From Robert Horton, film critic, The Herald, Everett, WA:
How technical do you want to get about "opening shot"? Is the opening shot literally the very first thing that appears onscreen? Or is it the first shot proper, the thing that tells the people behind you to stop talking and pay attention? In the 1931 "Dracula," the former is a wonderfully archaic credits plate with an art-deco bat, accompanied by a scratchy, mood-setting snippet of "Swan Lake" (without that bat and the music the movie that follows would somehow not be the same); the latter is the post-credits shot of a lusciously suggestive Transylvanian crossroads. Both count in "Dracula."
Most movies now begin with credits over a shot, making it hard to define the beginning-proper (and making it hard for the people behind you to know when to shut up already). The credits play over the opening shot of the 1981 film "Cutter's Way" (aka "Cutter and Bone"), a film very people have heard of, let alone seen, but which is nevertheless one of the key American films of the 1980s (a crucial film in connecting the post-sixties hangover and the corporate runamuck of the eighties).
The opening shot is dreamlike, stylized, drained of color—quite the opposite of the remainder of the film—and looks dead-center down a warm Santa Barbara street as an Old Spanish Days parade approaches the camera. It begins in black-and-white and bleeds slowly into color, and it's in slow motion; the odd music by the late great Jack Nitszche seems to be running in slow motion, too. A band marches, banners wave, and front and center is a blonde in a white dress, like a bride, dancing in the Fiesta. Nothing really unusual about a blonde in a small-city parade, but when you watch the movie, you realize that this might be the kind of pretty girl who could end up dropped in a dumpster on a side street in the middle of the night because she made a bad decision about which rich guy to blow.
The camera has watched this, panning finally to accommodate the blonde's sideways movement. The whole thing has the drowsy long-lens shimmer of midsummer. The blonde has gotten close enough to the camera to pass out of the frame, but as we peer at the people in the distance, now coming into focus, she abruptly passes by again—and as her white ruffled dress rustles by, the image in the background is wiped away and replaced by a whole new shot…if you like, the first shot proper of the story: an exterior, in the magic hour of dusk, of the outside of an unmistakably Southern California hotel.
The next shot—now night—reveals the name of the hotel in neon: El Encanto. (And it's impossible to resist describing the next shot, another "first" in that it introduces us to our first main character: a close-up of the mustache of Richard Bone, as he neatly trims his facial hair with a woman's electric shaver. He's ending a one-night stand in his job as boat salesman/gigolo. And his character is nailed.)
Why is this opening shot—if we've decided on the slo-mo credits shot—such a great one for "Cutter's Way"? This is a story about seeing clearly, for one thing, and the parade shot forces us to peer into a hazy, mundane image and search for something sinister within it. This night, Bone (Jeff Bridges) sees (or thinks he sees) a corporate fatcat at the scene of a murdered girl's disposal. Bone lives with Alex Cutter (John Heard), a Vietnam vet with only one eye, one leg, and one arm, all working overtime, as is Cutter's suspicious mind. Also very much in the suspended animation is Cutter's wife, Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), whom the shiftless golden boy Bone loves, or thinks he does. Cutter becomes obsessed with proving that the businessman (Stephen Elliott) is the killer, even if Bone is increasingly uncertain about his initial recognition. It gives them all purpose. It gives them all a reason. Even though they might be wrong.
Czech filmmaker Ivan Passer directed "Cutter's Way," and has managed nothing as good since. The movie is a model of directing—of how a shot can carry a myriad of ideas above and beyond the marking-down of plot. In the business of tone, mood, light, pace, the film is just about flawless. (And by the way, Jeff Bridges, John Heard, and Lisa Eichhorn are in an ensemble zone that is breathtaking, and heartbreaking—nobody has ever done callow, self-loathing studliness the way Bridges does it here.)
It's a film about ambiguity, and that opening shot delivers the mood. We're not sure what we're seeing, or how it fits into the story. But something mysterious has begun, and when that white dress wipes away one image and presents another, it's like a curtain being pulled on a special place. Something is coming toward us—and this is also true in the film's devastating final shot, where something comes toward us that utterly finishes the film but also opens up a world of possibilities. And by that point we can't back away.
JE: Thank you, Bob! You nailed this haunting and unforgettable opening. And your description is so beautiful it had me tearing up, re-experiencing one of my most-loved movies. There was no better film in the 1980s than "Cutter's Way" -- although in some ways I think of it as the last of the great 1970s pictures. It belongs with movies about paranoia, dread and ambiguity like "Performance" and "Chinatown" and "Night Moves" and "Nashville" and "The Parallax View" and "The Conversation"...
One more note about the music, by the late Jack Nitzche. After the roar of the MGM Lion, there's a quick snippet of ghostly mariachi music before the eerie round tones of the score begin to reverberate. (Sounds like it's scored for bow saw, glass harmonica and mandolin.) The mariachi music swirls in and out of the mix as the woman in the white dress swirls in and out of the frame. Nitzche (the Stones and Neil Young producer who also did the music for "Performance" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") is doing on the soundtrack what you describe in the shot -- pulling you in and making you ask what you're seeing/hearing, and what it might mean...
Mel Gibson with a player in his upcoming film "Apocalypto," who is undoubtedly not of the Hebrew persuasion.
Drunk people say the darndest things. Like Mel Gibson, who was arrested on DUI charges Friday (blood alcohol level: 0.12; legal limit: 0.08). He seized the occasion, around three in the morning, to offer the arresting officers his assessment of the role of Jewry in world affairs. And, really, who wouldn't, under the circumstances? Field sobriety tests present splendid opportunities to expound on a range of subjects, especially if you can't focus on any one of them for too terribly long. You've kind of got a captive audience (or vice-versa), and if the cops will listen and record what you say, what a handy way to organize your religious and political opinions before they put you in a detox cell! According to the incident report obtained by AOL's TMZ.com and summarized in the New York Daily News:
The "Passion of the Christ" director repeatedly said, "My life is f----d," according to the report by Los Angeles County Deputy James Mee... [...]
