Opening Shots Project

Opening Shots: The Conversation

Jim Emerson

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.

Opening Shots: ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’

Jim Emerson

View image

“But I do want to say something about imagination purely as a tool in the art and science of scaring the crap out of people… You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible,” the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.”

— Stephen King, “Danse Macabre” (1987)

View image

Peter Weir’s 1975 “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is masterpiece of horror, but not in the way you might think. There are no monstrous bugs of any sort — except for the usual (tiny) ants that plague just about any picnic. “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is a perfect thriller because (like “Twin Peaks,” another symphony of anguish over Not Knowing) it’s about effect of Mystery on the human imagination — not just the ache of the Unknown, but the terror, and torture, of the Unknowable. Is there anything more horrible for the mind to contemplate than a mystery with no satisfactory solution? It’s more than the psyche can bear…

View image

And it’s all set up right here, in what is undoubtedly a series of nearly imperceptible dissolves (perhaps combined with optical work): A rock in the outback remote wilderness (premonitions of Ayers’ Rock and Fred Schepisi’s “A Cry in the Dark”?) that stays utterly still, yet shifts and changes. First, we see the black trees in the red foreground. Then the rock appears, hovering over the landscape. Next, fog obscures the foreground and the rock appears to be floating (hanging?) on a cushion of mist. How much time has elapsed between each of these views? Minutes? Hours? Days? Just when you think you know what you’re seeing, it becomes something slightly different. You can’t quite pin it down. It’s … unsettling, disorienting…

Zamfir’s primitive-sounding pan flute reverberates in the air. It’s an ominous beginning and we’re tempted to feel, like Roy Neary would about another rock formation in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” a few years later, that this means something. But what if it doesn’t?

Opening Shots: ‘Man Push Cart’

Jim Emerson

A cacophonous industrial noise fills the darkness, illuminated by what seems to be some kind of flashing safety light behind a divider of scuffed, semi-opaque plastic strips. They ripple and part and a man appears — his legs in tattered jeans, seen only from the waist down — carrying a tank of propane.

It’s a neo-Bressonian opening if there ever was one — no music, just the legs, a man doing some kind of work. The man, as it turns out, is engaged in a Sisyphean labor, operating a breakfast pushcart in midtown Manhattan. He’s a Pakistani immigrant and, as he soon realizes, a Middle Eastern man toting a tank of gas in New York makes some people nervous.

I saw Ramin Bahrani’s “Man Push Cart” at Roger Ebert’s 2006 “Overlooked Film Festival,” and fell in love with it — even more so about two seconds after it ended — on exactly the perfect note. It’s that kind of film, one that gets under your skin as you watch it, and then stays with you. It’s been months since I’ve seen it, but I still think about it and want to revisit it.

I’m looking forward to writing about “Man Push Cart” in detail, when it opens in theaters in September. The three best films I’ve seen in 2006 so far (in the order in which I saw them) are “Man Push Cart,” “A Prairie Home Companion” and “The Descent” — three unique, personal visions of three distinct worlds. I’m very happy to report that Ramin, a self-described “movie geek” who really knows his stuff, is currently shooting his next film — and promises to contribute a favorite Opening Shot when production wraps. I’m exceptionally eager to see whatever he does next. 

Opening Shots: ‘Kiss Me Deadly’

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Slapping flesh and heavy breathing.

From Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun:

When reading the request for greatest opening shots, the first film that popped into my head was immediate and almost too easy — “Kiss Me Deadly.��?

And then I reflected more.

There are so many masterful opening shots, some I find works of genius or some I simply love. But the more I thought about it, the more I drifted back to where my mind always manages to drift back to — stark, hard-boiled cruelty, paranoia, insanity and psycho sexual angst — so there it was again, “Kiss Me Deadly.��?

But for good reason. Robert Aldrich’s masterful noir hits you with a hysterical bang that sets its frenzied tone with such balls-out experimental élan; you can’t believe the film was released in 1955:

Before any credit sequence, the film begins with a pair of naked feet running down the middle of a highway in the black of the night.

