From Andrew Davies:
I think the first shot of Christopher Nolan's "Memento" could be best described as the film in miniature because of how the subject of the shot establishes several important elements of the film. The credits begin on a dark screen. The title "MEMENTO" is still there as the shot fades in, placing the title over the image of a hand holding a photograph. Placing the title over the image of the photograph links the word and the image, telling the audience this photograph is a memento of...something.
The photograph, which is that of a man dead on the floor, his blood on the wall and floor, establishes several important things about the film. The photograph first establishes the narrative structure of the film because as it is shaken, the picture fades instead of develops. This represents how the film begins at the end of the story and progresses, so to speak, to the beginning. The fading of the photograph also establishes the mental state of its main character, the man holding the photograph, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). Like the photograph, Leonard's memory fades. He has short term memory loss, caused by an intruder who raped and murdered his wife in a home break in. His mission through the film is to find "John G," the name he gives to the intruder. The photograph, in of itself, establishes one of the ways in which Leonard tries to keep track of people and places he will forget is to take photographs of them, writing captions underneath the picture.
Finally, the photograph sets up the first mystery of the film, which is who the dead man in the photograph is and who killed him. Even when we learn who the dead man is, Teddy (Joe Pantoliano), and that Leonard has killed him, we will spend the entire movie trying to figure out whom these two men really are and their relationship to each other. Teddy taunts Leonard by telling him that "you don't know who you are." Memento makes us reflect on the fragility of our own sense of identity and how like Leonard, we alter and distort our memories in order to justify our actions and to create meaning in our lives, regardless of who gets hurt. The fading of the photograph ultimately represents how Teddy will vanish from Leonard's memory as he possibly hunts another "John G" or maybe gives up his hunt entirely.
JE: This shot is so simple (it's also the background for the opening credits) and, as you say, it works in so many ways. To start with, it's a striking piece of graphic design, and a widescreen composition that's both bold and subtle. Of course, your eye immediately goes to the red (blood) in the photograph, but you also notice right away that there's a hand holding it. Which means someone is looking at it... from roughly the same position that we are. And then there's that little bit of indecipherable writing on the hand. What is going on in this picture? We're left to wonder throughout the duration of the shot, and the more we learn, the more the mystery deepens.
The first time the hand shakes the Polaroid picture, we might feel a little confused: Did that photo just fade a little? After the second shake, we realize that the exposed film is "undeveloping" -- that we're seeing time run backwards. What's particularly great about this is that no explanation is offered. (One of the major criticisms of Nolan screenplays is that they over-explain everything in dialog or narration rather than presenting things in such a way that gives the audience the satisfaction of piecing things together for themselves.) Of course, this becomes explicit when we see the picture go back into the camera and the bullet shell go back into the gun.
Unfortunately, the explanations of Leonard's "condition" or "handicap" are forthcoming all too soon. Nolan has never quite learned to trust his audience without lecturing (or hasn't developed the skill of communicating information and ideas indirectly), but at least we get the pleasure of not understanding for a little while, and the pieces don't all quite fall together until the end. I think that's why "Memento" remains my favorite Nolan puzzle-picture.
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It starts in a girl's bedroom, the camera slowly retreating in a gentle arc around the bed where the girl lovingly pets and hugs her dog. A teenager's room is a private sanctuary, and this bed (with a blanket folded at the foot for the dog -- a bed upon a bed) is her own imaginary island.
Her name is Holly (Sissy Spacek), and her story (narrated in the first person) and her voice is as flat as Texas but colored with the awkward poetic aspirations of a teenage diarist who's writing her thoughts for herself, but also partly addressing them to some future fantasy reader. She begins:
My mother died of pneumonia when I was just a kid. My father had kept their wedding cake in the freezer for ten whole years. After the funeral he gave it to the yardman... He tried to act cheerful, but he could never be consoled by the little stranger he found in his house. [Fade to black.] Then, one day, hoping to begin a new life away from the scene of all his memories, he moved us from Texas to Ft. Dupree, South Dakota.
Moments later we meet Kit (Martin Sheen), a garbage man in Ft. Dupree, who discovers a dead dog in an alley. After examining the corpse with the curiosity of a child, his response is to say to his partner: "I'll give you a dollar if you eat this collie."
The story of "Badlands" (1973), Terrence Malick's first feature as writer-director, is loosely based on the 1958 Midwestern killing spree of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate -- known in the movie as Kit and Holly. The movie first connects them through their associations with dogs. Holly shows more emotional attachment to her dog than to her distant father. Kit feels none of the empathy or emotion we would expect someone to show upon finding a dead dog. Something is missing in the lives of these two, a hole that each believes -- for a time, at least -- that the other can fill.
Holly's dog (who is nameless, like almost all of the characters except the young lovers themselves) becomes, in effect, the movie's first victim of violent rage, carried out with ruthless resolve. Holly's father (Warren Oates) uses her dog to punishes her for seeing Kit, and that's what sets off the murderous spree.