"F-----g Jews. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," Mee's report quotes him as saying.
"Are you a Jew?" Gibson asked the deputy, according to the report.
The actor also berated the deputy, threatening, "You motherf----r. I'm going to f--- you," according to Mee's report.
The actor also told the cop he "owns Malibu" and would spend all his money "to get even with me," Mee said in his report.
TMZ quoted a law enforcement source as saying Gibson noticed a female sergeant on the scene and yelled at her, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar t--s?"
Deputy Mee then wrote an eight-page report detailing of the incident, but higher-ups in the sheriff's department felt it was too "inflammatory" to release and would merely serve to incite "Jewish hatred," TMZ said.
(Note: Officer Mee's last name is not a traditional Hebraic one.) TMZ.com, which broke the story and the allegations of a police cover-up of Gibson's Jew-hating tantrum, reports that Malibu police had stopped Gibson two other times for DUIs -- three years ago and last year -- but let him slide. Not Friday, though.
Everybody and her pedicurist has been weighing in on this, but the first thing I thought of was how alcohol loosens the inhibitions that usually prevent people from saying what they really feel. Drunken free-speech probably more accurately reflects someone's true attitudes than sober, publicist-crafted press statements. Gibson has apologized, saying he has a problem with alcohol. But it sounds to me like he has a bit more of a problem with Jews. And as Albert Finney said in John Huston's film of "Under the Volcano": "There are some things you can't apologize for." A commenter over at Anne Thompson's Hollywood ReporterRisky Biz Blog sums up my own feelings about Mel's Latest Disgrace:
Wow, that booze is pretty potent stuff. Like Mel Gibson, I can say that some of my best friends are Jews. It's quite disturbing to think that I might denounce them with obscenities and blood-libel accusations if I drank too much alcohol.
Jeepers.
Yeah. Jeepers creepers.
MEL UPDATE (8/1/06): Mel Gibson issued another apology (this time to Jews -- oops, he forgot the first time), asking for forgiveness, and announcing that he will check into rehab. We assume he means the Shylock Center for Jew Abuse, but maybe not. Classic stuff from the horse's... mouth: "There is no excuse, nor should there be any tolerance, for anyone who thinks or expresses any kind of anti-Semitic remark.... [Note: It's the remark that is inexusable, whether silently thought or said aloud, not the anti-Semitism itself.] But please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite. I am not a bigot. Hatred of any kind goes against my faith." And yet... hatred of any kind is almost always said to go against any faith -- and yet, it's that same faith that people use to justify their hatred. Maybe Mel needs to detox on whatever virulent strain of renegade Catholicism he's infected with...
Neil Marshall's "The Descent" is the most exhilarating and exciting psychological horror-thriller I've seen in years. I call it a "psychological horror-thriller" because I don't know quite how to fit it into a genre. It belongs somewhere between "Deliverance," "Alien" and "Jaws" -- the story of six women for whom a cave-diving expedition becomes a descent into the abyss. This poster expresses the sensibility of the movie brilliantly (click "Continue reading" for a look at the classic Surrealist image that inspired it).
I've seen ads that promote "The Descent" as being "from the studio that brought you 'Saw' and 'Hostel'" -- but what makes it so powerful is that it's not another piece of literal-minded torture porn. It's a smart movie designed for people who love movies, and it's full of clever and effective, ingeniously integrated references to other memorable thrillers, concentrating on classics from the 1970s (like the titles mentioned above). "The Descent" is an adrenaline work-out for anybody, but especially thrilling for movie buffs.
WARNING: Do not look up this movie on IMDb or other movie sites. Some have spoilers right there on the main page!
View image: "Dali Skull" (1951), by Philippe Halsman
I love this image, and how it evokes sex and death. I've had a postcard of it on my fridge since the 1980s!
A fairy-tale home in a wooded setting. Two women sit an an outdoor table in the shade of some tall trees. The camera glides across the lawn silently (we can't hear what they're saying, just barely audible laughter) at an oblique angle that takes us closer to the women, but not directly toward them. A big black trunk passes startlingly across the screen in the foreground. Then a smaller trunk comes into the shot, mid-distance, and nicely frames the image. That's all there is to the opening shot (which lasts less than 10 seconds), but to understand the context we have to consider the rest of the brief pre-titles sequence.
The women are looking at photographs, scenes from a marriage. "Wasn't he thin?" the older woman observes. "That was just before I met him," says the younger woman. The older woman suggests the man, surely the husband of the younger woman, could stand to exercise more and lose some weight. The younger woman defends him and says he has lost a little. The older woman (we assume she's the mother of the wife) says she hasn't noticed. They look at another picture, a new mother holding her baby, and the younger woman remarks: "That was when Michel was born."
A boy runs into the scene carrying a bouquet of flowers, which he gives to his grandmother. Behind him is a man who walks over and stands behind his wife, resting his hand on her shoulder. A beautiful family tableaux. The sound fades. The image goes out of focus. Roll titles.
Of course, we already know something about what we're seeing because the title of the film is "La Femme Infidel" ("The Unfaithful Wife") -- a masterpiece by Claude Chabrol, from 1969. The title character (played by Chabrol's own wife and frequent leading lady, Stephane Audran) is, ironically, standing up for her man in this scene. But the unsettling effect of those thick vertical lines, and particularly that big black tree trunk, lingers over the prologue, and the rest of the movie.
