Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Black Hawk Down
2001 · Ridley Scott · Black Hawk Down 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
Notice you cannot tell where anyone is. (camera)
Slawomir Idziak shoots through constant smoke and dust on very long lenses that flatten the city into planes. Streets stop connecting to each other. The geography of Mogadishu never resolves.
Payoff: The frame hands you feeling where it would normally hand you a map, which is the soldiers' position too. In the reading: any-space-whatever (disconnection). The reading calls this an any-space-whatever: a place that stops being a setting for action and becomes a field of pure sensation.
Look at the color: ash-green, ochre, no gold anywhere. (light)
The film was graded digitally across footage from many cameras, draining the warm hues heroic war pictures use. Shafts of light cut through smoke, a Ridley Scott habit, here stripped of any beauty.
Payoff: The palette refuses to make the battle handsome, so nothing in the image argues for the mission.
Listen for how differently each weapon and rotor sounds. (sound)
Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers give every gun its own acoustic signature and every helicopter a distance you can hear. Radio voices cut in and out of comprehension underneath it all.
Payoff: The sound is an environment rather than an accompaniment, and it is what puts you inside the street.
Count how many soldiers you can tell apart. (performance)
Scott taped the actors' names inside their helmets because he could not tell his own cast apart. Hartnett, McGregor, Bana and Sizemore all work in one ensemble texture, with no arc handed to any of them.
Payoff: Nobody's choices organize this battle, so the film declines to give anyone a story suggesting otherwise. In the reading: dispersive situation. The reading calls this a dispersive situation: many weakly linked figures and no protagonist, because nobody's decisions still shape the world.
Watch for action happening in several places at once. (staging)
Scott spreads each sequence across planes and directions instead of building it around one focal point. Up to seven cameras ran at the same time. There is rarely one thing in the shot to follow.
Payoff: The staging matches the tactical facts: dispersed forces, several crises running together, nobody holding the full picture.
Once you have seen it
Count the minutes before the raid starts. (structure)
There are roughly fifteen or twenty, and almost none go to Somalia's civil war, the UN intervention, or the decisions that put these men in the city. The film starts at the mission and stays there.
Payoff: It takes the soldiers' own limited view as its limit, which is both its coherence and the thing critics fight it over.
Watch how the Somali fighters are framed, almost always massed. (staging)
The militia arrives as movement through alleys and over rooftops, filmed at distance through long glass. Almost none are given a face, a name or a line that separates them from the group.
Payoff: One side of this battle is present as a threat and absent as people, and the lenses are where that happens. In the reading: the dividual. The reading calls this a dividual: a crowd filmed as a single intensity rather than as a set of persons.
Watch how fast Scalia cuts during the heaviest firefights. (cutting)
Scalia had to shape simultaneous, overlapping action out of seven cameras. He keeps just enough thread for you to stay attached and lets the rest run as sensation rather than sequence.
Payoff: The cutting chooses immediate feeling over clear space, and it won an Academy Award for holding that balance.
Listen for the Breton lament in the quiet stretches. (sound)
Denez Prigent sings Gortoz a Ran, which means I am waiting. Hans Zimmer keeps the rest of the score underneath the sound design rather than over it, with no triumph anywhere in it.
Payoff: The music refuses to convert the battle into victory, so the quiet passages land as endurance instead.
Carry this in: Find the moment the map stops working. Everything after it is men reacting to something that will not respond.