The idea of the "teenager" was coming into its own -- as a generation-defining phase in American adolescent development, and a marketing demographic. Starkweather saw himself as a rebel in the James Dean mold, and both Kit and Holly romanticize their exploits (as they themselves might call them), even as they express themselves in flat, understated terms that reflect both Midwestern manners and sociopathic alienation.
In his last interview (Sight and Sound, 1975), Malick described the distance both characters have from themselves. Of Holly, who shapes the story as if it were a fairy tale, he said she was guided by a need to be helpful, and not to dwell upon herself, which would be unseemly:
When they're crossing the badlands, instead of telling us what's going on between Kit and herself, she describes what they ate and what it tasted like, as though we might be planning a similar trip and appreciate her experience.
Kit, Malick said, sees himself
as a subject of incredible interest to himself and to future generations. The movies have kept up a myth that suffering makes you deep. It's not that way in real life, though, not always. Suffering can make you shallow and just the opposite of vulnerable, dense. It's had this kind of effect on Kit.
Holly and Kit have that in common. Their suffering has made them numb, callous. I've raised two German Shepherds, both rescued from shelters. These are sensitive creatures, and they're subject to something shelter workers call "Shepherd Shutdown," where the dogs just... shut down. Likewise, children adopted from orphanages sometimes fail to form emotional attachments to others. That seems to be something like what Holly is describing in the opening moments of "Badlands" -- the early death of her mother, the emotional withdrawal of her father... and then the description of herself in the third person as "little stranger he found in his house." In order to become free adults (as they see it), she and Kit will obliterate him and his house. And hardly appear to feel a thing.
That's shocking, but Malick makes it something else, as well. (Holly's narration is not, for example, that of the killer himself, as in Michael Winterbottom's chilling Jim Thompson adaptation, "The Killer Inside Me.") In "Badlands," Kit takes full credit/blame for the killings and Holly gets off with probation -- that news conveyed in the same monotone as the news of Kit's execution.
I find Holly's narration, like Linda's (Linda Manz) in "Days of Heaven" five years later, to be exceptionally moving because they don't supply the emotions (beyond a certain detached wistfulness). The images do. I don't know anything about Malick's religious beliefs, but he ends "Badlands" with an image of "heaven," and begins "Days of Heaven" with an image of hell (a factory with a roaring blast furnace).
In a brief cutaway at the airport after Kit and Holly have been apprehended, a father points out the fugitives to his son.
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From David Nicol:
The camera drifts slowly across a stretch of calm water. Insects and birdsong can be heard. Raindrops begin to strike the water's surface as we pass over a patch of water weed. And in voice-over, a young woman says, "Come spirit, help us sing the story of our land. You are our mother; we, your field of corn. We rise from out of the soul of you."
This is the opening shot of "The New World" (2005), Terrence Malick's dream-like interpretation of the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia. The film depicts the interactions between the English colonists and the Powhatan natives, and in particular the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas, who speaks the film's opening words. As an opening shot, this image of placid river water is less spectacular than many of those that we have studied for Jim's project, but its simplicity is deceptive and it contains all of the qualities of a great opening shot that Jim has been encouraging us to see.
The camera shoots the water from the point of view of someone gazing over the side of a shallow, drifting boat. It has an exploratory feel: we are surveying the water, studying it, so that even though it is Pocahontas who provides the voice-over, the explorer Smith is also subtly present. But this is not the gaze of someone who is simply staring at the surface of the water. The gazer is looking deeper, into the river's heart. At first, we see nothing of what lies beneath the water's surface, because blue sky and trees are reflected onto it. But as the shot continues, the reflection fades, and we see underwater a thick layer of green plants, whose tips eventually stipple the water's surface. Sky, water, and plants exist together, all in one shot. When combined with the din of the insects and birds, it's an image that plunges us from the outset into the beauty and the fecundity of the natural world, and Malick will continue to emphasize that theme throughout his film.
But the idea of looking deep into the river has further significance. This shot is our introduction to the network of waterways upon which most of the film's events will take place. The credits sequence that follows this shot will display animated versions of John Smith's maps of the rivers of Virginia. Following that, we will see images of the Powhatan people swimming in the river and (in the 'Extended Cut' of the film) Pocahontas's voice-over will refer to the spirit-mother as "the great river that never runs dry". As the swimmers rise to the surface (from out of the soul of her), they will see, coming up the river, the three ships of the Virginia Company. The Englishmen will build the colony of Jamestown on the banks of the river. So the river water that we see in this opening shot is not only the source of the Powhatan sense of origin, but also of the colony of Virginia that will ultimately become the United States. Everything comes from the river. And Malick will underscore this in the music that he chooses to accompany the arrival of the ships: the prelude to Wagner's opera Das Rheingold, which opens with the three Rhine-Maidens swimming in a river at the beginning of the world.