In the final shot, this movement will be reversed (from a different part of the property, with the dark woods behind) and the family tableau will be reduced. Another secret will be hidden, but the wife will be faithful at last.
Chabrol, whose 2004 film "The Bridesmaid" is being released in the United States this year. A Sunday New York Times story by Terrence Rafferty is headlined "Claude Chabrol Is a Master of the Thriller (Hold the Thrills)"), and that's an apt description of Chabrol's method. He doesn't pile on the showy action set-pieces, but his films are gripping psychological thrillers, usually about what goes on behind the facade of middle-class "normality" and "respectability." My favorite film of his (and one of my favorite films ever) is 1971's "Le Boucher" ("The Butcher"), about serial killings in a small French town. It's as emotionally draining and suspenseful as movies get, and yet so much of it is below the surface, like the local caves that provide the images for the titles sequence. -- JE
Hot Blogger and Hot Button colunist David Poland has posted his third, breezy "Lunch With David" vlog over at iKlipz and I think it's the funniest one yet. This week's topic: Secrets in Hollywood -- who tells 'em and whether they really want anybody to keep 'em. The premise is simple, kind of like an UnCabaret routine (or Johnny LaRue's Street Beef): one person, one camera, one table. David sits down and tells you whatever's on his mind about goings on in The Biz, at the box office or behind the scenes. He's a funny guy (and knows just how to play to the camera for comic effect). David describes the newly launched iKlipz as a kind of MySpace for movie people -- in particular, folks who want to distribute their films and videos on the web. So, I went ahead and joined up. (It's free.) Wanna be my friend? ;)
"I have never heard the song 'Cousin Dupree' and I don't even know who this gentleman, Mr. Steely Dan, is. I hope this helps to clear things up and I can get back to concentrating on my new movie, 'Hey Nineteen.'"
I haven't been able to post as much as I'd like recently (and I've got some real juicy Opening Shots waiting) because I've been so busy doing reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and RogerEbert.com, to help pick up some of the slack while Roger is resting and recovering. (See message from Chaz here -- kind of a teaser trailer for Roger's own progress reports!) This week I've got reviews of Woody Allen's "Scoop" and Betty Thomas's "John Tucker Must Die." You'll never guess which one I thought was funnier. I've already written three more for next week: "Little Miss Sunshine," "The Night Listener" and "The Descent." More about that last one, especially, in the next few days...
New York Magazine reports on "How Kevin Smith Reinvented Movie Marketing." By manufacturing a dust-up with a TV movie critic just before the opening of his film and getting lots of free publicity? Sure. But also, by listing 10,000 of his MySpace "friends" in his credits:
Smith’s newest addiction is MySpace: “I think it has a lot to do with growing up fat, ’cause you’re always trying to find acceptance and credibility. I’ve been on since March and I’m closing in on 50,000 friends. So I feel like, Wow, that’s kind of cool.� The Weinstein Co. hatched a plan to promote 'Clerks II' by putting the names of the film’s first 10,000 MySpace friends in the credits. They thought the contest would go for weeks. They had the names in two hours.
Smith feels a compulsive need to win over an audience with the sheer tonnage of his verbiage; there were no short answers to my questions. Even though he’s now a 35-year-old father who lives in his pal Ben Affleck’s old house in L.A., Web surfers still have access to insanely intimate details of his life: One blog post this month touched upon his predilections for cunnilingus, anal sex, and picking his nose.
The naughty fairy tale "Red Hot Riding Hood" and "King-Size Canary" are treasured classics, but one of the funniest 'toons ever, for my money, is "Northwest Hounded Police," (1946) starring Droopy Dog as Sgt. McPoodle of the Mounties. Its surreal sensibility anticipates "Duck Amuck" (Chuck Jones, 1953) by way of "Cops" (1922). Only instead of the wanted man being pursued by a whole stampede of cops (they accumulate, like the avalanche of boulders and brides in "Seven Chances"), he's hounded by what an extraordinarily persistent Droopy. The nightmare logic is relentless -- and part of what makes it so funny is that it's also creepy and anxiety-inducing...
UPDATE: After watching "Rock-a-Bye Bear" on Dennis's site, something struck me (and it wasn't a mallet or a club or an anvil): It's built upon the same recurring gag as Abbas Kiarostami's "The Wind Will Carry Us." Yep, that fancy-schmancy Iranian artiste has been stealing from Tex Avery! One involves a dog repeatedly running out into the snow to make noise; the other involves a man repeatedly running out into the desert to get cell phone reception.
Hooray, for America! On Monday's "The Colbert Report," M. Night Shyamalan made #2 on the "ThreatDown," thanks to my diligent review of "Lady in the Water." I wrote:
The key to deciphering M. Night Shyamalan's fractured fairy tale, "Lady in the Water," is to remember that it is rooted in the mythology of Stephen Colbert and "The Colbert Report." It is a warning to Mankind about the dire threat posed by ferocious topiary bears in America today, and a salute to the gigantic, soaring eagle who swoops in to rescue Wet Ladies from pitiless ursine jaws and claws. Colbert oughtta sue.
Colbert had the perfect topper: "Well, I am suing... Spoiler alert: I was fatally shot in 1995 and I'm a ghost." Thank you, Mr. Colbert -- you will never be Dead to Me. As a proud citizen of Colbert Nation for years (going back to "The Daily Show"), I could not be more honored if I'd received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wait a minute, let me think: George Tenet, Paul Bremer, Tommy Franks... To get that medal these days you have to commit fraud, perjury and/or war crimes. No, I'm more honored to be cited by Stephen Colbert!
