Sightlines · how it works
Sightlines is a hand-built atlas of about 3,400 films. Every one of them carries a reading: what it is about and how it feels, the films it descends from and the ones it shaped, the viewing threads it belongs to. You can browse that atlas, ask it for films in a sentence, and bring your own films to see what they say about you. Here is how, page by page.
The flow most people want, from browsing to a list or a course of their own:
Shortcut. Already keep your films on Letterboxd? Paste a list, a watchlist, or your @username into the search box on Your Films, or on Browse. Sightlines reads the films straight off it, and everything below is one click away.
That is the whole thing. The rest of this page explains each piece.
Browse shows every film in the atlas as a grid of posters, and three controls sit above it. Slide by tone is a set of sliders for how a film feels: warm ↔ menacing, funny ↔ serious, slow-burn ↔ frenetic, simple ↔ cerebral, tame ↔ shocking, and more. Leave a slider centered and it does nothing. Nudge it and the grid leans that way. Push it to the end and only the films that truly sit there survive. Narrow by is the facets: mood, subject & theme, setting, characters, story device, kind, craft, movement, era, and so on, each a row of pills with a count. Pick a few and the grid shrinks to films that are actually about that. Group by arranges whatever is left by decade, genre, feeling, or viewing thread, so you can see the shape of a set rather than a flat grid.
A word on facets, because they are deliberately loose. A facet marks a film that substantially belongs, not one that satisfies a strict definition. That looseness is the point. It is what lets “memory” or “justice” or “the atomic age” turn up films you would never have filed there yourself. Treat facets as doors into the collection, not a catalog.
The search box takes almost anything. A film's title opens its page. A director's name pulls up their films. Two films with vs between them (“Heat vs Drive”) open the space the two share, with a dial to lean toward either. A Letterboxd list, watchlist, or @username brings those films in. And a sentence, a mood or an evening, goes to Ask. Type a film Sightlines does not hold and it does its best to show you the closest kin it does.
The same grid, with the same three controls, is what you get on Ask, on a film's related films, and on your own lists. Learn it once and you have learned the whole site.
On Ask, say what you want in plain language: “suspenseful but not too violent,” “a noir but not in black and white,” “something by Lynne Ramsay,” “what influenced Heat.” Sightlines reads the sentence against everything it knows about its films, the facets, the lineage, the viewing threads, the theory, and answers with a grid of films and a short paragraph on why these. It never invents a title. If a film is not in the atlas it will not appear, and that is a feature. Every result has a page behind it.
Below the answer is a second field, “Say more about your search.” Type a correction and the grid re-forms around it. The three controls from Browse are there too, so you can slide the answer by tone or narrow it by facet without asking again. Above the grid, one line says how your sentence was read and the terms it searched for.
Click any poster and you land on that film's own page. A short door at the top says what the film is about and how it feels, and offers Related films →, the films around this one, on the grid you already know. Below it, the lenses:
What a lineage is. A lineage in Sightlines is never “these are both sci-fi.” It is 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. Each film's record tells its own side of a relationship, and the two sides do not always agree. One film's page may call another an ancestor while that film's page calls the first a sibling. Where that happens Sightlines shows both notes, marked as that film's lineage tells it, and lets the older film be the ancestor when the dates settle it. I would rather show you the disagreement than quietly pick a winner.
Everything above reads the atlas. Your Films reads you. Give it your films any way you like: paste a Letterboxd list, watchlist, or @username; paste a screenshot of your favorites or a whole poster grid and it reads the titles off the image; upload a CSV; or type titles one per line. If a film is not in the atlas it says so, and notes it for intake rather than pretending. Or bring nothing at all and use the chooser instead: two films at a time, which would you rather watch?, until a reading forms from your choices.
Your films appear as a grid, with the tools strip above them, and then five doors. Each door says what it does before you open it, and each shows an example when you have brought nothing yet.
A reading of what you are drawn to, written from your films in plain words: the dials you sit on, the sensibility your films share, and the founding films your taste descends from. It measures your films against the whole atlas, so it names what is distinctive about you rather than what is merely popular. More on the reading below, since it changes the rest of the site once you have one.
A whole watchlist sorted into small groups that reward being watched near each other. Each thread gets its line, what it is about, and how much it asks of you, so a hundred films become eight evenings you can actually plan. Sightlines keeps a library of some 1,400 such threads across the atlas, and this door finds the ones running through yours.
Recommendations, on the grid you know. Every film Sightlines holds around yours, starting from all of your films at once, with the tone sliders and facets to shape the set. Group it by how each film relates to yours: kindred, lineage, sideways, the same thread. Each recommendation says which of your films it comes from, so a suggestion is never a mystery.
The classics your films descend from and the films they shaped, with how the influence works. The films that share their sensibility. And the ones that sit sideways, the interesting next film rather than the obvious one. Your films with the richest lineages open first, and the rest sit in a strip of anchors you can open one at a time or all at once, so the page works for four films or forty. An influence web draws the whole set as one graph, your films lit and their relatives around them.