This is a film about the arrival of change, change that is sometimes fascinating and sometimes catastrophic. Malick evokes these impending transformations at the end of the shot. The crystalline water is disrupted as first one, then several, then many raindrops hit it. As the rain strikes, the river trembles, and just as the shot ends, we hear the roar of crashing waves. Sound and image are warning us that something is coming (to quote another great cinematic opening sequence, "The world is changed; I feel it in the water"). I don't think the raindrops are an entirely disquieting image, though; rain gives life as much as does the river. That ambiguity is fundamental to "The New World," whose title describes both Smith's discoveries in Virginia and Pocahontas's in London, and which concludes with a revelation that the spirit mother is everywhere, even on the banks of a muddy English stream.
Beautifully done, Dr. Nicol -- thank you! What a deeply mysterious opening it is, beginning with a reflection on the placid surface of the water that looks like an upside-down Impressionist landscape illuminated through Magritte's "Empire of Light" -- European and/or Native American, depending on your sphere of reference. And as we begin to realize that we're moving over the water, we begin to see not only the disruptions on the surface, but, as you say, the world beneath it -- very much a new world, as in prehistoric, untouched. The next shot is (we assume) of the speaker, Pocahontas, herself, gazing in the opposite direction, toward the sky with her arms outstretched. Following the credits (patterned on old navigational maps), we are below the water, swimming with the fishes and the people who live here...
And it ends with the camera gazing up at the tree of life -- a whole forest, really -- as a bird, silhouetted against the sky, swoops fleetingly through the frame.
Note to MZS: I'd still love to read your take on it too, Matt!
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Nicholas Ray's directorial debut, "They Live By Night" (1949), begins like a trailer and then slams us right into the opening titles of the feature. An attractive young couple (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell) are nestling in close-up by the flickering light of a fireplace. They smile, they kiss, and then something off-screen (and unheard on the soundtrack, though signaled by an jarring shift in the musical score) causes them to react with fear and alarm.
"They Live By Night" is a prototypical young-couple-on-the-run movie ("You Only Live Once," "Gun Crazy," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Badlands"), and this tabloid-style opening sets it up breathlessly. The shot seems to exist out of time -- perhaps an idealized moment they once shared, or would never have. The man who would later direct "Rebel Without a Cause" establishes them as innocents and outsiders, star-crossed lovers who "were never properly introduced to the world we live in..." Dissolve to an aerial shot of a truck barreling through a dusty wasteland.
We soon discover that, at the point the title appears, the boy and the girl have yet to meet. So, the whole film could be seen as a flashback -- a noir convention that emphasizes the forces of fate, since the ending of "their story" (even if we don't know what it is) has already been determined from the opening shot. Or perhaps it's a flash-forward to a memory they'll cling to for the rest of their lives. Or an imprint of their fugitive state of mind...
You may notice the scene that is the apparent source of this first shot somewhere in the middle of the film. It's preceded by a speech from one of the cops who's on their trail, reminding a junior detective what Bowie (Granger) and Keechie (O'Donnell) are going through emotionally: "Sooner or later [they know] they'll be caught. Every time they hear" -- knock knock knock -- "on the door, their hearts jump a foot. A heart can take just so much..." Dissolve to the lovers by the fire. This scene also plays out in a long double close-up, but from a different angle than the shot at the beginning. But the characters are wearing the same clothes as earlier: she a soft sweater, he a black t-shirt. They're talking about what would happen if they couldn't stay together. They kiss -- and are interrupted by that knock-knock-knock on the door.
It appears that an alternate take of this scene became the opening for the movie -- and what a dynamic opening it is: fresh, romantic, youthful, kinetic, exciting... You can immediately see why it was embraced by the Cahiers du Cinema critics, and how it points ahead to Godard's "Breathless" (1960) and Truffaut's "The 400 Blows" and "Jules and Jim," among others. (You can see director Nicholas Ray himself in the previous entry on Wim Wenders' gorgeous "The American Friend.")
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By the way, if you want to see a really peculiar re-use of a take under an opening credits sequence, take a look at the first few minutes of Andre de Toth's "Crime Wave" (1954), starring Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson, Phyllis Kirk and Charles Bronson. A montage of shots taken while driving around a city at night ends with the producer and director credits as a car pulls into a gas station, the man on the passenger side gets out and approaches the office where the attendant (Dub Taylor) peeps up over the ANDRE like a mechanical duck in a carnival shooting game and then immediately drops back down without anybody winning a kewpie doll. Fade to black.
The film then repeats that last shot of the credits as the first shot of the picture, this time without titles over it. It's... disconcerting. Did they think nobody'd notice? Or care? I suppose if you wanted to stretch, you could observe that the film is about characters who are unable to unlike their past mistakes, even after they've paid for them. Just when they think they've gotten out, they're pulled back in (as some famous gangster once said). Perhaps its an almost subliminal illustration of the principle of "eternal return," the repetition suggesting the power of fate in action. Or perhaps the titles department at Warners put together a montage and the stuck it on the head of the picture...
