Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Buffalo '66
1998 · Vincent Gallo · Buffalo '66 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 him pace and double back looking for a bathroom. (performance)
The film opens with Billy released from prison, frantic and aimless, unable to find a toilet before he does anything else.
Payoff: A man this unable to solve a small problem is not about to solve a large one. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The reading calls this the crisis of the action-image: a man who perceives his situation but cannot convert it into an act that works.
Notice how often people are framed dead center, like a snapshot. (camera)
Acord and Gallo favor locked-off, symmetrical compositions with characters posed in the middle of the frame, rhyming with the family photographs that recur throughout.
Payoff: Every shot asks you to notice someone posing for a picture that isn't quite working.
Notice the bleached, high-contrast look of the wintry exteriors. (light)
Shot on reversal stock, the film's blacks run dense and its skies blow out flat and overcast, skin gone slightly sick with cold.
Payoff: The whole world looks pinned under the same cold light Billy carries inside him.
Watch the family posed at dinner like a portrait. (staging)
Gallo blocks the dinner scenes like a chamber play, actors held in stiff, frontal arrangements around the table, the camera kept back.
Payoff: The family keeps holding a pose for a warmth that isn't actually there.
Listen for the prog rock needle drops arriving at emotional peaks. (sound)
King Crimson's Moonchild and Yes's Heart of the Sunrise arrive at the film's most lyrical moments, a specific 1970s sound tied to Billy's childhood.
Payoff: The music carries feeling the characters cannot otherwise let themselves express.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the posed family photograph motif, and notice who is actually looking at whom.