Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch City of Pirates
1984 · Raúl Ruiz · City of Pirates 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 objects blocking part of the frame while staying in focus. (camera)
Bottles, candelabra, banisters, and limbs sit in the near field, sharp and unblurred, while the background stays equally sharp, so nothing recedes into scenery.
Payoff: You have to choose what to look at. The frame refuses to choose it for you. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). Deleuze calls the frame a closed set of information to be read as a system; here Ruiz stacks it instead of ranking it.
Watch how often characters are framed inside doorways and windows. (staging)
Figures keep passing between rooms shown as separate worlds, staged within thresholds, corridors, and windows that frame them again inside the shot.
Payoff: Every doorway makes you unsure whether the next room belongs to the same house at all.
Listen for voices that seem to come from nowhere in the shot. (sound)
Whispers and first-person narration drift in that cannot be pinned to a speaker, sometimes addressing Isidore from off-screen or from somewhere inside her.
Payoff: You are never sure whose voice you are hearing, which is exactly the film's subject. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. Deleuze calls voices cut loose from bodies audiovisual disjunction; the image and the sound tell two different stories that only meet in the gap.
Watch the boy announce murder in a completely flat, calm voice. (performance)
Ten-year-old Melvil Poupaud delivers the boy's confession with the same tone he'd use to describe his day, no emphasis, no rising or falling.
Payoff: The flatness is where the disquiet lives, not in anything the boy shouts or cries.
Notice how unnaturally colored the light in each room is. (light)
Interiors are bathed in unmotivated hues while exteriors carry the hard silvery light of the Portuguese coast, color used as feeling rather than realism.
Payoff: The color tells you the emotional weather of a room before anything happens in it.
Once you have seen it
Track gestures or phrases that return later, changed or relit. (structure)
The film advances by repeating a gesture, a phrase, a location differently lit, doing the structural work that cause and effect does in other films.
Payoff: Meaning builds by echo here, not by one event causing the next. In the reading: onirosign / dream-image. Deleuze calls this circuit of repeated, displaced images the dream-image, a pattern that can't be pinned to anyone's remembered past.
Watch how the man on the island shifts between selves. (performance)
Hugues Quester plays several people inhabiting one body as modulations of a single instrument, never resolving into one person with a single history.
Payoff: The film never tells you which self is real, because it treats all of them as equally present.
Notice when a doorway leads somewhere it geographically shouldn't. (cutting)
Sarmiento's cutting lets a character cross a threshold into a room that cannot be adjacent to the one just left, skipping the connective tissue entirely.
Payoff: The gap between shots is doing real work here, not just moving the story along.
Carry this in: Stop trying to map the rooms onto each other. Watch what each doorway does to the person standing in it.