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The opening shot of Wim Wenders' moody color noir "The American Friend" (1977), based on Patricia Highsmith's 1974 novel "Ripley's Game," isn't anything fancy or complicated -- no intricate tracking or crane movement -- but, wow, does it announce the movie. First we hear the sirens and the traffic noise behind a black screen, over which the title is immediately emblazoned in electric red-orange block letters: "DER AMERIKANISCHE FREUND."
Bam! We're there, at street level on the lower West Side of Manhattan. We get a look at a few cars and a truck heading uptown, and the ghostly outlines of the World Trade Center towers that stand in the distant haze -- modern New York looming over this less imposing block of old New York. (They also provide a Roman numeral II to mark this sequel to the Scanners Opening Shot Project, which is why I chose this shot for last week's announcement of Part 2).
The title is wiped off the screen by the arrival of a taxi, entering the frame from the left behind the camera. The cab seems to glow in the shadows, as if from the residual illumination of the title lettering, but we see in the window reflections that the orange light is radiating off the facade of the building out of frame to the right.
There's movement in the back seat and a man in a cowboy hat emerges, hugs his jacket to his chest, and gives us a brief moment to register his silhouetted face. It's Dennis Hopper as Highsmith's criminal sociopath, Tom Ripley. At this point in Hopper's career -- two years before his turn as the wigged-out photographer in "Apocalypse Now" and eight years before his big-splash return to American film consciousness in David Lynch's "Blue Velvet," Tim Hunter's "River's Edge" and David Anspaugh's "Hoosiers" (for which he got an Oscar nomination), the actor himself had become something of a shadowy presence in movies. (He spent most of the 1970s in Taos, consorting with drugs, booze and guns, and later claimed he couldn't remember much of that decade, and didn't want to.)
It's hard to tell from this glimpse if Ripley is cold, nervous, in pain, or all of the above. (We soon see he's definitely suffering from some existential anxiety.) The camera pans with him as he walks into the building at right. Before he exists, we hear a rough voice singing a kind of a cappella blues. Cut. Inside, a man is waiting. A solitary red lightbulb seems to carry over the glow from outside into this bluish interior. This is the man Ripley has come to see. We don't know his name yet (we don't know Ripley's, either), but he is Derwatt, a "dead painter"/forger played by the great American director Nicholas Ray ("They Live By Night," "On Dangerous Ground," "In a Lonely Place," "Johnny Guitar," "Rebel Without a Cause," "Bigger Than Life") -- who directed Hopper in "Rebel" and would co-direct (with Wenders) the documentary "Lightning Over Water" (1980) about his attempt to make a final feature before his death from cancer.
As convoluted as the twists of "The American Friend" may seem (Roger Ebert wrote that Wenders had tossed out the parts that would help it make plot sense, challenging us "to admit that we watch [and read] thrillers as much for atmosphere as for plot"), it opens and closes with conventional bookend shots: of a man coming into the frame, and then of a man walking away. Of course, they're not just "conventional" shots, because they're photographed by Robby Müller, one of the great cameramen of the New German Cinema (along with Michael Ballhaus, Thomas Mauch, Jürgen Jürges).
In the final shot, Derwatt is again waiting for someone... who does not arrive. In the deepening dusk, he walks off down the road, this time with another New York landmark -- the Statue of Liberty* -- outlined against the dying light. It's a fittingly inconclusive ending for a most melancholy thriller, a movie about alienation and isolation, images and illusions, forgery and frames, in which, as one character says, "friendship isn't possible."
"I know less and less about who I am... or who anybody else is.... Even this river... this river reminds me of another river." -- Tom Ripley
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Another good adaptation of "Ripley's Game" appeared (under that title) in 2002, directed by Liliana Cavani ("The Night Porter") and starring John Malkovich, Ray Winstone and Dougray Scott. It's a more straightforward thriller, but Wenders' is a stranger and more mysterious film.
Also: Watching "The American Friend" on DVD the other night reminded me that perhaps many cinephiles today don't know how lucky they are. It features a spectacular, expressionistic use of intense color, and it has never looked better than it does on DVD (in a dark room, on a big-screen HDTV). Those of us who first saw these movies in the '70s generally saw dirty, scratchy 35mm repertory prints (if we were lucky) or X-generation 16mm nontheatrical prints struck from other prints that looked like old color xerox copies. A lot of Wenders and Fassbinder films were first seen this way. Even the worst DVDs are no sludgier than many of the nontheatrical prints some American distributors used to rent to schools and film societies at premium prices.
* We've glimpsed Miss Liberty's counterpart in Paris at a crucial moment earlier in the film.
