Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Killing Fields
1984 · Roland Joffé · The Killing Fields 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 camera stays inside the crowd rather than above it. (camera)
Chris Menges came out of documentary work with Ken Loach and shoots the collapse handheld, in available light, on long lenses that flatten and crowd the frame. Schanberg and Pran are threaded through masses of extras.
Payoff: The principals get swept along rather than commanding the image, so the city's panic reads as something happening to them.
Watch Haing S. Ngor's face refuse to show what he is thinking. (performance)
Ngor was a Cambodian physician who survived the regime and had never acted. He plays Pran through stillness, holding fear and calculation in the body. A trained actor performs reactions. He performs the withholding of them.
Payoff: Every visible feeling is a danger to this man. The flatness you are watching is a survival technique, not a limitation.
Listen to how loud and layered the war sequences are. (sound)
Ordnance, radio traffic, crowds and several languages at once fill the track while the city holds. Mike Oldfield's electronic score threads through it, mournful and estranging rather than heroic.
Payoff: The density is the sound of a city that still holds together.
Track who takes the risks and who can leave. (structure)
Schanberg works the phones, the checkpoints, the embassy. Sam Waterston plays him as driven and abrasive, and the reporting depends entirely on Pran's language, contacts and nerve. The two men are not exposed equally.
Payoff: The friendship rests on an asymmetry the film never smooths over. Whose seeing this is, and who pays for it, is the moral question. In the reading: action-image. The reading calls the first hour an action-image: to see is to file, and to file is to intervene.
Look at the crowds packed into the embassy compound. (staging)
Joffe stages the evacuation and the compound for density and confusion. Bodies fill the frame edge to edge, and no single figure can organize the space or see past the person in front of them.
Payoff: Confusion is being built in the blocking. You cannot get an overview because nobody in the scene has one.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how the reporters turn what they see into stories, and who has to stay close enough to see it.