Opening Shots Project

Opening Shots: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Jim Emerson

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From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:

Seemingly too easy of a choice, this film’s first shot meets your criteria perfectly. After a slightly creepy overture, we are blessed with shot of a barely visible moon. It slowly moves down as the earth rises above it, and even more distant, the sun rises above the earth.

All of this happens as “Also sprach Zarathustra” beams in the background, a song and tone poem based on a book that spoke about the journey in the evolution from ape to man to superman. Already, Kubrick is telling us exactly what will happen in the next couple of hours with just the music. The visuals are telling us exactly how his film should be approached: as a slow but massive epic, a film with concepts and visuals that should be pondered and revered, much like one is awed when looking up at the heavens. As an added bonus, the final shot in the film uses the first shot and takes it to the next level.

JE: Right you are, Jonathan. Kubrick composed his films with a thoroughly musical technique unlike any other director I can think of. (I’ve said it before: “Eyes Wide Shut” is ridiculous if seen as a straight narrative [it is, after all, based on a “Traumnovella” — or, “Dream Story”]; it’s magnificent when you look at it as a musical composition, using imagey the way musicians use sounds — thematic statements, colors, tempos, structure, repetition, development, variation…)

When we see the image of the planets and the monolith in alignment at the beginning of the film’s last movement (the psychedelic star trip into inner/outer space), we have that momentous sense that this is the climax of the picture, and it could take us anywhere — even if we don’t understand exactly what’s going on. And then, in the last few moments of the film, the spherical, planet-sized Star Child drifts into view…

I saw “2001” at the Cinerama Theater in Seattle when I was 10 years old. My life has never been the same since. Kubrick finds expression for the mystery and awe of being alive in this universe, at this time, by invoking images of the unimaginably distant past (“The Dawn of Man”) and the unimaginably near future (“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite”).

Opening Shots: ‘The Crying Game’

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Your eye just naturally alights on the figure to the right of the support…

Enlarge image: …who moves slowly along the shore in the opposite direction of the camera. (Here, the person is dead center in the frame.)

From Edward Copeland:

When Jim asked me to submit something about my favorite opening shot from a movie, I was at first flummoxed — it seemed all the best ones were obvious and would have been written on to death, so I dug through my memory to try to find a less-obvious choice.

What I settled on was “The Crying Game.” I was fortunate to see “The Crying Game” for the first time long before the hype about the “twist” kicked in, so I was genuinely surprised at the direction the film went in and I think, upon rewatching its opening, that the beginning was helpful to that end.

Percy Sledge’s great “When a Man Loves a Woman” plays on the soundtrack (the irony of that song will only sink in later) as the camera moves slowly under a bridge across a lake where on the other side sits an amusement park with Ferris wheels and various rides going round and round. If you had no idea going in where this film was headed, you certainly couldn’t have figured it out by these images, though you’d be mesmerized nonetheless.

Opening Shots: Le Samourai

Jim Emerson

From Brandon Colvin, Out 1:

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The opening shot of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir masterpiece “Le Samouraï” establishes the tone of Melville’s contemplative crime film, defines its amoral protagonist Jef Costello (Alain Delon), and introduces the connections between Costello, a hired assassin, and the concept of the Japanese samurai, particularly the ronin, or masterless samurai. The nearly three-minute shot maintains a simple but wonderfully expressive composition throughout, remaining within the drab gray-blue confines of Jef’s apartment.

Jef lies stiffly on his white mattress with black polka dots in the bottom right corner of the frame. Two windows, overflowing with soft light, balance the composition by providing visual anchors in the center of the frame. Jeff’s pet bird chirps away in his birdcage, resting on a table centered between the two windows. Chairs and dressers crowd the outskirts of the frame, completing the layout of Jef’s ascetically simple, disciplined apartment. For minutes, the only sound is the constant drizzle of rain outside the windows and the intermittent whooshing of cars on the street below, punctuated by the light cries of Jef’s bird. Jef’s lights a cigarette and when he puffs, the smoke floats up softly, stagnating in the light of the windows, rolling around as if trying to escape. The completely still shot seems as if it’s attempting to emulate the frozen camera of Ozu. Jef lies with solemnity and his imprisonment in his dreary apartment is analogous to the situation of his caged bird.