Opening Shots: ‘Juggernaut’

Jim Emerson

From Richard T. Jameson, Editor, Movietone News, 1971-81; Editor, Film Comment, 1990-2000:

The opening credits of Richard Lester’s “Juggernaut” (1974) play over a neutral backdrop that can just barely be detected as an undefined image rather than a simple blank screen. Whether it’s an out-of-focus image or something more elemental — say, the granules of the film emulsion itself — is hard to say. The basic color is a beige-y grey, with now and then the merest hint of a diagonal band of something warmer attempting to form across the frame. On the soundtrack are noises similarly difficult to ascertain; some suggest hammers falling, an unguessable project under construction, while in other select nanoseconds we seem to be listening to something beyond the normal range of hearing — the mutual brushing of atoms, perhaps, in an unimaginably microscopic space. In short, nothing; and the essence of everything.

The first shots cut in after the (swiftly flashed) credits have ended, and we get our worldly bearings. An oceanliner is preparing to depart an English port and, among other things, a dockside band is tuning up. I say “first shots,” but we won’t cheat: there can be only one opening shot, and it’s over with before we barely register it. And indeed, why register it? It’s nothing dramatic. Indeed, it’s barely informational. There are streamers, fluttering limply and unremarkably in the breeze. Send-off streamers; bon voyage and all that. Most of their brief time onscreen, they’re out of focus, because that’s a gentle way of easing us from the shimmering nothingness behind the credits and into the coherent imagery of a movie we are obliged to pay attention to. Besides, this is 1974, five years after cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs and “Easy Rider” had made rack focus a fashionable, sometimes almost fetishistic aspect of self-consciously contemporary moviemaking. (Not that Kovacs worked on “Juggernaut”: the DP is Gerry Fisher, working with Lester for the first and last time.) So out-of-focus and then in-focus streamers, no big whoop. And the movie moves on.

It’s only on a second viewing that these streamers may hit us like a fist in the chest. For the essence of the shot is that there are two streamers in particular traversing the frame in clarity. And one is red, one is blue.

Opening Shots: ‘Nights of Cabiria’

Jim Emerson

View image

View image

View image

From John Hartl, film critic for MSNBC, Seattle, WA:

“Nights of Cabiria��? (1957)

The opening scene in Federico Fellini’s greatest film presents a pattern that will be repeated in the story of Cabiria, a shrimpish streetwalker who is as feisty as she is gullible. She and her boyfriend of the moment, Giorgio, scamper across a vacant field in front of some appallingly character-less Roman apartments. She’s happy and uninhibited, but he seems impatient and calculating. As they approach a canal, he grabs her purse, shoves her in the water and runs away. A small boy hears her cries, and he and his friends rescue her just as she’s about to drown. Several adults join the rescue party, gracelessly turning her upside down as they expell the water she’s swallowed, and finally she starts breathing again. Offended and embarrassed by the kindness of strangers, she walks off in a huff.

Life rarely gets better for Cabiria, who doesn’t have much more luck in her dealings with celebrities, religion or a theatrical hypnosis session in which she bares her soul for an audience of still more strangers. Played with tremendous spirit by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina, she has a habit of falling for traitorous losers, throwing money at them, then waking up to find herself surrounded by people she’s never met. The opening scene is almost a prophecy, yet it’s never depressing because Cabiria doesn’t know how to give in to despair. In the end, she achieves a state of grace in the midst of her most ruinous folly.

Opening Shots: ‘Choose Me’

Jim Emerson

View image

View image

View image

It starts in the dark with a swirl of strings and then a blast of brass as the screen explodes into vivid neon pink. No movie has ever announced itself with a more sexually confidant and pulchritudinously entrancing opening shot than Alan Rudolph’s “Choose Me.” As Teddy Pendergrass purrs the song from which the movie gets its title (back-up girls: “You’re my choice tonight!”), we rack focus and pull back from a flashing neon sign for a nightclub called “eve’s LOUNGE.” Yellow arrows direct our gaze downward toward the awninged entrance. We tilt down, still floating above street level, as a man emerges, dancing to the music on the soundtrack, and enticing a woman (momentarily out of frame) to join him. She does, and we’re about ready to join them both. As we descend to street level, , he’s wrested away by another woman, leaving his initial partner leaning against a parked car (looks like a ’50s Chevy — metallic blue with a white top). This is when the title appears in lower-case pink-and-blue neon letters (the credits continue throughout).