Two kinds. A quick course takes four films that go together and writes, in about fifteen seconds, the thread that ties them and, for each, a reminder of what it is, one thing to watch for, and what it adds after the film before. Short enough to share. Sightlines deals the four; hit Deal another four for a different set. A full course takes up to twelve and writes the way a good teacher would: it finds the through-line, orders the films so the arc flows, and writes each one up with no spoilers and no jargon, with a “watch for” guide on every film. It takes about half a minute and needs at least three films. Bring more than twelve and the door says how it will choose: it starts from the best-rated film in your list and gathers the eleven that sit nearest to it in the atlas, so the course has a center rather than a sprawl. Twelve or fewer, and your list is the course, in your order.
The way back. Every page you make from your films, a reading, threads, a list, a course, is saved to its own link, and Your Films remembers them. Come back later and the page offers Continue → to where you were, and lists your pages on this device. All of them live under My stuff.
The + button sits on every poster, everywhere on the site. Click it to keep a film, click again to let it go. As soon as you have one, a pill at the bottom right counts your picks, and Next → opens them as a list on their own page. Your picks are remembered in the browser as you keep browsing, and the × on the pill clears them.
A list page has two views. Films is the grid, with the same three controls, so you can group your own list by viewing thread or narrow it by facet like any other. Read is the lines of sight: kindred films, lineage, the influence web, and a go deeper section for the films with the most behind them. Above the grid, the same tools strip appears on every list, course, and set of results:
The Courses page is a library of guided, spoiler-free courses curated by Sightlines: runs of four to twelve films that trace a genre, a movement, a craft, or an idea, each film with its details and a note on what to watch for. Save, share, or print any of them. Beside the library sits Make a course from your films →, which takes you to Your Films, since a course is always made from a set of films and that is where you bring one.
Essays are the wider view: standalone, long-form criticism on films, directors, movements, genres, and techniques, the kind of piece you would read in a good film magazine. Each essay links to the films it draws on, and each film's page links back to the essays that touch it. Where a course walks you through a run of films, an essay argues something about them.
Everything else on Sightlines reads films. The taste reading turns the lens around. Bring your films to Your Films (a reading needs at least two, and reads better with more), or use the chooser, and Sightlines writes your film personality: not “you like dramas,” but the specific shape of your eye. It places you on the same dials you slide on Browse, warm ↔ menacing, simple ↔ cerebral, tame ↔ shocking, so the reading is spoken in the language you explore with. It measures what you are drawn to against the average filmgoer, so it names what is distinctive rather than what is common. And it traces the founding films your taste descends from (“everything you gather comes out of Vertigo, L'Avventura, and Peeping Tom”), then surfaces a handful of films you did not choose that sit closest to your center of gravity.
The reading is a set of claims about you, and each one can be answered. Under every claim sit three answers: That's right, Not me and Say more. Confirm a claim and it loses its hedge, leads its section, and the films suggested for it go to the front of your recommendations. Reject one and it stops steering the reading; the next time you sharpen, Sightlines asks you to choose between films split on exactly that point, to see what you meant. Say more in your own words and the films suggested for that claim follow your words, and your words reach the written reading. Sharpening itself works the same way throughout: choose between two films, and the reading, its recommendations, the lists and the courses built on it all move with your choices. Your answers stay with your reading, so it tightens each time you come back.
Once you have a reading, the site changes a little. Your taste reading appears in the nav, and every grid on the site, Browse, Ask, a film's related films, any list, gains an In my taste button at the head of Narrow by. Turn it on and the grid keeps only the films your reading points to. Turn it off and the whole atlas is back. The reading is a shareable page, and you can export it to Letterboxd as your My Sightlines list, where the description is about your taste rather than the films.
No reviews, no ratings, no “people like you also watched.” Just an honest reading of your sensibility from the films you gathered.
Beside its facets and its lineage, most films in Sightlines carry a reading through the film-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and you do not need to have read a word of him to use it. Deleuze was a French philosopher who did something unusual in two books, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2: he did not review films, he built a system for describing what cinema does with movement and time. Nearly everything in it hangs off two ideas. The movement-image is classical cinema, organized around action: a character perceives, feels, and acts, and the film moves with them. The time-image is modern cinema, from Italian Neorealism onward, where that chain breaks and time itself rises to the surface. Characters watch rather than act. The film lingers, doubles back, dreams.
Those two regimes, and the dozens of finer concepts beneath them (the affection-image and the close-up, the crystal-image, the seer, the powers of the false), are the vocabulary the theory pages use. Each concept is a doorway: open one and you see every film that embodies it, with the concrete moment that earns it. The glossary defines every concept in plain language. If you have never read Deleuze, the readings are written to be inviting, a way to notice how a film thinks. If you have, they go deep.
Sightlines has no accounts. Your lists, your courses, your taste reading, and the pages you make from your films are kept in this browser, under My stuff, and nowhere else. Clear the browser and they are gone, unless you have the links. The links carry everything: a list link holds its films, a course link holds its course, a reading link holds your reading. Share one and the person you send it to sees exactly what you see. So save the links you care about, and share freely.
Want the story of the collection itself, how the films were chosen, written up, and wired together? That is on the About page. Questions, or a film we are missing? Reach Adrian at gravity7.com.