Both movies begin with a close-up of metal barrier at night. A hand grabs it, and a man pulls himself up into the frame, suggesting a transgression of some kind is occurring. In "Vertigo," the man is a criminal suspect on the run from a policeman (and, we soon learn, James Stewart); in "Munich," he is one of the Palestinian Black Septemberists, climbing over the gate into the Olympic Village where he and his terrorist cohorts will murder 11 Israeli atheletes -- the event that sets the movie's story in motion.
More on both these movies in future Opening Shots. Just wanted you to see the effective way Spielberg begins his movie with a visual quotation from Hitchock's. I've heard from people over the years who don't think critics should mention other movies in reviews -- like it's just some kind of arcane "film geek" thing. (I got an e-mail just last week, scolding me for mentioning Spielbergian suburban-myth movies -- "CE3K," "E.T.," "Poltergeist" -- in my review of "Lady in the Water"; I don't see how you could review that movie without mentioning predecessors like those in the work of a filmmaker who has spoken publicly about Spielberg's influence on him. That's a critic's job -- to offer context and analysis.) Artists in all fields borrow and comment upon each others' work all the time. (You don't have to know, for example, that Nirvana thought "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was just their Pixies rip-off -- but you may hear it with new ears once you do.) In this case, Spielberg is grabbing an image that has resonance, for him and the audience, even if you don't consciously notice it when you see it. It has impact, some of which reverberates all the way back to "Vertigo" in 1958 and the way that movie made you feel in its opening sequence....
One of my favorite opening shots is from Michael Tolkin's "The Rapture." First, a black screen, menacing ambient music, vague noises of typing, people speaking. The camera rises and we realize we're looking at the side of a cubicle, and then we begin to move over a dark and shadowy cube farm, where average-looking phone operators perform and say the same maddeningly rote things over and over again. Eventually the camera focuses in on Sharon, our protagonist; but until then she could be anybody, another face in the crowd.
The shot sets up the themes of spiritual emptiness and social isolation that are so integral to the rest of the film, and which are mirrored in the final shot of Sharon standing alone (on what is unmistakably a set or a sound stage but which somehow still works), her voice echoing into the darkness, "Forever."
JE: I'm so happy that people have sent in Opening Shots for so many of my favorite movies of the 1990s: "Miller's Crossing," "Dazed and Confused," "Fight Club" -- and "The Rapture." This is just a great shot in every way. I used a frame from it in my Chasing the Image: Office Spaces post, too. Nathaniel captures the spooky, depersonalized feeling of it (and I'd forgotten about the distorted, echoey sound). The camera movement prefigures the movement of the film: We're going on a journey, moving inexorably toward a destination, but we don't know where we will end up. (And, as Nathaniel says, the shot also echoes the end of the movie, when Sharon asserts that she is not just "Operator 134" but her own person, defiantly exercising her free will.) When we reach Sharon's cubicle, the camera holds on her as she takes several calls, hearing only her side, and each just a variation on: "Operator 134. What city, please? Can you spell that? Is that a business or residence? Please hold for the number..." And on and on and on. Someone taps her on the shoulder. She looks up. She takes off her headset and hands it to a black woman who slides into her place in the shot and finishes her call: "Please hold for the number." At this point in the movie, Sharon is just an anonymous, interchangeable component, a cog in the machine during the day, who compensates by acting out uninhibited sexual fantasies at night ("What does control have to do with it?"). By the end, she's become a kind of mythic heroine, saying a firm "NO" to God.
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.
I think this sequence is absolutey perfect in the way it makes us feel disoriented and how it tells us everything we need to know about how to "read" the story: It's not about heroic samurai warriors and it's not an epic historical drama. It's about desperate times and desperate people who are without higher goals or ideals, they lack direction and like the stick they are thrown to the winds.
The samurai films of Akira Kurosawa, themselves heavily influenced by the films of John Ford, were subject to reinterpretation several times themselves, the most famous examples being John Sturges’ refashioning of "Seven Samurai" into "The Magnificent Seven" and, more profoundly, Sergio Leone forging not only a remake, but the foundation of his entire directorial style, out of the discoveries he would make as he twisted new shapes into "A Fistful of Dollars" out of the original clay of Kurosawa’s "Yojimbo." Leone’s film follows Kurosawa’s template closely, but even by looking just at the opening shot it’s possible to see some of the parallels, and the differences, between Kurosawa and Leone.
The film begins on a close-up of a mountain range. A man, seen from behind and shot from a low angle, moves into the frame and observes the range which looms spectacularly before him. Leone might stage this shot to emphasize the landscape dwarfing his human figure by placing the figure low and small in the frame against the mountains. But Kurosawa achieves the same effect by giving the man roughly the same amount of graphic weight in the frame, but by shooting him from a low angle and keeping his face hidden from us. The man, dressed in the clothes of a samurai (the clothes themselves are ragged, worn and dirty), holds himself with dignity, adjusts his shoulders, and then, in a gesture that will find echoes throughout Leone (particularly in the opening of "Once Upon a Time in the West," reaches up under his robe and unceremoniously scratches his head—with a single scratch, the deflation of the image of this dignified samurai warrior is underway.