Opening Shots Quiz 2: Answers

Jim Emerson

“I am your host! Und sagen…”

Here they are, eleven of the most famous opening shots in movie history, plus a bonus that I threw in just because I like it. Prepare to smack your head and say, “D’oh! I knew that!” But don’t give up — keep sending in your nominations for great opening shots, along with your explanations for why they set up the movie so well, to: jim AT scannersblog dot com.

Congrats to Daniel Dietzel, who got all ten right, but did not hazard a guess about the two bonus shots — and to Jeremy Matthews, who got nine out of the top 10, but also correctly identified both the bonus/tiebreakers!

And come back Sunday for the answers to the original Opening Shots Pop Quiz.

Now, the answers to the Opening Shots Quiz 2: 10 Easy Pieces (+2):

Opening Shots: ‘Miller’s Crossing’

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Clink!

Enlarge image: Gurgle.

From Dave McCoy, Editor, MSN Movies:

The Coen Brothers love to use objects as symbols for characters, especially before we actually meet them. Think of the tumbling tumbleweed that starts “The Big Lebowski” — blowing from the outskirts of Los Angeles, through the city streets and finally making its way, aimlessly, down a beach to the sea. And is there a better metaphor for The Dude (Jeff Bridges)? “He’s the man for his time and place,” says The Stranger (Sam Elliott), our narrator. “He fits right in there. And that’s The Dude, in Los Angle-ess.” In a matter of seconds, the Coens both introduce us to our hero’s wandering demeanor and the film’s casual, quirky and directionless tone.

But in their 1990 masterpiece, “Miller’s Crossing,” it takes the Coens but one quick shot to establish their cool, hard-as-nails, no-nonsense protagonist, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne).

Opening Shots: ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”

Jim Emerson

An empty landscape, an endless, desolate (and TechniScope-horizontal) landscape…

… suddenly replaced by another enormous sun-baked landscape, and the long shot is instantaneously transformed into a close-up of…

… a human face, staring into the camera — and, by extension, into the distance off-camera. It’s a variation on the signature Leone shot, and for him these faces (Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach — and in other movies Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, Jack Elam, Woody Strode…) were landscapes, and landmarks, as characteristic of his stylistic world as the buttes of Monument Valley were for John Ford. — JE

We’ve had several excellent appreciations of how the opening shot of Sergio Leone’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” works, each with its own unique angle, if you will. Here are a few — beginning with Roger Ebert’s 2003 Great Movies review:

A vast empty Western landscape. The camera pans across it. Then the shot slides onto a sunburned, desperate face. The long shot has become a closeup without a cut, revealing that the landscape was not empty but occupied by a desperado very close to us.

In these opening frames, Sergio Leone established a rule that he follows throughout “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The rule is that the ability to see is limited by the sides of the frame. At important moments in the film, what the camera cannot see, the characters cannot see, and that gives Leone the freedom to surprise us with entrances that cannot be explained by the practical geography of his shots.

There is a moment, for example, when men do not notice a vast encampment of the Union Army until they stumble upon it. And a moment in a cemetery when a man materializes out of thin air even though he should have been visible for a mile. And the way men walk down a street in full view and nobody is able to shoot them, maybe because they are not in the same frame with them.

Leone cares not at all about the practical or the plausible, and builds his great film on the rubbish of Western movie clichés, using style to elevate dreck into art. When the movie opened in America in late 1967, not long after its predecessors “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964) and “For a Few Dollars More” (1965), audiences knew they liked it, but did they know why?