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Following the credits, text appears in the top right corner of the shot. The text reads, “There is no greater solitude than that of a samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle . . . perhaps . . .” The quote is attributed to Bushido (Book of Samurai), which Melville fabricated for the film, and illustrates the connection between Jef’s disciplined isolation and the social exile experienced by great warriors, like samurai. Particularly interesting is the connection between Jef and ronin, or masterless samurai. Ronin are noted in Japanese storytelling for their lack of morality and existential listlessness, caring for themselves above all and feeling no loyalty to exterior forces. Jef exemplifies this sort of selfish existence, which, as with the ronin, fates him to a sense of dread and, ultimately, death.

Opening Shots: Zodiac

Jim Emerson

View image Opening shot: Above it all.

View image Second shot: A street in a neighborhood: Vallejo, CA – July 4, 1969. Music: “Easy to be Hard,” from “Hair.”

It’s probably the second shot of David Fincher’s “Zodiac” that you remember best: the linear, smooth-gliding traveling shot (out the passenger window from within the car that will be the site of the movie’s first “Zodiac Killer” murder) through a suburban neighborhood on July 4, 1969.

View image What is this boy running from — or to?

The first shot is a simple (if breathtakingly beautiful) aerial establishing shot, of the sort that will be used repeatedly to introduce timecoded segments throughout the rest of the movie. We won’t know it until the next shot, but the fireworks we see are exploding over Vallejo, CA. From above, we get a sense of the terrain — the bridge over the river, the cityscape stretching into the distance. Nobody in the movie gets to see this Big Picture this way. Everyone is limited to looking at events from ground level, trying to map out the larger view, one piece at a time, in their heads.

View image The kid approaches the car and his face appears in the (window) frame.

View image Same “kid,” last frame.

This is a movie about maps, about time and place and getting from one point to another and how long it takes to get there and whose jurisdiction events fall within. It is, as I’ve written before, an analog movie set in an analog world. It is about, and made up of, an obsession with details — an investigation into our need as pattern-seeking animals to understand and make sense of the evidence we observe or uncover or have delivered to us by phone or mail or courier (but only rarely by fax). The Zodiac Killer proved elusive in large part because he didn’t stick to his patterns. In so doing, he sent police and newspapermen scurrying all over the map, and they kept losing him in the details. (See also: Hurdy Gurdys and Aqua Velvas: Misc. “Zodiac” fax….)

View image Noticing what is in front of one’s nose: “This can no longer be ignored. What is it?”

View image A typical “Zodiac” establishing shot, marking the temporal and geographical coordinates, as if putting a pushpin in a map of time and space: “September 14, 1972 – Santa Rosa, CA – Sunset Trailer Park – Space A-7.” What do all these details add up to?

The film’s other establishing shots may be aerial views or more conventional exteriors or wide-shot interiors, but they accomplish the same purpose: to place the next piece of action in a particular time and place in relation to the previous one. The movie’s second shot — from the street, but with glimpses of the fireworks overhead connecting it to the first — shows a neat row of subdivision houses. The parallel motion of the camera emphasizes the geometric orderliness of the setting, but there are glimpses of life in passing property as we glide by — but there’s also something a little creepy about them: a kid entering a house, a girl with a sparkler, a cone fountain (“CAUTION: Emits shower of sparks”) erupting in a front yard, a man with a Weber, a family congregating in the rear of a driveway/alley…. The shot ends when the camera stops in front of a house and a boy runs from the front steps, down the sidewalk, and into view from the driver’s POV. His face, framed in the car window, the first we see clearly in the film, will also be the last shot in the movie. That will be years later, and this boy will be a different person. “Zodiac” traces the distance from this face to that one. His face is one of the movie’s maps or cryptograms.

Opening Shots: The Producers (1968)

Jim Emerson

From Raymond Ogilvie:

“The Producers,” Mel Brooks first film, uses its first shot to break taboo by sexualizing old women. The character Max Bialystock is based on a producer Brooks worked for as a young man. This producer would, like Max, make love with old women to get funding for his plays. But Mel Brooks, whose films “rise below vulgarity,” doesn’t end his taboo-breaking here. He goes on to apply the same gleeful irreverence to ex-Nazis, homosexuals, and voluptuous foreign blonds. Indeed, if the studio had not objected, Brooks would have called this movie “Springtime for Hitler.”