The warrior looms in the frame, the mountain range but a background, and begins to move off to the left as the credits roll. We’re still seeing the man essentially only from behind, and he has now moved away from the mountain range, and Kurosawa still shoots him from that low angle—he is framed now only against the white, clouded sky of the afternoon. With the range now receded into absence, the man now seems to tower over his surroundings, greater than all he surveys—though nothing that he surveys is visible at this point in the shot. He looms large even as he moves deliberately along, adjusting his collar. Upon the appearance of the credit “produced and directed by Akira Kurosawa� the camera tilts down and we see the man’s raggedy sandals as he pads along on a dirt road—the landscape has been brought down to the level of this man moving silently through it. The visual strategy here is the inverse of close-ups and lone figures against the landscape that would mark Leone’s adaptation of "Yojimbo," and then eventually his entire style—in the opening of "Yojimbo", as the samurai moves along the road, the surrounding landscape dwarfs him by creating not a sense of its expansiveness, but instead of the claustrophobia created the tall grass alongside the road and the way the director angles the perspective on the man to exclude a sense of anything but the immediate space surrounding him.
The mountains have long since disappeared behind the tops of the grass as the samurai encounters some stone markers along the road and turns past them, as if to examine them. A series of title cards reads: “The time is 1860. The emergence of a middle class has brought about the end to power of the Tokugawa Dynasty.� The man’s observance of the markers is but a momentary distraction and he is soon heading back down the road. As he moves along, the mountain range returns to the top of the frame, only it too is dwarfed graphically by the expanse of grassy field the man finds himself moving through.
More title cards: “A samurai, once a dedicated warrior in the employ of royalty, now finds himself with no master to serve other than his own will to survive… and no devices other than his wit and his sword.� The man has encountered a fork in the road, each trail leading he knows not where, and his preference of destination is nonexistent. His next move, like the momentary, alternating allegiances that he will assume later in the film, will be left to chance, as will his own fate. He takes in the surrounding space of the divided road, still surrounded by tall grass, and comes upon a large stick, which he picks up and tosses in the air. Where it lands will determine what direction he goes, what road he takes…
JE: Thanks, guys -- I thought both your accounts of this shot were well worth including. I believe somebody else -- and, for the life of me I can't find the e-mail or comment now -- made mention of how, when the samurai throws the stick in the air, he's reminded of the ape and the bone in "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- which I thought was a brilliant association (and now I'll never be able to see "Yojimbo" without thinking of it). It works, too: This samurai may be the last of a certain breed, but he's also evolving into something new.
Dennis does a fine job of detailing the funny games (Michael Haneke foot-level shot reference) Kurosawa is playing with scale here. You both mention how, in the first part of the shot, the samurai is equated with the mountain, and the shot is close to him from a low angle, presenting him as a towering figure. The first thing that undercuts his "stature" is that goofy little head scratch. After a stretch where he seems to be walking into nowhere (we can only see his head and the clouds above), we tilt down to his feet and he executes a little aimless footwork around some small ancient idols/markers. So far, Kurosawa seems to be taking us into the past, and then plopping us down to earth. The titles explain the specifics, the historical background. When the samurai walks away from the camera he is transformed. No longer a legendary, abstract figure, he becomes an individual, human-sized one, seen in the context of a particular historical landscape that we have now entered with him. He throws the stick in the air. Let HIS story begin...
A couple days ago we published an Opening Shot contribution for Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" in which Allen cited an old joke to illustrate a point about his view of life:
Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says: "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions."
I couldn't help but think of that when I saw the open letter Steely Dan's Donald Fagen and Walter Becker posted on their web site ("Open Letter to the Great Comic Actor, Luke Wilson"). Be sure to check out the groovy Residential Suites at Longworth stationery: "Where Value is King... And So Are You!"
Fagen and Becker address their open letter to Luke to complain about his brother Owen's movie, "You, Me and Dupree," which they say is a bad movie that they think Owen should have thanked them for, because they think the story (and title) resemble their song "Cousin Dupree," off the "Two Against Nature" album. "Cousin Dupree" is about a guy who... well, let them put it in their own words:
Well I've kicked around a lot since high school
I've worked a lot of nowhere gigs
From keyboard man in a rock'n ska band
To haulin' boss crude in the big rigs
Now I've come back home to plan my next move
From the comfort of my Aunt Faye's couch
When I see my little cousin Janine walk in
All I could say was ow ow ouch
Honey how you've grown
Like a rose
Well we used to play
When we were three
How about a kiss for your cousin Dupree
Write Fagen and Becker:
Anyway, they got your little brother on the hook for this summer stinkbomb -- I mean, check the reviews -- and he's using all his heaviest Owen C. licks to try to get this pathetic way-unfunny debacle off the ground and, in the end, no matter what he does or what happens at the box office, in the short run, he's gonna go down hard for trashing the work of some pretty heavy artists like us in the process. ... I mean, we're like totally out in the cold on this one -- no ASCAP, no soundtrack, no consultant gig (like we got from the Farrelly Bros. when they used a bunch of songs in their movie, "You, Me and Irene" or whatever). No phone call, no muffin basket, no flowes, nothing....
But, hey, luke, man -- there is one petite solid you could do for us at this time -- do you think you could persuade your bro to do the right thing and come down to our Concert at Irvine and apologize to our fans for this travesty?
OK, I can see some similarities between one Dupree and the other -- especially the ramblin' nature of the character, the sleeping on the couch, and all that.
But, frankly, I think Owen Wilson's Dupree is even more like the out-of-place "special friend," the unwelcome guest who will not leave, who is the title character of the Dan masterpiece "Gaucho":
Can't you see they're laughing at me
Get rid of him
I don't care what you do at home
Would you care to explain...
Who is the gaucho amigo
Why is he standing
In your spangled leather poncho
And your elevator shoes
Bodacious cowboys
Such as your friend
Will never be welcome here
High in the Custerdome...
No he can't sleep on the floor
What do you think I'm yelling for
I'll drop him near the freeway
Doesn't he have a home...