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Nearly five years ago (June 16, 2006), I announced what I called the Movies 101: Opening Shots Project, and I figure it's past time for a re-launch. I want to elaborate a little on what I wrote back then, when I started off with the opening title/shot of Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon":
Any good movie -- heck, even the occasional bad one -- teaches you how to watch it. And that lesson usually starts with the very first image. I'm not talking necessarily about titles or opening sequences (they're worth discussing, too -- but that's another article); I'm talking about opening shots. As those who have been reading Scanners (and my Editor's Notes on RogerEbert.com) know, two of my cardinal rules for movie-watching are:
1) The movie is about what happens to you while you watch it. So, pay attention -- to both the movie and your response. If you have reactions to, or questions about, what you're seeing, chances are they'll tell you something about what the movie is doing. Be aware of your questions, emotions, apprehensions, expectations.
2) The opening shot (or opening sequence) is the most important part of the movie... at least until you get to the final shot. (And in good movies, the two are often related.)
I still hold those truths to be self-evident, but I thought I would add a few things, for those unfamiliar with the Project from the first time around:
1) When you find yourself thinking, "What's happening? How did we get here? Where is this going?" and such, maybe that's exactly what the filmmakers want you to be thinking (if they're good at what they do, that is). As Pacific Northwest travel guru Rick Steves tells tourists: the best way to discover new things is to put away the map and get lost. Same goes for movie-watching. Don't worry about where you are; consider that the movie may be taking you somewhere you did not anticipate. That's a good thing.
2) No, not all movies begin with a key image -- sometimes it's just an unassuming ol' establishing shot, or one element in a montage. The first image is always going to be important, because it's the first image, but not all of them leave an impression -- and the ones that don't aren't the ones we analyze and discuss in the Opening Shots Project. But what may seem like nothing much in the first few moments of a movie could turn out to be significant when you look back on it afterwards. The most important thing is that you notice what you saw, from start to finish. The opening shot may not take on resonance until the picture is over.
The aim of the Opening Shot Project (see the needs-to-be-updated index here) is manifold: to use the technology of video and the Internet to look closely at the shots in question, using frame grabs (and, perhaps, actual clips); to allow for contributions and comments from interested cinephiles and cinephiliacs the world over; to use these shots to begin deeper explorations of the movies as a whole. (I like to encourage those "close textual readings" you may remember from school days...)
So, if you'd like to contribute, check out the existing entries and add your comments. Or, if you have an idea for a new submission, send it to me at the e-mail address above and put Opening Shots in the Subject line. Remember: Don't just describe the shot -- write about it in such a way that you explain why it is significant, how it is doing what it's doing in the context of the film that follows. It would be great if you could include 500-720 pixel frame grabs to illustrate, but if you can't I'll try to do them myself. I'm sure I won't be able to publish all of them, but I look forward to reading them -- and, as always, I'll probably tack my own notes onto the end.
P.S. Some have asked: Why not a Final Shots Project? Well, because that would give away the endings! At least the opening shot is what you see in the first few seconds or minutes of the movie. I despise trailers because they plant images in your head that disrupt the experience of the movie. While you're watching (assuming you still feel like you want to see the movie after you've seen the trailer), you may find yourself keeping track of the images from the trailer that haven't yet appeared. That's no way to watch a movie.
POP QUIZ: Can you identify the opening shot at the top of this post? Know who's in the cab -- performer and character name? And who s-he is going to see?
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From Jason Haggstrom (haggie), Reel 3:
The opening shot of Robert Altman's "The Player" establishes the film as a self-reflexive deconstruction of the Hollywood system and those who run it. With its prolonged shot length, the take is also designed as a means to introduce the bevy of players who work on the lot and to setup the film's general plot--or at least its tone--as a thriller/murder mystery.
The first image in this extended opening shot is of a film set--a painting of one, to be precise. We hear the sounds of a film crew before a clapper pops into the frame. The (off-screen) director shouts "And... action" informing the audience that the film should be viewed as a construct, a film. The camera tracks back to reveal its location on a Hollywood studio lot where movies are described not in accolades of quality, but of quantity with an oversized sign that reads, "Movies, now more than ever."
The lot is filled with commotion. Writers come and go (some invited, some not) as do executives, pages, and assistants. The political hierarchy is highlighted through dialog and interactions that expose the value system of Hollywood. The most powerful arrive by car; high-end models pervade the mise-en-scène in all of the take's exterior moments. An assistant is made to run (literally, and in high heels) for the mail, and then -- before she even has a chance to catch her breath -- to park an executive's car.
Stories are pitched and then quickly reshaped in order to better match the desires of the studio. Arty foreign films and their directors are mentioned, but not by those who hold any power. The studio's head of security, Walter, bends the ears of anyone who will listen as he blathers on and on about extended takes as though the length of a shot alone determines its artistic value. Altman acknowledges Walter's interests as well in making this opening shot a protracted eight minutes in length. After all, Altman is making this film within the studio system. He sees no difference between the security man and the studio executive when it comes to opinions on how he should shoot his film. If he's to get The Player made, he must please the suits.