Cold open on a frosted glass window with the legend, “Max Bialystock, Theatrical Producer.” Behind the glass, two silhouettes kiss and giggle mischievously. The man, the taller of the two, excuses himself for a moment, putting up his finger to tell the woman to keep quiet. Slowly he cracks open the door and peeks out. Here is Max Bialystock, theatrical producer, played by the tall, portly comic actor Zero Mostel. He’s checking to see that there are no witnesses to his clandestine love affair.

Opening Shots: ‘Greetings’

Jim Emerson

The public and the private, the personal and the political: Although this isn’t precisely the opening shot of “Greetings” described here, it’s part of it, showing the same TV, the same book and the same coffee pot in the same apartment. Frame grabs to come…

Excerpt from my programme notes for a double-bill of “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!” — the first presentation in a Brian De Palma series programmed by R.C. Dale at the University of Washington, April 14, 1981:

…. “Greetings,” De Palma’s 1968 anti-military/anti-war movie mélange, was the first of his films to find an audience. In fact, it was so successful that “Hi, Mom!” was conceived as a sequel (originally to be called “Son of Greetings”). “Greetings” is an ebullient comedy, and a brazenly disturbing mixture of movie-movie acrobatics and American counter-culture politics in the manner of pre-l968 Godard. Critics have emphasized over and over De Palma’s debt to filmmakers such as Godard and (especially over-emphasized) Alfred Hitchcock. In “Greetings,” Michelangelo Antontoni’s “Blow Up,” another hip youth-cult film of the time, also looms large. But the filmmaker whose specter really presides over this film is that of Abraham Zapruder, the man who made the most famous home movie of the Kennedy assassination at Dealy Plaza.

The first thing we see in DePalma’s movie is a television set carrying a speech by President Johnson. In front of the set sits a book: “Six Seconds in Dallas.” “Greetings,” made five years after the assassination, is a picture of a nation obsessed with six seconds of 8 mm Kodak movie film. Right away, De Palma begins detailing the dissolution of the barrier between the personal and the political in American society; just as, in this and subsequent films, he will dissolve the barrier between the film and the audience, between horror and humor, between public and private.

Opening Shots: ‘Slacker’

Jim Emerson

View image: To sleep, perchance to dream…

View image: The dreamer awakes.

View image: Meanwhile, on the other side of the world… (From the opening shot of “Lost in Translation.”)

Does this shot look uncannily familiar? A man asleep, or almost asleep, with his head against a window as the twilight world outside floats by. This one’s from Richard Linklater’s “Slacker,” but we’ve also featured a similar opening shot from Sophia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.”

I love the way the window, besides being a frame within a frame (suggesting a slightly fuzzy, abstracted reality in the background that’s distinct from, but related to, what we’re seeing in the foreground), is almost like a cartoon dialogue bubble, but instead of words it’s filled with images. A dream, perhaps? It certainly has a dreamlike quality. And, of course, the sleeper/dreamer in this shot is the filmmaker himself, Richard Linklater. And the movie we’re about to see is filled with stream-of-consciousness monologues and long, winding shots that drift from one character to another until the very end when some kids throw the camera itself off a cliff. Linklater (unlike Bill Murray in Coppola’s movie) is on the right of the frame, with the window images moving from left to right. Linklater’s face is on the strong axis, in terms of traditional composition, and the flow of motion seems natural and unforced, kind of like the path-of-least-resistance flow of the whole movie. Murray, on the left with the images moving right to left (against the way we Westerners read) seems to be swimming upstream in an Eastern world. (Speaking of upstream: You rarely see images of spawning salmon leaping left to right; upstream always seems to be right to left. See “My Own Private Idaho.”)

Opening Shots: ‘Ghost World’

Jim Emerson

From Robb Hamilton, Seattle, WA:

A few weeks ago I took my kids to see “Cars” at a theater off Aurora Avenue in Seattle. Aurora would be a perfect setting for a Clowes/Zwigoff picture: seedy motels, diners, people waiting for buses, adult book stores, etc. We were seeing the movie a week or two after it opened so the crowds had died down. The cast of characters in the lobby getting snacks (the overweight family loading up on jumbo popcorn, the chaperone with the retarded kids, the guy with the NASCAR hat) made me remark to my wife that I felt like i was in a Dan Clowes comic.

