Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Barren Lives
1963 · Nelson Pereira dos Santos · Barren Lives on Sightlines
4 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
Watch the sky and ground bleach into pure white. (light)
Barreto overexposes the image until the horizon disappears, so figures look like they are being slowly consumed by a glare with nowhere to hide from.
Payoff: The light itself is working against the family, not just illuminating their struggle. In the reading: any-space-whatever (emptiness / white). Deleuze calls a space this drained of landmarks an any-space-whatever, a condition the family is inside of rather than a place they can read.
Listen for the ungreased cart wheel's recurring shriek. (sound)
In place of any music score, the film keeps returning to the same harsh, mechanical squeal of the oxcart's axle, bookending and punctuating scenes throughout.
Payoff: The wheel does the work a score would, and it never once lets the discomfort soften.
Watch how small each family member looks against the land. (staging)
Dos Santos keeps blocking the family with wide gaps between them and vast empty ground on every side, rarely letting them fill more than a fraction of the frame.
Payoff: The distance between them in the frame is doing the same work the drought does to the family itself.
Watch Fabiano's body do the talking his words can't. (performance)
Átila Iório plays him through posture, carrying, and endurance rather than speech, a man whose oppression includes barely being able to name what is happening to him.
Payoff: His silence is not a lack of feeling. It is what the system has left him able to do.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where the bodies sit in the frame and what the sun does to their edges. Then watch for the wheel.