Opening Shots: Army of Shadows

Jim Emerson

View image

View image

From: Andy Horbal, Mirror/Stage:

“Army of Shadows” actually begins with an epigram: “Unhappy memories! Yet I welcome you… you are my long-lost youth… “

Perhaps a French person would immediately recognize the film’s subsequent opening shot as the ultimate unhappy memory, but it took a bit longer for this American viewer to grasp the significance of what he was seeing. The transition from a black screen with white letters to the Arc de Triomphe towering over a frame also marked by a pallid, even sickly, gray morning light is like the shock of abruptly waking up in the middle of a dream. The sound of marching drifts in from somewhere offscreen. …

View image

After a few seconds a column of soldiers emerges from the left of the frame. Dwarfed by the monument, they look like a line of black ants. A few more seconds and the cadence of their footfalls (which seem to grow steadily louder and more ominous) is joined by the sound of a military march. The beginning of the column reaches the middle of the Arc and sharply pivots right towards the camera, towards us.

Opening Shots: ‘Deep Red’

Jim Emerson

View image: The kind of thing that can ruin a childhood.

From Robert Daniel, Birmingham, AL:

“Deep Red” (Dario Argento, 1975): The scene opens a floor-level shot. We hear a stabbing sound and a loud scream. The knife falls in from the left and the child’s feet rush in from the right. Then the screen goes black for the credits. I guess I counted this as an opening shot because the camera does not move, nor isthere ever a cut. It is one short, continuous take.

The whole giallo is based on this event. It is the murder of a parent in front of the child (whose legs we see). Most of the film happens 15 or so years later, with the child as an adult. The string of brutal and creative murder set-pieces all relate back to what happened in this shot.

The shot is made more effective by the fact that a very eerie child’s nursery rhyme is playing in the background. Rumor has it that the nursery rhyme music was played before in an episode of “Davey and Goliath”!

JE: Thanks, Robert — and thanks for sending in the frame grab, too. I can’t believe I haven’t seen this major Argento (one of those embarrassing gaps for me), but it’s been in my Netflix queue for a long time. I’m gonna have to bump it up to the top now.

Movies 101: Opening Shots Project

Jim Emerson

“Barry Lyndon” opens with a bang.

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.)

The opening shot can tell us a lot about how to interpret what follows. It can even be the whole movie in miniature. I’m going to talk about some of my favorites, and how they work, and then request that you contribute your own favorites for possible publication in future Scanners columns.

Opening Shots: Eyes Wide Shut

Jim Emerson

From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:

When the release of “Eyes Wide Shut” drew near, a lot of the buzz was around it being a “sex film,” and some (fools) went as far as to claim that its ambition was to be the “sexiest film ever” (after all, Kubrick had broken the molds of other genres). After “EWS” came out, the buzz was that it was a letdown — due largely to the fact that it was “not sexy.” Subsequently, many felt that it was a sub-par film, almost unworthy of the Kubrick moniker.

View image

Unfortunately, they missed the point. The opening shot to “Eyes Wide Shut” is short and simple: Nicole Kidman’s character getting undressed. I’m sure many saw this as a tease, a promise of what’s to come. But I believe Kubrick was using it for the exact opposite purpose, telling us to forget about our preconceived notions of what this film was going to be (or, as you pointed out, Jim, what a narrative should be). In essence, the shot is so brief that it’s almost as if Kubrick is saying “Okay, here: Nicole Kidman naked. Satisfied? Now get that out of your mind and let me tell my story.” Many films don’t have their nudity so early on, so perhaps Kubrick put that quick flash in there to see if we’re paying attention. The next time we see Kidman, she’s doing something very unsexy (using the toilet), and further events tell us that some things are not what we expect them to be (for example, Tom Cruise’s character turning off what we believe to be the background score).

Yes, more nudity follows in the film, from Kidman and many others, but Kubrick is telling us that the nudity and sex is not really the point; he’s not setting out to make the “sexiest film ever.” What is his point, then? I’m not sure. It’s a film that can be watched many times and still not be totally understood — just like some other great Kubrick films.

