Sightlines is a hand-built atlas of roughly 1,500 films. You can browse it, search it by mood, and trace how films influenced one another — and you can build your own lists, save them as PDFs or shareable links, and generate short film courses. Here's how, piece by piece.
The flow most people want — from browsing to a saved list or course:
That's the whole thing. The rest of this page explains each piece.
Click any poster and you land on that film's own page, which offers a few lenses on the same title:
What a “lineage” is. A lineage in Sightlines is never “these are both sci-fi.” It's a specific craft debt — a technique, a collaborator's method, a genre innovation, a formal device — that one film inherits from another, named precisely enough that a cinephile could defend the link. The Trace page and the Lineage tab both let you walk this graph, film to film.
The Theory page vs. the Essays. A film's theory page is a focused reading of that one title through Deleuze's Cinema books — the same concept layer the Galaxy maps (more below). The Essays tab is something wider: standalone, long-form criticism on films, directors, movements, genres, and techniques — the kind of piece you'd read in a good film magazine.
The + button appears on every film poster, everywhere on the site — Explore, Atlas, Trace, Ask results, recommendations. Click it to add a film; click again to remove it. As soon as you've picked one, a ▸ 3 films pill appears at the bottom-right of the screen with two choices:
Your list is remembered in your browser and carried in the page's link, so nothing is lost if you keep browsing. The ✕ on the pill clears it.
On the list page, each film shows its year, director, runtime, and genres. Three buttons across the top:
On your list, click Make a course. Sightlines writes a short "mini film course" that connects your chosen films — what to watch for in each, and why they belong together — with no spoilers and no film-theory jargon. It takes about 20 seconds the first time.
On Explore (and on the recommendations page) there's a box: “…or enter a film we don't have.” Type any title — even a brand-new release the collection doesn't hold — and Sightlines does its best to surface the closest kindred films from the collection, by shared facets and sensibility. From there you can build a list or make a course as usual.
Every film in Sightlines also carries a reading through the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze — his two Cinema books. Deleuze's concepts (the time-image, the seer, the crystal-image, and dozens more) work as a second set of facets — facets for film theory.
Each concept is a doorway: open one and you see every film in the collection that embodies it, with the concrete moment that earns the tag. The Galaxy page is the visual map of this layer — a way to wander the collection by idea rather than by mood or plot. If you've never read Deleuze, the readings are written to be inviting, not intimidating; if you have, they go deep.
Want the story of the collection itself — how ~1,500 films were chosen, written up, and wired together? That's on the About page. Questions or a film we're missing? Reach Adrian at gravity7.com.