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The opening shots of “Ghost World” cut back and forth between “Jaan Pehachaan Ho” from the Bollywood movie “Gumnaam” and a camera movement to the back of Enid’s apartment building. We find out at the end of the shot that the movie is playing on Enid’s TV. Terry Zwigoff does a great job of capturing Dan Clowes’ style as well as Enid’s character. All of the inhabitants in the apartments seem brain dead, while Enid’s apartment is pink and blue, filled with thrift store finds, toys and a Pufnstuf poster. Later in the movie Enid is eventually able to escape the dead end that is her life. The opening shots of “Ghost World” drop you right into the pages of a Dan Clowes comic book and more importantly shows the juxtaposition between Enid and her surroundings.

An alley off Aurora Avenue North near 80th — east side of street. Residential facilities on the right; a structure housing the Baseball Barber Shop on the left. Keep heading north for lots, lots more… (A9 Local Search)

JE: Muchas gracias, Hammy! (I recently wrote an appreciation of “Jaan Pehachaan Ho” here.) As you know, I love Aurora and consider it the greatest street in the entire world. (Sorry, State Street — Seattle’s my kinda town.) My theory is that every town in America has an Aurora Avenue (the old Highway 99), a main commercial drag (possibly the former primary arterial route) that takes you past parks, parking lots, and used car lots, and is littered with establishments where merchants provide for the exchange of goods and services of every conceivable type — from birth (diaper services) to death (funeral homes, cemetaries). In LA, it’s Pico Boulevard. In Spokane, I suppose it’s Division. Anybody reading this should know the clogged arterial in their particular burgh. What’s yours? (BTW, if you want to take a simulated drive down Aurora, you can do so right now, thanks to Amazon’s fantastic A9 Local Search, which photographs both sides of streets to help you find just the merchants with the goods and services you require. Here it is: Seattle’s Aurora Avenue North, between Green Lake (and Woodland Park) and 80th.)

The way I look at this opening is much like you describe. The first two shots are really a “title card,” because they are really a suggested frame-within-the-frame image of “Gumnaam” playing on TV (although we don’t know that yet). After the title appears, there’s the first shot proper: a great image down the side of an apartment complex, with the silhouettes of wires and ceramic insulators in the foreground. In the windows receding into the distance, we see the flickering of light from cathode-ray tubes. The camera begins to move toward them. Although the rest of the sequence involves cutting back and forth between “Jaan Pehachaan Ho” and shots that slide past and peer into those windows, it feels like one continuous camera movement. I’ve said it before: It perfectly legitimate to talk about the context for these Opening Shots — as Robert Horton also does for “Cutter’s Way.” More images after the jump…

Opening Shots: ‘Raw Meat’

Jim Emerson

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They don’t grind ’em out like “Raw Meat” anymore. I don’t know if horror movies will ever seem as seedy as they did in the first half of the 1970s, when even the emulsion itself seemed to carry dread and disease. In this British horror-thriller, released in the UK as “Death Line” and directed by Gary Sherman (“Dead & Buried”), there’s Something in the Underground. Yes, there’s a through-line to “The Descent” here. And Guillermo Del Toro (“Cronos,” “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Pan’s Labyrinth”) considers it one of his favorites.

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A Semi-Important Brit (with mustache and bowler hat) is seen checking out various porn shops and strip clubs in a seamy area of London, before descending into subway where he attempts to pick up a prostitute and is then found dead. That begins an investigation by Inspector Calhoun (a tartly over-caffeinated Donald Pleasence) and long-suffering Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington — the put-upon manager, Norm, from “A Hard Day’s Night”). Christopher Lee also appears as an MI5 operative, doing what seems to be a nutty send-up of Patrick MacNee’s Steed on “The Avengers.”

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The opening shot itself begins with an out-of-focus blur of colors, accompanied by a dirty, grinding, sluggish, metallic guitar/bass/drums riff that sounds like Angelo Badalamenti’s score for the endless-nightmare Roadhouse scene in David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks; Fire Walk with Me.” As the image comes into focus we see a Magritte-like silhouette of a British gent looking at dirty magazines. Then the shot goes out of focus again. The pattern is repeated throughout the titles sequence as the naughty fellow visits one unseemly establishment after another: out of focus (indistinguishable, unidentifiable); then in focus (ah, that’s what we’re seeing/where we are); then back out again. And, wouldn’t you know it, that’s the shape of the mystery (and the investigation) itself: Someone’s whereabouts are unknown. Then he is seen. Then he disappears. The aim is to fill in those out-of-focus parts, to figure out where he came from, how he got there, and where he went.

