Perfect beginnings
I’m tempted to put together a video mash-up of favorite first minutes, but how would I ever narrow it down? If you were going to teach a film school course on Great Beginnings, which opening shots would you choose?
As I prepare to lead a series of discussions on the art of great filmmaking, I’m browsing through DVDs of recent favorites. I’m looking for scenes that would inspire rich discussions, moments that demonstrate the measureless possibilities of cinema.
I haven’t made it very far. The first two films I selected gave me great stuff right in the opening moments.
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Bringing up the opening scene of Jeff Nichols’ extraordinary directorial debut, Shotgun Stories (my favorite film of last year), I was again impressed by how much he accomplishes within one minute of screen time.
We see a shirtless man sitting on the edge of a bed. The glow through the curtains suggests that it is morning. He leans forward, staring intently at a small scrap of paper. It appears to be a note that was left for him. He receives its message with very little expression at all. (Is that frustration? Angst?) He shakes his head, tosses the note aside.
We can see the faint traces of marks on his back, but he’s shown in profile, so we’re not quite able to discern the nature of those marks.
This room is furnished, but barely. This is not a wealthy person at all.
Then he stands, turns to face the door (and us). He takes a t-shirt from a dresser drawer, winds it around his hand, looks ready to leave the room. But pauses, glances down to the dresser as if something has just occurred to him. He reaches down and opens a drawer. The film cuts to over-the-shoulder perspective, so that we can see that the particular drawers he opens are empty.
Without a line of dialogue or narration, Nichols is communicating to us what has happened. It all becomes clear by this one simple gesture.
And then we’re back to gazing in through the bedroom door as the man turns to contemplate the scene of his abandonment. For the first time, his back is to the camera. We can see from the sunburn that he must work outdoors a lot, and with a t-shirt on. Perhaps the shirt is to cover those scars which we can now see clearly. They’re scattered across his back — deep, round scars the size of a quarter or larger. They are not open sores. They have been there a good long time. Buckshot?
And then, the opening title to the film: Shotgun Stories.
In this brief span, Nichols kindles my curiosity: What is the story behind those scars? It’s a question that will hang over everything that follows, and the answer is not revealed until almost the end of the movie. If you aren’t paying close attention, you’ll miss it.
He also gives me a picture of a fractured relationship, perhaps a broken marriage. She’s gone, and she’s taken her things. It’s serious this time, and he doesn’t seem surprised. We’ve seen how little he possesses, and thus we won’t be surprised to learn that the problem is related to a lack of money. Clearly, he has failed in some way.
This efficiently sets the stage.
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Secondly, I chose Flight of the Red Balloon, and was again entranced by just how much Hou Hsiao-Hsien accomplishes in the opening moments.
There is an effortlessness to this opening scene that tells us we’re in the hands of a master. He has a way of making things seem incidental, “happened upon,” spontaneous, and yet upon contemplation, sophisticated meanings begin to suggest themselves.
The opening image reveals a young boy climbing around on the railing at the top of a stairway that descends to a Paris subway station. Heavy traffic is rushing past. The boy is relatively still, a quiet and meditative point in the middle of the city’s frenzied energy. (Note: The fact that Hou places the child at the entrance to a station, and not only that, but one that asks him to descend in order to get on the train and take the journey, is not insignificant.)
The boy is talking to himself. Or wait, no… he’s talking to something hovering out of the frame above his head. A balloon which is out of reach, teasing him from high among the branches of a tree. We won’t see the balloon for a while yet. Instead, we feel eager to see it, and thus begin to participate in the boy’s longing.
The first of several visual jokes scattered throughout the film is immediately in view. An advertisement for a film is posted here at the entrance to this station. The movie poster advertises Severance. Now, it may or may not be significant that the poster refers to a horror movie about savagery among salespeople.
But we will come to observe that Flight of the Red Balloon is a film about growing up and losing our childhood wonder, playfulness, and carefree spirit. It is a film, in short, about the severance that will inevitably occur in the days just ahead for this young child.
Am I reading too much into this? Am I putting too much upon what is really just an incidental detail?
But wait, note that a vertical beam, a pole that is part of this station stop, is bisecting the title. Even the word Severance is severed. If that’s an accident, what a happy accident!
As the boy, despondent at his inability to reach the balloon, gives up and disappears, the camera turns skyward and we watch the balloon slowly descend as if it is disappointed that the boy is gone.
Forgive me, but how can I avoid anthropomorphizing the balloon? It moves so gracefully, like a dancer in the air. Its string twitches like a cat’s tail. It catches the breeze and is buoyed along, only to descend a few moments later at another train station.
I’ve had several people ask, while watching the film with me, just how they controlled the balloon. I hope I never find out. I suspect they just let it go… but then, it behaves so perfectly.
This station is above ground, and the balloon has a few moments to meander about the platform as if waiting for the next train. Another train passes in the opposite direction, but the balloon stays, sinking down low to the tracks as if in anticipation.
How does one choreograph a balloon?