While the film's camera is clearly operating from within the studio (literally and figuratively), it is not so privileged that it can get into the office of the mighty executive, Griffin Mill. Instead, we are forced into the position of voyeur listening to pitches from behind Mill's window, crouched beneath a plant. It's a typical position for us spectators, but also a metaphoric camera placement that further establishes the film's position as a piece of metacinema.
Mill favors the pitches that are analogous with previously successful films. If it is to star Julia Roberts, has "a heart," or attempts to amalgamate proven formulas (no matter how disparate) such as "Pretty Woman" and "Out of Africa," then it has a good shot at being made. It's a scathing vision of a Hollywood that privileges repetition over artistry, and of its complex system of social rules that were erected with only profit in mind. But still, in this system that privileges the powerful, there is one message that gets through from someone with no presence at all: a character who is, and will remain, unseen and unnamed. In terms of "the pictures," this would normally be the least powerful position of all.
When the page, Jimmy, is involved in a crash, the camera tilts down to draw attention to a postcard (and away from the "unimportant" man who is lying injured on the ground). It reads, "Your Hollywood is Dead," and features images of legends from years gone by such as Charlie Chaplin. Contrasting this message of the demise of the Golden Age of Hollywood with the film's setting in a Hollywood driven not by art but by profit furthers the film's theme of modern Hollywood deconstruction.
Who is sending the postcards? Is it the director of this film, Robert Altman, himself? When the postcard ends up in Mills' hands and is revealed to be a death threat, the film's nature as a self-reflexive, deconstructionist text is married to something more conventional: a thriller/murder mystery. Movies may be "more than ever," but the sender of the postcards--and the film itself--believes that we might be better off with a change in management.
JE: Thanks, haggie! (And thanks for the concluding reference to the Hal Phillip Walker campaign in "Nashville.") That first image of the mural reminds me of the last shot (or last few shots) of another great Hollywood movie-movie, Billy Wilder's 1950 "Sunset Boulevard," with Max/Mr. DeMille at the foot of Norma Desmond's staircase, directing her Salomé descent, until she decomposes into her final close-up....
The tension is thicker than the valley smog on the lot this morning, from that first trompe l'oeil image with the arm and the clapboard (this whole movie is trompe l'oeil), to the jarring alarm bell that signals all quiet on the set, to Thomas Newman's nervous, subtly discordant music. It's all quite unsettling: People are scurrying around, on foot and in vehicles, making and missing appointments, pitching images of themselves and the movies in their heads in hope someone will buy. Everything is a status symbol, from your means of conveyance (car, golf cart, bicycle) to your office, to your lot pass.
The first thing that happens after the clapboard snaps is an incoming phone call, which the receptionist mishandles by telling "Mr. Levy" that her boss, studio head Joel Levison, is not in yet. She is immediately reprimanded by an obviously experienced executive assistant (the great Dina Merrill), who reminds her that she should always say he's "in" -- in a meeting, in a conference, but always "in." Still, she's a little worried about his tardiness and sends the girl off to get the trades right away, before he arrives. There may be some disturbing news in them.
As the crane pulls back and we see the studio tagline -- the utterly inane "Movies... Now More Than Ever" -- we should remember that Altman's "Nashville" (1975) was born out of his disillusionment after the re-election of Richard Nixon in 1972, in which the CREEPy campaign slogan was "President Nixon. Now more than ever."
("Nashville" wound up being shot during the summer of 1974, when the Watergate hearings were on television every day, and that well-justified political cynicism seeped into the picture, too. In 1984, Altman would film the one-man political fantasy "Secret Honor," with Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, drunkenly making his last White House tape.)
As Tewkesbury recalled in the introduction to the Bantam paperback edition of her "Nashville" screenplay (which was actually a transcript of the theatrical release version of the picture):
The day after Nixon was elected for the second time, the campaign where Wallace was shot, I was with Robert Altman and his wife in New York. There had been a storm of extreme proportions the previous night and as we walked down the street through the debris, Altman shook his head and said something about nature's omens. The election had been a lie.
"The Player," then, sets out to do in Hollywood more or less what "Nashville" had done in the Country Music Capitol. Altman had spent the last several years in a kind of exile in France. Tewkesbury (who played the publicist escorting the real-life Elliott Gould and Julie Christie around Nashville) appears in this opening shot, pitching a movie idea with Patricia Resnick, another screenwriter who'd worked on Altman's "3 Women" (uncredited) and "A Wedding" -- as well as the hit comedy "Nine to Five," starring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton. As Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) paraphrases their pitch, it's like "The Gods Must Be Crazy" except that the Coke bottle is a television actress -- to be played by Julia Roberts (everybody's first choice in 1992), or perhaps Goldie Hawn. Buck Henry pitches... a preposterous sequel: "The Graduate, Part 2."