UPDATE: Discussion of various interpretations of "Gaucho" (any or all of which work) here. Best of all: " It's obvious that the singer is berating an acquaintance (a roommate or other such cohabitant?) for his association with some poseur, a lightweight, freeloading hipster fraud who's long overstayed his welcome. Beyond that, though, we know nothing. Who are these characters? What are the circumstances of their involvement? What is the Custerdome? In the end, of course, it doesn't matter, because we're hearing a snippet of a diatribe from one character to another, and that's all we're supposed to be hearing."
... and channels roles from the entire career of James Earl Jones. That's the premise of this very funny short, "Vader Sessions," from Akjak Moving Pictures, in which the Imperial Villain speaks in Jones' voice through sound clips from "The Great White Hope" to "Clear and Present Danger" to "A Family Thing." (I kept waiting for him to announce: "This... is CNN.") I know: Is it possible for yet another "Star Wars" parody to be funny? I think these guys have demonstrated that it is. I'd love to know the sources of all the dialog used -- so feel free to post a comment with whatever you recognize.
All of the cuss words, none of the plot! Now that the courts have stopped companies like Clean Flicks and Family Flicks USA from releasing their own custom-sanitized DVD versions of other people's movies (we used to just call this "bowdlerization"), perhaps it is time to celebrate with a different approach: a feature with all the f-words left in, but the rest of the movie taken out. That's what somebody's done with "The Big Lebowski" in this two-minute, fourteen-second "F*cking Short Version." If you're offended by profanity... well, then you're out of your element, Donny!
... in 7 minutes and 31 seconds: Think of this as the Opening Title Project. It's called "working title" by cuechamp, and it's a mesmerizing, rapid-fire montage of movie title cards, in alphabetical order, from silents to the present. It will only take a few minutes, but I guarantee you'll be flashing on subliminally glimped movie titles ("The Leech Woman") for days. Look for your favorites. Some of of my lesser-known faves that I'm glad to see acknowledged: "Accident," "The Brood," "Miracle Mile," Herzog's "Herz aus Glas" ("Heart of Glass" -- did I really see that?), the Sherlock Holmes picture "The Woman in Green" ... I'm getting dizzy. I'm going to have to go watch it again. I think I'm addicted.
WARNING: If you're a cinephiliac prone to seizures, procede with caution!
Brian De Palma’s exceedingly stimulating and sensational consideration of femme fatale iconography and the possibility of redemption within it begins with one of the director’s customarily brilliant, multilayered opening shots.
Under the black of the producers credits, familiar voices are heard. It’s Fred MacMurray. Fade up on a shot of an extreme close-up of a TV. It’s MacMurray, 525 broadcast lines blown up to big-screen size, in "Double Indemnity". But a close examination of the image reveals a splash of color -- something else is visible here, contrasting with the black-and-white images of Billy Wilder’s film. It’s a reflected image of a half-naked woman stretched out perpendicular across the TV screen. She is watching "Double Indemnity", and we see her watching the movie in her reflection off the glass TV screen. "Double Indemnity" continues to play out, crosscutting between MacMurray and the original femme fatale, Barbara Stanwyck (as Phyllis Dietrichson).
The image of the young woman becomes clear, yet remains slightly ghostly, as the image in Wilder’s film darkens. MacMurray moves to close a window, when a shot rings out. Stanwyck has betrayed him with a bullet, and the title credit "Femme Fatale" pops on screen at the same time, as the ethereal image of the woman, reclining on her side, dispassionately watching the movie, lingers. (The title credit “A Film by Brian De Palma� was earlier synchronized with Stanwyck’s first appearance on the TV.) Now De Palma’s camera begins to pull back. We see the cabinet of the TV, and we can now also observe that there are French subtitles superimposed on Wilder’s film. The image of the woman reflected in the TV seems even clearer now, as we continue to pull back, seeing her much more clearly in the flesh, gray tendrils rising from the cigarette she’s smoking while watching the TV. At this point there is double layering of the woman’s image, the reflection and the person being reflected, over the image of Stanwyck, who has taken a dominant position over her wounded lover as she confesses her machinations against him.
The camera pulls all the way back to reveal that the woman watching is nude, her ass covered by a sheet, her bare back and legs exposed to us. Like the samurai in "Yojimbo", we’ve not had a clear look at her face, except for what we could discern in the reflection on the TV screen, and we’ll be denied one for the length of the shot. Suddenly a door opens (off screen), outside light briefly streams in and the door closes, as we hear a man’s voice say, “What the fuck are you doing?� A black man in a tuxedo enters the frame from the left and turns off the TV. The woman has not moved, not acknowledged his presence, not said a word. The camera begins moving in on him as he begins to quiz her. “Do you know what time it is?� She gets up off the bed, revealing that she is at least wearing black panties, but totally unselfconscious in this man’s presence in the fact that she is otherwise naked. She stands and moves across him to the left, still smoking. She begins to dress and he continues in what seems at first to be a parody of the hardboiled language we’ve just heard and seen on the TV:
“Listen up. At 2200 Wetsuit’s down the hole when the snake hits the carpet. Security lifts the key. I terminate the torpedoes.�
The woman has now put on her top and moved completely out of frame to the left.
“Charm the snake into the stall. Bait and switch. At 2220 Wetsuit turns out the lights. Glasses on. I bag the snake.�
The camera is now pulling back as he moves left to where she is.
“Key in the bag. Bag to the boat. No radio unless absolutely necessary.�
The man has now seated himself next to the woman backward on a chair, as she continues to prepare herself at a vanity. She has still offered no response to what he is saying, or even really acknowledged his presence, or whether she is even hearing what he is saying or not. She tamps down her slick, short, dyed blonde hair with both hands, still holding a cigarette in the left.