When the new train arrives, the balloon is caught in crisscrossing currents of air and begins to bump against the windows, one after the other, as if eagerly searching for the boy.
I don’t know about you, but these images achieve something quite unlikely. They make me feel like a kid again. That is, in part, because Hou has removed me from the fast, urgent pace of my life (and the fast, urgent pace of the movies I’m accustomed to watching). He’s training me to meander, to see things I might otherwise miss if I’m among the rushing masses.
And there is so much more to see. Notice just how many red balloons, real or merely suggested, tease the screen. Red lights. Bright red dots in incidental advertisements. A bus passes a few minutes later, and big balloon shapes of all different colors are painted down its side. And don’t miss it: You’ll glimpse a banner advertisement on the side of the bus, a poster for yet another movie: Children of Men.
Oh, give me a break. Really?
Hou never shoves these details into our faces. His camera moves with the lazy grace of a balloon on the breeze, hypnotizing us into a state of carefree wandering, kindling our curiosity: What’s around this corner? What’s through this window? What surprise is waiting to be found in this reflection or down this alley? What’s behind the big red door?
Are these all just happy accidents, these frequent nudges to consider the film’s theme? Or did Hou set this all up and then turn it loose with such mastery that it seems like the clamor and rush of real life?
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Both films will make good examples for the discussions I hope to lead next week. I’m excited about it not because I have any expectation of getting people to see what I see, but because I usually find that those who are watching for the first time see all kinds of things I missed on my first several viewings. It’s a discipline that sends me back to the incidental moments of my own day a little more inclined to slow down, to notice things.
There’s a nest in the budding tree outside my window. Most people will think it’s a bird’s nest, but I know it was built by a squirrel. I watched it happen one morning. It took about four hours watching this animal stitch the thing together. It’s lasted through all kinds of storms, and now it rests in the middle of those bare boughs, a sphere of dark red leaves. I remember that I noticed it come into being the morning after I saw Flight of the Red Balloon for the first time. I wonder if I would have missed it otherwise.
There is a child’s shoe sitting on the median strip of a busy street about five minutes from my home. It’s been on that strip for three weeks, and no cars have knocked it off, no pedestrian has bothered to pick it up, no weather has washed it away.
I feel like I’m starting to wake up to more of the myriad, intriguing details all around me because gifted filmmakers like Hou and Nichols are training my senses to notice things. They’re reminding me how to see as I once did. Those filmmakers are a rare breed — artists who are patient, observant, and willing to treat their audiences as intelligent, curious, and able to think for themselves.
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What movies have caught and held your attention with perfect opening imagery? Which have reminded you of just how much can be achieved in a few moments of carefully crafted camerawork? Which have assured you, from the first step, that you’re being guided by a master?
I’m sure they’re popular choices, but the showboat openings to both Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights always strike me as masterful in both technique and story set-up. And the opening narration to The Third Man is just grand.
But for a more low-key one, David Mamet’s Spartan always stands out. There’s no opening title sequence, just a brief title flash before two people are chasing each other through the woods. Both are winded, both are pushing as hard as they can. Why the cat-and-mouse? The answer, the first time I saw it, wasn’t what I was expecting, and it let me wanting more. Still does.
Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God begins with a long tracking shot of mist-shrouded mountains. As the camera zooms in closer, you begin to see the expedition of conquistadors as they’re descending. The narration says that they are coming down from the clouds on the mountain; it’s a descent that continues throughout the movie, first with their literal trek to the river at the mountain’s base, and continuing through the fracturing of the expedition and Klaus Kinski’s descent into madness as he seeks to exalt himself into a godlike force of nature.
In retrospect, I really should have written this article about Blade Runner‘s opening minute, shouldn’t I?
Good call on putting “Flight of the Red Balloon” on this list. I would add Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence.”
One of my favorite opening shots is that of “Apocalypse Now”. It fades up to a wide shot of the Vietnamese jungle as “The End” by The Doors slowly creeps onto the soundtrack. The shot just sits there for a good while, taking in the beauty of the jungle as yellow smoke drifts through the frame. We see couple of quick flashes of helicopters, and as Jim Morrison sings the words “This is the end”, the trees are engulfed in a huge explosion of napalm. The camera then pans a bit to take in the devastation and we are hypnotically drawn into the film.
Overall, is one of the most simple yet evocative opening shots I’ve ever seen. A perfect beginning to a great film.
Off the top of my head:
Magnolia
The Two Towers
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Kill Bill
Fight Club
The credit sequence on Watchmen
Star Wars (obviously. Isn’t that the most iconic opening shot in cinema?)
The Matrix
Looking at this quick list, I’m kind of surprised at how many of them are big blockbuster type films. I’m usually more of an indy film guy. But there’s no arguing that all of these have unique and incredibly effective opening sequences and, in fact, a few of them were watershed moments in the evolution of cinema (both in good ways and bad).
I really love the opening shot of The Prestige…the way the camera glides over the pile of top hats as Alfred Borden asks us (via voiceover), “Are you watching closely?” It serves a dual purpose as both a striking image and a sort of key with which we may unlock the story. Amazing stuff.