I’m sure “Raw Meat” is not as shocking as it must have seemed in 1972, but Sherman’s use of real, atmospheric locations is still eerily effective. And for fans of long takes, this guy loves ’em! There are whole stretches where the camera simply prowls around underground, revealing its horrors one by one. The film was cut for its original release in the UK — some gore, a bit with a rat’s head, an attempted rape — and wasn’t passed by the censors until the DVD release in 2006.

Opening Shots: Keep ’em coming!

Jim Emerson

It’s really not that difficult.

I’ll be publishing your Opening Shots submissions all this week. And I’ll provide the answers to both my Opening Shots Pop Quizzes (and further appreciations of the shots themselves) on Friday or over the weekend. While nobody’s correctly identified all the shots on either of the quizzes, all shots except one have been identified by at least one person. The Most Mysterious Shot: Number 8 on Quiz #2. Also, I thought some of the images were showing up dark on my desktop PC (though not on my PowerBook), so I lightened ’em up a bit.

Remember, send quiz entries and your nominations for great Opening Shots (along with your explanations for why they work at setting up the film) to jim at scannersblog dot com. (Link above.)

Also, if you want to discuss individual shots, I’ve enabled Comments on some of these new posts. I still have to approve them before they’re published (Sun-Times policy), but I’m hoping it will help generate more lively and informative discussion hereabouts.

Opening Shots: ‘Stranger Than Paradise’

Jim Emerson

View image Eva in The New World.

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From Christopher Long, Reviewer and Features Editor, DVDTown.com:

In terms of narrative structure, the opening shot of Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger than Paradise” is a perfect “mini-movie.” The film opens with a shot of Eva (Eszter Balint, seen from behind) standing to the far right of the frame; in the background, we see a plane park on an airport runway. Eva watches a plane land, very slowly picks up her luggage (a ratty suitcase and a shopping bag), turns around (glancing around in almost a full circle) then walks (again, very slowly) left and towards the camera until she exits the frame.

The shot lingers, however, long after Eva has departed to witness the parked plane as it begins its takeoff. Here is the entire story laid out in miniature: “Stranger Than Paradise” begins with an arrival by plane (Eva coming to America from Hungary) and ends with a departure by plane (Willie [John Lurie] flying to Budapest).

Opening Shots: ‘Primer’

Jim Emerson

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Shane Carruth’s ingenious “Primer” (2004) offers a textbook example, if you will, of a “What are we looking at?” opening shot. Linear and rectangular or trapezoidal patterns of light dot the dark screen. Then the irregular, vaguely chevron-shaped object at the top of the frame flickers, illuminates, and… we see we’re inside a residential garage, near the ceiling, looking at the door, which begins to lift to the accompaniment of odd, but still somewhat familiar, electronic and metallic/mechanical sounds. Even once we know what it is, something about it feels like science fiction — as though this door were opening up to a new dimension or something. The next shot orients us: a more conventional exterior establishing shot, showing the grinding, squealing door from the outside and four young men walking into the space. This is the (twisted, inside-out) story of these garage-based tech entrepreneurs, and they won’t understand what they’re seeing, either, when they accidentally invent and/or discover something incredible in that unassuming structure. Or, maybe, they already have… — JE

Opening Shots: ‘Quills’

Jim Emerson

From Jeff Levin, Rochester, NY:

I’ve never seen an opening tighter or more ingeniously structured than the one for Philip Kaufman’s “Quills.” It’s an opening that flips from dreamy to nightmarish and completely changes the nature of what you think you’re initially observing, all the while quickly and efficiently familiarizing viewers with the persona of the of the protagonist.

That protagonist would be a one Marquis De Sade, brilliantly played in the movie by Geoffrey Rush in an Oscar-nominated role. Starting with a black screen, you hear him announce that he has a “naughty��? tale to tell, one “guaranteed to stimulate the senses.��? He then begins by announcing that the tale is about an aristocrat named Mademoiselle Renare, as soft music begins to play and the visage of a dreamy looking young woman appears on the screen. You then see an erotic expression come over her face as the Marquis describes how her sexual proclivities “ran the gamut from winsome to bestial.��?

But suddenly, you see a man’s hand come into the picture … then two hands … then the man himself, a brute wearing a hooded mask. The Marquis continues, “Until one day … Mademoiselle found herself at the mercy of a man every bit as perverse as she. A man whose skill at the art of pain exceeded ever her own.��? The man then begins tying her hands as she pleads for mercy. Looking up at a window, she suddenly notices a figure looking down at the proceedings and it’s … the Marquis himself. It’s at this point that you realize that you’re not seeing a story acted out — you’re seeing what inspired it in the first place: mass executions during the French Revolution.