“Code red, five minutes to blackout. Drop everything. Walk away. If the cops catch you, tell them the truth. You know no one. Got it?�
By now the man has begun staring at her intensely, looking for some hint that she is processing what he is saying to her.
“Got it?�
She leans into the frame, looks directly at him, coolly blows smoke in his direction, and nods.
“You have your passport?�
She flicks it into frame very casually. He peruses the document and continues:
“The plane leaves tomorrow at 0700.�
She flippantly offers a mock salute, as if to say, “Yes, sir, sir!� He smiles.
“And remember, no names and no guns.�
Suddenly there is the sound of a crowd chattering and milling about outside. The man acknowledges it with a cursory glance, but before we have had the chance to really process it ourselves, he leans forward slightly and slaps the woman hard across the face. She leans back, absorbs the blow and then slowly leans forward into a straight-up sitting position, her face still turned away from us and toward him, never taking her eye off of him. He continues:
“Are you high?�
She shakes her head slowly.
“Then stop dreaming, bitch. This isn’t a game tonight. People can die. Now get moving.�
He places the passport in his jacket pocket, rises up off the chair and moves away from her, toward the drawn curtain at the center of the room (and the frame). We become aware again of the sound of that mysterious crowd outside. He turns to her again, bends down out of frame and retrieves a headset, holds it up to her and says,
“You forget something?�
The woman emerges from the left, walks up to the man, never taking her eyes off his face, and grabs the headset from him. The producer’s credits are superimposed on the man as he rubs his hands together and considers this unflappable, impossibly cool woman. He adjusts his tie and his lapels, and light once again floods the room as the woman opens the door off screen. He turns sharply toward the window, reaches up and throws open the shade.
Cut to a long shot of the red carpet on closing night of the Cannes Film Festival. The credit is superimposed over the scene of the festivities: Directed by Brian De Palma.
JE: You picked a doozy here, Dennis! And there's so much communicated in this shot beyond the dialogue and the details of the caper, too. First, there's "Double Indemnity" -- the climactic scene of "Double Indemnity," after MacMurray's plans have gone awry and he's wised up to what a sucker he's been -- with French subtitles. Well, the movie is called "Femme Fatale," a French phrase, and now we assume we're probably in France. Visually, with that reflection/superimposition, De Palma transfers the title from Stanwyck to his "femme fatale" -- and, in movie terms, updates her in the process: She's still a blonde, but she's got a modern androgynous haircut... and she's nude, which is not something you would have seen in a 1944 Paramount Picture. (Also, something tells me this woman is not watching "Double Indemnity" for the first time; if anything, she's refreshing her study of it for her role in the movie we're about to see.)
I love the way De Palma compartmentalizes screen space here, too, using frames within frames. (Remember, this is a guy who loves split screen: "Sisters," "Carrie"...) First there's the TV screen (which is also a mirror), then the window that is obviously behind the drapes, and which will be used for the final reveal you describe. As you say, the journey is from a film ("DI" on TV) ... to a film festival (outside the window). De Palma keeps composing and re-composing -- and I think my favorite little moment is when she thrusts her head into the left edge of the frame (this profile is the closest we get to seeing her non-reflected face) to defiantly confront the man, coordinator of the unfolding plot, who is there to keep her in line. At the mirrored vanity, we have more frames-within-frames, but De Palma keeps us craning our necks to see more (kind of like Polanski's famous doorway shot of Ruth Gordon on the bedroom phone in "Rosemary's Baby"). He never actually shows us a clear reflection of the woman in those mirrors, frustrating our expectations. At the end of the shot we don't see her leave, but the light from an opened door (to the bathroom? hallway?) spills into the room. The movie's visual strategy has been beautifully set up now: We will be seeing pictures within pictures, one part of the whole but never the Big Picture... until the end of the picture.
The ferocious topiary bear-like creatures who inflict near-fatal superficial wounds on a narf in M. Night Shyamalan's "The Lady in the Water" are called "scrunts." (I think there's only one of them in the movie, but it's hard to tell.) Shyamalan, who improvised this tale for his young daughters before he released it as a movie and a children's book, may have some explaining to do. According to the Urban Dictionary, a "scrunt" is nasty filthy slang for a ... dirty lady and her parts. If you want to learn more, beware: the vulgarism contained in the word "scrunt" (aka the c-word) is part of the definition. According to MSN Encarta, however, "scrunt" is Caribbean slang, an intransitive verb meaning "financially strapped: to be in a poor financial situation." Like the wolf at the door, if you catch my drift.
You're in safer waters with narf, which is said to be "a substitute word, does not need to be for a curse word, can be used in any circumstance," from the TV show "Pinky and the Bean Brain." BTW, "Tartutic" and "Eatlon" are undefined.
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.
Do you know "Juggernaut"? More than likely not. It's rarely talked about and little shown on cable. I just clicked on IMDb and was surprised to discover it actually is out on DVD. I'm ordering a copy as soon as I finish writing this, because it's among Lester's half-dozen best films, one of the best films of the '70s, and probably the finest entry in the (mostly negligible) disaster-movie genre that had pretty well exhausted its box-office appeal by the time "Juggernaut" came out. The luxury liner puts out to sea, and once it's in mid-ocean, the shipping line receives word from a mysterious presence self-named Juggernaut that several bombs have been placed on board. One goes off, more or less harmlessly, to show that Juggernaut isn't kidding. If a great deal of money isn't paid P.D.Q., more bombs will explode, ruinously enough that the liner and the several hundred souls aboard will be lost.