Fargo comes to mind. The bird floating along innocently with the gradual intrusion of the car bearing a man whose fight with the devil has been lost.
Gotta go Apocalypse Now here.
Gotta agree with Apocalypse Now!. Others:
Silverado… what audio! And not just the opening sequence but the titles that follow, too…
The Untouchables, unbelievably, because it’s a titles sequence! But the score…
Jesus of Montreal
Lawrence of Arabia
There Will Be Blood
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Gone Baby Gone… great voiceover montage
First one that comes to mind is The New World–the rising dramatic score that fades into sounds of nature and rises again…the natives, the low angle over the water to the ships, you feel like you’ve arrived at a new land somehow where everything is foreign even though you know it’s really the east coast. amazing.
Has any cinematic opening ever been quite as grand, epic, and pitch-perfect as the opening space sunrise in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, set to the glorious “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Strauss? It’s a very simple opening, but remarkably iconic and awe-inspiring.
Aguirre: The Wrath of God is sublime. The Mountains, the mist, the tiny people, popul vuh on the soundtrack.
Also kinda always liked the simplicity of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and again the audio is as important as the visuals.
I remember quite well how the London bombing just a few minutes into Children of Men punched me in the stomach when I first saw it in the theatre.
Also, I can’t get enough of The Fall’s opening titles sequence.
Here are a couple more.
The “I believe in America” speech given at the beginning of “The Godfather”. Here is a sequence where the idea of the “American Dream” is brutally shattered, and the only way for a good man to receive justice is,in his mind, by selling his soul to the devil. What’s always fascinated me about this scene is how Coppola films it as though it were taking place clandestinely at night, in some back alley shop office, and yet this is all taking place in daylight, with a wedding party going on not 20 feet away.
The opening sequence of “Amilie”, as we watch her young life unfold.
The opening puppetry performance from “Being John Malchovich”.
The opening scene of Sergio Leone’s masterpiece “Once Upon a Time in the West” is my all-time favorite.
For a nearly dialog-less 10 minutes, we watch three gunmen (played perfectly by Jack Elam, Woody Strode and another guy) waiting at a small, old West train station to perhaps gun down someone. The details put into this scene are brilliant and funny. A fly, droplets of water…
When the train finally arrives, the three men think that their target didn’t come. As they turn to leave, a harmonica begins playing (a harmonica theme that gets brilliantly weaved into the musical score by Ennio Morricone), and they then realize that the man has come.
The harmonica player – Charles Bronson – faces off with the men and then looks over to see the three men’s horses.
Bronson: “Did you bring a horse for me?
Elam: “Looks like…ha ha ha…looks like we’re shy one horse.”
Bronson (shaking his head): “You brought two too many.”
Just an all-time classic opening scene, to a brilliant and complex movie.
Greg Wright grabbed one of my favorites in SILVERADO.
No list should be without PINOCCHIO, an animated film that predicts the craneshot by swooping in over the village in which the story begins. All done by hand on cellulose.
Being a sucker for Budd Boetticher, I have to mention SEVEN MEN FROM NOW. Pitch dark. Monsoon rain. A figure walks in wilderness towards light from a protected fire. He approaches the fire and the proprietors draw on him. Randolph Scott doesn’t draw. He answers why he walks with a story of sacrificing his horse to hungry indians….
Basically everything Pete says is spot-on.
For the other two Lord of the Rings movies, Fellowship’s prologue and Return’s unexpected opening shot of a worm serve their purpose masterfully.
The Lion King. Blatantly awesome. My favorite Disney movie. Plenty of people know the songs, but not many know the African lyrics. I’m proud to say I do.
I love the opening sequence for “To Kill A Mockingbird”. The blend of music and imagery instantly creates a sort of fairy tale atmosphere, putting you in the mind of the child through which you see the rest of the film.
And though I love all of the LOTR films, I’m especially fond of “The Two Towers” and its epic scenery and combat.
Some of my favorite film openings:
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY opens with a wide shot of brown, craggy hills in the distance. Then a man’s face enters the frame. His face is weathered, brown, and craggy just like the land.
MANHATTAN: black and white shots of New York City over Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”
LA DOLCE VITA: a statue of Jesus being carried by a helicopter over ancient Roman architecture on its way to the Vatican.
If you any of you are interested in opening shots, I highly recommend you check out film critic, Jim Emerson’s series on opening shots. You can find the index here:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/07/opening_shots_project_index.html#more
Howabout the opening sequence of Punch Drunk Love.
We meet Sandler’s character, alone, talking on the phone. It’s a wide shot, dimly lit, with a great deal of empty space, revealing the loneliness of the character. He is alone, has trouble communicating – even on the phone to a telemarketer – and ultimately, his social quirks are revealed in the susequent moments when he discovers the “piano” and meets the “girl.” I think this film is about communcation, what it takes, how it can be difficult and why it matters and therefore I think this opening sequence is really beautiful – and profound.
I agree on Boogie Nights. I’ll add I’m Not There, too.