Opening Shots Project: Pop Quiz

Jim Emerson

It feels like an unbroken stream (of consciousness)…

We’ve received some terrific contributions to the Open Shot Project. Thank you so very much. And please keep ’em coming in. (And tell your cinemaniacal friends.) I’m going to start posting them next week. But remember: We’re talking about single opening takes, not entire sequences or montages. Doesn’t matter if the image comes before, during, or after the titles — just as long as it’s the first image. (Of course, the first shot of a montage could be significant and wonderful and worth considering on its own, especially when you consider how the succeeding images build upon what it establishes.) I’d even include this shot from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” because, although it is really a combination of layered opticals, it gives the illusion of being a single, unbroken take — no clear cuts, just a lot of overlapping fade-ins, fade-outs and dissolves.

Today, I’ve decided to offer a little pop quiz. What follows after the jump are single frame-grabs from some of my favorite opening shots in some of my favorite movies from the ’20s to the ’00s — some famous, some fairly obscure. I don’t necessarily expect anybody to get them all (unless they know me personally!), but see what you can do. In most cases, the frames are taken from the first second or two of the shot. Some shots last only a few seconds, others a minute or more, and some begin as dissolves out of the opening titles. Keep in mind that filmmakers often like to hit you with a distorted image you can’t quite make out — an extreme close-up, or a reflection, or a shot from a peculiar angle — just to grab your attention and pull you in. Ready? Begin…

Opening Shots: ‘Fight Club’

Jim Emerson

View image: From synapses deep inside the brain…

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View image: … out through a sweaty pore…

From Robert Humanick, a film odyssey:

I’m not sure if this applies to the “opening shot” rules, in that it is included as part of the opening credits, as well as the fact that it was digitally rendered (some people are picky about such things). But having already read (and agreed with) many of the other submitted choices (particularly “Aguirre,” my personal favorite), I felt this one needed a voice of its own.

“Fight Club” opens from remote darkness into unrestrained chaos, the camera pulling back at near-breakneak speed out of an unknown quarter through various layers of strangely textured substances, the frantic nature compounded by the Dust Brothers’ pulse-techno soundtrack. Ultimately, the microscopic journey reveals itself to have been taking place within the brain of the film’s unnamed main character (Edward Norton). The point-of-view shot exits his body through a pore on his face (a bead of sweat rolling down from it just as the camera retracts from the skin), pulling further back over more differing terrains to ultimately reveal a hazy human figure. Just as the picture comes into focus, revealing the figure to be at the mercy of the film’s quasi-villian (who has a gun shoved mercilessly into his mouth), the recurring voiceover begins: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden.”

Opening Shots Project Index

Jim Emerson

A little beyond the first anniversary of the Opening Shots Project, I figured it was past time to compile a handy, one-page index to all the contributions. The Opening Shots category page takes forever to load, so now you can bring up a handy single-page list (just click “continue reading” to get the whole thing). The Opening Shots Index can always be found in the Categories listing at right.

Oh, and the Opening Shots Project itself isn’t over, not by a long shot!

Introductory posts:

(Introduction) Movies 101: The Opening Shots Project

Opening Shots Lexicon

Opening Shots Project: Pop Quiz

Quiz 2: 10 Easy Pieces (+2)

David Bordwell on establishing shots — and Opening Shots

Opening Shots: Quiz 2: 10 Easy Pieces (+2)

Jim Emerson

Set your timers — it’ll be a blast!

OK, I know the Opening Shots Pop Quiz is difficult — mainly because, even though many of the movies are famous (or by famous directors), they’re very personal favorites of mine that most people wouldn’t necessarily think of right off the bat.

So, I thought I’d do another one that didn’t require so much detective work. It’s also a kind of companion to my 101 102 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, in that these are 10 11 of the most celebrated films, and most famous opening shots, ever (plus one relatively obscure one by a favorite director of mine who also has a shot on the OS Pop Quiz — a little extra hint. Another clue about that one [BONUS #2] here).

So, not only should you have seen all these movies (and you probably have), I hope you won’t have too much difficulty remembering these classic opening shots, and why they’re great. Feel free to send in your answers via the e-mail link above — along with your comments. I’ll publish the first correct answer, and any of the interesting comments you have about the shots themselves. Just click the link below and start the clock ticking…