"Juggernaut", a movie that begins in dreamy formlessness, almost immediately resolves into a gripping suspense narrative in which detail is paramount. It's there in the performances of a sterling cast, including such ace professionals as David Hemmings, Ian Holm, Freddie Jones, Roy Kinnear, Shirley Knight, Clifton James, Roshan Seth, Cyril Cusack, Michael Hordern, Caroline Mortimer, and the prestellar Anthony Hopkins, as well as a couple of marquee names, Richard Harris and Omar Sharif. The latter, respectively playing the leader of a bomb-defusing squad helicoptered out to the ship and the captain of the vessel, give more disciplined and compelling performances than we had long since ceased expecting of them. Still more crucially, detail is there in the crisp storytelling by Lester, which doesn't linger a frame longer than necessary on any of the information and atmosphere it is imparting. The precision and professionalism of the filmmaking becomes a virtually metaphysical corollary of the professionalism brought to the assignment by the bomb unit and (credit where it's due) the disconcertingly sympathetic genius behind the diabolical scheme. (Lester took on the film two weeks before shooting was due to begin, demanded and supervised a significant rewrite of the screenplay, and finished the shoot four weeks ahead of schedule -- all while taking time off before completing the final scenes of his epic, two-part comeback movie, "The Three" and "Four Musketeers"!)
The suspense climax comes to bear, of course, on whether Harris makes the right choice on clipping the right wire in the telltale bomb of bombs: the red, or the blue?
May we give this much away? He cuts the right wire. And that's it. The movie will be over within seconds. Next thing we see, Harris is striding the length of the liner, still at sea, enjoying the fresh air and sunlight as he comes to the stern rail, observed by an airborne camera that lifts away as the ship grows smaller and smaller heading into infinity -- safe now, yet still looking bravely vulnerable, because we know how finite is the line between security and catastrophe. The image dissolves to something approaching the abstractness of the opening-credits backdrop: just the surface of the sea, rolling, light-spangled, eerily overcast with a filter effect very like a veil. All we see of a planet where human existence has scarcely ever seemed a more precarious and evanescent thing.
JE: Thanks again, RTJ, for reminding me so eloquently of a terrific movie experience I had long ago, and one I plan to have again soon. The Seattle Film Society showed it years ago, at RTJ's suggestion, and I remember it as a wonderful surprise -- one of those unjustly neglected movies that people will really enjoy discovering. And, as you can see -- I ordered the DVD as soon as I received this Opening Shots contribution!
If a movie's opening shot provides the compass with which to navigate the ensuing film, then this simple set up needs commending. Unexpected, efficient, and funny from frame one (relying as it does on the "Woody persona"), this fourth wall-breaker immediately establishes the anything goes storytelling so unique to "Annie Hall."
JE: Good one, Hiram. The shot doesn't have to be complicated (or even long) to do what it has to do. This shot from "Annie Hall" not only sets up Alvy's profession and character (a writer and stand-up comedian with an anhedonic view of life), it establishes him as the narrator even when he's offscreen. (Seinfeld would later borrow the device of having the story grow out of the framing device of Jerry's monologue.) We'll return to this shot near the end. And, of course, Alvy (and other characters) will break the fourth wall at key moments in the movie (most memorably in the Marshall McLuhan scene with the pompous guy in the movie line), reminding us that this is Alvy's subjective take on his relationship with Annie. As he illustrates, she sees things quite differently. Here, for the record, is what Alvy says to frame the funny valentine to the girlfriend he can't quite get over:
ALVY
There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly
women are at a Catskills mountain
resort, and one of 'em says: "Boy, the
food at this place is really terrible."
The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and
such ... small portions." Well, that's
essentially how I feel about life. Full
of loneliness and misery and suffering
and unhappiness, and it's all over much
too quickly. The-the other important
joke for me is one that's, uh, usually
attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think
it appears originally in Freud's wit and
its relation to the unconscious. And it
goes like this-I'm paraphrasing: Uh ...
"I would never wanna belong to any club
that would have someone like me for a
member." That's the key joke of my adult
life in terms of my relationships with
women.
Tsch, you know, lately the
strangest things have been going
through my mind, 'cause I turned forty,
tsch, and I guess I'm going through a
life crisis or something, I don't know.
I, uh ... and I'm not worried about aging.
I'm not one o' those characters, you know.
Although I'm balding slightly on top, that's
about the worst you can say about me. I,
uh, I think I'm gonna get better as I get
older, you know? I think I'm gonna be the-
the balding virile type, you know, as
opposed to say the, uh, distinguished
gray, for instance, you know? 'Less I'm
neither o' those two. Unless I'm one o'
those guys with saliva dribbling out of
his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria
with a shopping bag screaming about
socialism.
(Sighing)
Annie and I broke up and I-I still can't
get my mind around that. You know, I-I
keep sifting the pieces of the relationship
through my mind and-and examining my life
and tryin' to figure out where did the
screw-up come, you know, and a year ago we
were... tsch, in love. You know, and-and-and
... And it's funny, I'm not-I'm not a
morose type. I'm not a depressive character.
I-I-I, uh,
(Laughing)
you know, I was a reasonably happy kid,
I guess. I was brought up in Brooklyn
during World War II....
Not Very Silent Bob blows his own tooter to make some publicity noise.
Extra! Extra! It's a match made in movie hell: Joel Siegel vs. Kevin Smith (or vice-versa). It's ugly, but it's perfect, because the former is to movie reviewing what the latter is to movie directing. So, when Siegel stormed out of a screening of "Clerks II" (allegedly exclaiming on his way up the aisle: "Time to go! First movie I've walked out of in 30 [bleeping] years!"), well, Smith saw an exploitable promotional opportunity and ran with it. Not for nothing is he considered the leading contender for Most Avidly Self-Promoting Director, neck-and-neck with M. Night Shyamalan. Smith posted a positi