The unease builds. Annie Ross (the jazz singer from Lambert, Hendricks and Ross who would appear with Lori Singer in one part of Altman's next project, the Raymond Carver adaptation "Short Cuts") is one of the executives who discuss rumors that Larry Levy may displace Griffin Mill. Jeremy Piven (Ari Gold on HBO's "Entourage") plays a nervous tour guide showing a group of Japanese (investors?) around the lot. This was shortly after the unthinkable had happened in Hollywood, and a Japanese company, Sony, had purchased Columbia and Tri-Star Pictures and moved their headquarters into the Irving Thalberg building on the old MGM lot in Culver City. The company became known as Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1991.
Finally, Alan Rudolph, longtime Altman associate (background director on "Nashville"!) and the director of such films as "Choose Me," "Trouble in Mind," "The Moderns" and "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" -- although Jimmy the errand boy mistakes him for Martin Scorsese -- pitches something he describes as a kind of "Ghost" meets "The Manchurian Candidate" -- but with heart. He says he thinks he can talk to Bruce Willis about starring. Indeed, just the year before Rudolph had stepped in to finish the Willis-Demi Moore thriller "Mortal Thoughts" after differences with the previous director had caused the studio to shut down production.
And there are hints of actual violence. When Jimmy has his off-camera collision with a golf cart, we first glimpse the vaguely threatening, handwritten postcard ("Your Hollywood is Dead"*) that troubles Griffin in his final pitch meeting, with Alan Rudolph. The shot ends with him looking out the window, over his shoulder. And that's the way he'll feel for the rest of the picture... until things come full circle.
(NOTE: Not all of the frame grabs above are presented in chronological order.)
* When I interviewed Altman for "The Player," Hollywood was still thriving and he seemed cautiously optimistic about his own future making movies. (Indeed, he proved to be on the verge of a career renaissance that would include "Short Cuts," "Kansas City," "Gosford Park" and "A Prairie Home Companion.") He said he'd simply come to realize that he and the Hollywood studios were not in the same business. They made their pictures; he made his.
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Woody Allen's "Another Woman" (1988) begins with a shot that is the whole movie in miniature. As followers of the Opening Shots Project know, that's one of my favorite approaches, and I think "Another Woman" is one of Allen's best movies.
A woman (Marion Post, played by Gena Rowlands) appears at the far end of a dark hallway and strides toward the camera, passing in and out of light. She is wearing a long coat, and she puts a scarf around her shoulders as she walks. She's a woman who knows where she's going. We don't get a good look at her until she moves into medium close-up, adjusts an earring and comes face to face with herself in the mirror. (Bergman reference intentional.) Her reflection is obscured from our point of view, but for a moment we see her look directly into her own eyes.
Marion, who has recently turned 50, thinks she knows herself and what kind of life she has led. But what she encounters when she steps out the door will overturn her establish notions of who she is and what she has done with her life: her memories of the past, her marriages, her lovers, her friendships, her relationships with her own family... Everything she though was solid and certain is swept out from under her feet and she goes into free-fall. With wit and insight, the movie details her unexpected investigation into what she's made of herself. And as the illusions crumble around her, she notices her mother's tear stains on the last line of a favorite poem, Rainer Maria Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," which reads: "... for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."
The opening shot is accompanied by Marion's voiceover, placing us inside her head from the start: "If someone had asked me when I reached my fifties to assess my life, I would have said that I had achieved a decent measure of fulfillment both personally and professionally. Beyond that, I would say, I don't choose to delve. Not that I was afraid of uncovering some dark side of my character. [Cut to straight-on close-up -- more or less from the mirror's point of view.] But I always feel that if something seems to be working, leave it alone." The movie is the journey from there to the final image in which, adjusting to a new understanding of herself, she is no longer in motion, but seen in a moment of reflection with just the hint of a wistful smile on her lips: "... and I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you've lost."
(The film's language is quite stylized -- deliberately stilted, but also playful in the ways it reveals the characters while subtly undermining their seriousness. It's almost like a psychology department academese via Mamet.)
Allen is known for building time into his production schedules for extensive re-shoots. (The film before this one, 1987's "September" was entirely re-shot and partially re-cast after Allen didn't like.) Because his films are so modestly budgeted, he can usually afford to work this way. The opening of "Another Woman" is so note-perfect, however, that I was surprised to learn that the writer-director couldn't decide how to start it. According to an article at the Turner Classic Movies web site, which quotes interviews with producer Robert Greenhut and production manager Joe Hartwich in Julian Fox's book, "Woody: Movies From Manhattan":
Allen also changed his mind several times about the film's opening. At one point he wanted a tracking shot to follow Marion walking down the street carrying groceries for her new apartment. After crews spent two hours setting up track for the camera shot, Allen changed his mind. Instead of the outdoor shot, the film opens with Marion in her apartment.
Well, he found the right solution. "Another Woman" begins as it has to. The image feels... inevitable.