JE: You’re quite right, Jonathan. That eye-opening first shot IS a ravishing tease, but not in the way viewers might expect — plucked out of time and space, floating in isolation between the white-on-black titles for Cruise/Kidman/Kubrick, and the name of the movie itself. Blink and you’ll miss what Kubrick is doing from the moment the picture starts. “EWS” had been accompanied by the usual hyperbolic pre-release rumors that invariably swirled around rare and secretive Kubrick projects while they were still in the works. In 1979/80 “The Shining” had been touted in advance as “the scariest movie ever made” (did Kubrick really say that was his goal?) and in 1986/87 “Full Metal Jacket” was anticipated as as “the ultimate Vietnam movie” (whatever that was meant to mean). This sort of buzz, whether or not inflamed by Kubrick himself, helped intensify general interest in the movies but, as you point out, it was also ultimately misleading. Kubrick, more than any other filmmaker, taught me not to get distracted by the movie I was expecting, and to simply watch what was happening on the screen instead — because “The Shining” and “Eyes Wide Shut” were absolutely NOT the movies I thought I saw the first time I watched them.

Allow me to riff a little on this “EWS” shot: The first thing you notice is, of course, Kidman dropping her dress. The dominant color is the (warm, feminine) red of the drapes that frame her — and that are reflected in the mirrored closet doors to the left. The shot is not perfectly symmetrical, but in addition to the reflected curtains and the fleshly symmetry of Ms. Kidman, there is a lot of twinning going on here: Two pairs of identical columns mask the image; a couple of overlapping tennis rackets lean in the corner; pairs of shoes are lined up, rather haphazardly, underneath the window…

Opening Shots: ‘Yojimbo’

Jim Emerson

In the spirit of “Rashomon,” two views of the opening shot of another Akira Kurosawa picture:

From Or Shkolnik, Israel:

We see a beautiful mountain landscape, a dramatic music starts playing while the name of the movie appears in big letters:

Yojimbo

Suddenly a stiff samurai enters the frame, wind blows in his wild grown hair, and than a hand pops out from within his kimono neck collar in a charming way that looks as if his hands are still in their sleeves at the sides of his body. He scratches his head in a very un-samuraish way, and than the hand goes back from where it came from and disappears as if only to visually express what’s going in this man’s head: He has no direction. Then the credits start to roll and the camera follows the man (in a single shot) while he is walking, but we can’t see where because the angle is very low and frames only the back of the man’s head over a grey empty sky. Like the samurai, we can see no direction. After the credits end, a caption appears that unfolds the historic background of how in 1860 the Tokugawa dynasty lost all power and many samurai found themselves without a master to serve, including this samurai who was left with “no devices other than his wit and sword.”

We then see the samurai walk to a crossroad, stop, look around, pick up a stick and throw it in the air. The Camera frame the stick when it falls, and we see the samurai’s feet walk to it and than changes their direction to where the stick points, the camera tilts up and the sequence ends with the samurai walking away from the camera.

Opening Shots: ‘Dazed and Confused’ (and more)

Jim Emerson

Enlarge image: Sweeeeeeeet slow-mooooootion.

From Mike Leto, Bethpage, NY:

I agree with you about how opening shots are one of the most important parts in a film. If the opening shot is good then the movie takes hold of me right from the beginning and that can lead to a great movie. I’m glad I saw “Boogie Nights” and “Barry Lyndon” on your list and you made me look back on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to make me see how important that opening shot really is. But if I were you, I would need these three great opening shots on my list:

“Aguirre, The Wrath of God” — The first shot sets up the mood for this film perfectly. First, the opening titles tell us that this is a doomed mission but we didn’t even need message. We cut to a mountain covered in fog but as the fog starts to drift away we see a long line of men walking down the side of the mountain. This image, along with the music, sets a tone of failure and desparation before things actually start to go wrong.”Dazed and Confused” — I know what you’re thinking but I happen to think that this film is a masterpiece and the first shot (just like “Aguirre”) sets the perfect mood. When you hear Aerosmith’s “Sweet Emotion” and you see the car making the turn in slow motion it brings us back in time. Not to 1976. But to our teenage years. We don’t have to worry because it brings us back to a time in our lives where the worst thing that happens is that the party got cancelled.