank, helmet, and jacket. (setting)
Wyatt rides an American flag. Hopper stages him as a figure before he is a character, and the money from the deal is stashed inside that tank. The iconography is set before a word is spoken.
Payoff: The film loads its hero with national symbols deliberately. He carries the country's promise and his own funding in the same object.
Compare the wide country shots with the cafe and jail scenes. (camera)
Open highway arrives in long lenses and big light. Inside small-town rooms Kovacs goes handheld, grainier, and cramped. The commune and campfire scenes use real people and play like observed footage.
Payoff: The photography makes the argument before the script does. Open country is free and settled America is close, dim, and watching.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the flares and the miles. The film keeps you rapt on motion that changes nothing, and that was the discovery.