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From Nathan Marone:
It begins high above Union Square in San Francisco and by the time it ends, nearly three minutes later, the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film, "The Conversation", will hone in on one as-yet-unidentified man.
The slow descending zoom, looking down at a cheerful park, full of people, seems at first unobtrusive. Credits roll in the lower right corner of the frame, directing our gaze to the sunlit left hand side. Here, from a distance, we are able to observe a wide variety of people, but it is a very active mime that commands the most attention. All of this seems very normal until about the 1:15 mark, when a strange bleeping noise disorients the viewer. It comes and goes quickly, but will return, unexplained, several times throughout the shot.
This sound is our first indicator that something more than casual observation or location setup may be going on here. The second indicator comes when the camera intentionally settles on the action of the mime, who soon begins to follow and imitate a middle aged man dressed in a grey raincoat. The camera stays with these two for a little while. The mime continues his act while the man is totally dismissive. Soon the mime gives up on the uninterested man and steps out of the frame, leaving the camera to hold on him until the shot is over.
The sequence of shots that follows informs us that the strange bleeps we heard in the opening shot were sound interference captured from a long-range microphone. It becomes apparent now that the cameras slow zoom in the opening shot is a stand in for the microphone, a tool for surveillance that will factor greatly in the following narrative. We also learn the identity of the man in the grey raincoat. He is Harry Caul, an independent surveillance man and protagonist of this film. Putting these two pieces of information into the equation reveals the diabolical nature of our opening shot. Harry is be being observed by Coppola's camera -- by us, the viewers of "The Conversation" -- unbeknownst to himself. The tools for spying that he uses literally double back on him as he goes about his work on what will be one of the most significant jobs of his life.
Throughout the rest of "The Conversation" the camera will assume the cool observational tone found in the opening shot. This mood, or style, will continually reflect upon Harry's world of privacy, spying, and self-imposed isolation. The camera itself will trap Harry, leaving him all the more vulnerable because he is alone.
JE: Thanks, Nathan. This is another terrific example of those "What are we looking at?" opening shots that teach us how to watch the movie to come. Your eye is free to wander and pick out details in the shot: the dogs, the old lady with the purse, the blind man, the black dude with the afro, the panhandler... all part of the mise-en-scene on the sunlit left side of the frame, the primary composing space here. Before we're even introduced to Harry Caul (though, conceivably, he could be in the lower left corner in the first few frames of the shot, only to be reintroduced later), before we know anything about him, we're effectively inside his head. He's a surveillance expert, a private spy, and the viewer becomes one, too -- scanning the image, listening intently to the multi-layered soundtrack, and putting them both together to decipher pieces of information. What we don't know (and neither does Harry, until the end of the movie) is the larger context for what we're seeing and hearing...
]]>From Gavin Breeden, Charlotte, NC:
When I think of great opening shots, my mind quickly goes to Francois Truffaut's 1959 masterpiece, "Les Quatre Cents Coups" (aka "The 400 Blows"). I may have to break the rules a bit here and consider the entire opening credits sequence rather than the first shot though I think Truffaut would approve since he broke many cinematic conventions of his day with this film.
"The 400 Blows" fades in on a traveling shot down a Parisian street. The Eiffel Tower can be seen in the distance over a few rooftops and the viewer's attention is naturally drawn to it throughout the opening sequence. The camera moves down the street and towards the Eiffel Tower until it is blocked from view by a building. Then the film cuts to a new tracking shot which seems to be slightly closer to the Tower. The camera is still focused on the Eiffel Tower, though the tracking direction now runs parallel to it rather than toward it. Several more traveling shots follow in which the Tower gets closer and the camera seems to be moving in a circular motion around it through the streets of Paris. (The camera seems a bit like the POV of a child riding in a car around Paris-- attention always fixated on the Tower which dominates the skyline.) Finally, there is yet another traveling shot from the street running directly next to the Tower (almost under it). Just as the Tower is centered in the frame, "Mise en Scene de Francois Truffaut" appears near the top of the screen and for a split second the words are perfectly centered in the shot. After this the there are a few tracking shots of the camera moving away from the Tower.
JE: Thanks, Gavin. I like your description of the shot/sequence being seen through the eyes of a child. The music -- a melody of childlike simplicity over which a wave of romantic strings occasionally wash, like the sea in the final shot -- certainly suggests as much. And the freedom suggested by the movement of the opening contrasts with the movement of the final shot, which tracks Antoine Doinel to the edge of the ocean, and then zooms (as if trying to find some other way to keep moving) into a freeze-frame when the boy has run out of room to run...
The opening shot of the film proper would make a fine subject, as well: Looking over a schoolboy's shoulder as he opens up his desk and passes a girlie calendar across the room to Antoine, who draws on it, gets caught by the teacher, is told to go stand in the corner behind a chalkboard, and makes a face at the class as he disappears behind it -- all in one effortless long take.
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