Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch No Man's Land
2001 · Danis Tanović · No Man's Land 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 how still Cera has to lie on the mine. (staging)
He is on his back in the trench with a bounding mine under him, the kind that springs to chest height when the weight lifts. Filip Sovagovic plays almost the entire role supine and conscious.
Payoff: His stillness sets the blocking for every other body in the scene. Nobody can move near him without deciding whether to kill him. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls his stillness a gest: a body held in place so that everyone else can perform around it.
Notice who is above the trench looking down. (camera)
Walther van den Ende builds the film on verticals. The trapped men are at the bottom of a bowl, and both armies, then the UN, then the television crew occupy the high ground around them.
Payoff: The geometry sorts everyone into people who are in it and people who are watching it, and it never stops doing that.
Listen to Bosnian, French, and English talk past each other. (sound)
Soldiers, peacekeepers, and journalists keep failing to understand one another, and the film lets the failures run. Tanovic's own score is used sparingly, so what fills the track is ordnance, radio, and exposed silence.
Payoff: The gaps between the languages map the gaps between what each party actually wants out of this.
Look at the flat daylight and the churned brown earth. (light)
The palette is muted green and brown, uniforms and mud, with open sky overhead in nearly every exterior. Nothing is stylized and there is no shadow anywhere to disappear into.
Payoff: The void between the lines is fully lit. You are given a clear view of a situation with no way out of it.
Count the times rescue looks like it is arriving. (structure)
Soldiers, officers, engineers, diplomats, reporters. Each new arrival promises to resolve the situation and instead adds another party with its own interest. The trap gets tighter with every intervention.
Payoff: Everyone here perceives the problem accurately and nobody's action reaches it. That broken hinge is where the dread comes from. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: people reading a situation perfectly with no response adequate to it.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch each person see the situation clearly. Then watch whether anything they do ever reaches it.