Opening Shots Project Index

I keep pushing so hard to get Brazil in there, and what do I get?

Are you planning on posting any new opening shots? I have missed them so.

I am still working on (read: procrastinating like a thing that procrastinates a lot) another entry. I'll send it along soon (read: 2009).

Jim,

Back in 1971 I saw Who Is Harry Kellerman & Why is Saying All Those Terrible Things About Me? I haven't seen it since then, so my memory of its opening shot is probably fuzzy. But it was a great opener. Here is what I recall.

Dustin Hoffman plays Georgie Soloway, a prolific composer/performer. He is first seen walking down a long hall filled with his platinum & gold records. There are also photos of him with many major celebrities. His stature is on a par with Bob Dylan. It may even be that Georgie Soloway is a characterture of Dylan.

Georgie exits this luxurious penthouse office and walks onto the veranda. It is night time. We see the city streets far below and the skyline lit with lights. Georgie climbs up the concrete fence and is poised to jump. He pauses, shakes his head, prepares to jump again, pauses, pulls out a pen and paper and starts scribbling. He writes a few lines, then prepares to jump again. Just as he is ready he stops and writes a couple more lines. He starts to jump, but stops. This time he sits down with his feet dangling out over the street far below and starts writing his latest song in earnest. He scribbles furiously for a few moments, then pauses to consider. A sudden gust of wind catches the paper. Georgie frantically makes a grab for it and falls off the fence.

The credits start their role as Georgie falls in slow motion all the while trying to grab the piece of paper. He makes swimming motions but the paper dips and juts out of reach.

When the credits are finished the scene switches to a stately psychiatrist's office. On the walls are diplomas and commendations. Jack Warden is seated with pad in hand waiting to take notes. Georgie falls onto the shrink's couch, extends his hand, the paper falls onto it, he looks up at Warden and says, "Doc, you gotta help me."

This opening shot fully establishes Georgie Soloway's character. He has pursued his art to the exclusion of everything else. His personal relationships are in a shambles. He has no life other than writing and performing.

I don't recall being enthralled by this movie, but the opening shot made an impression on me.

Best of Luck, Jim.

AA

My choice was inspired by the unlabeled picture at the top of the Opening Shots Project page. I couldn't find a listing to go with it, but it reminded me of the beginning of "Silverado". The opening shot does a slow pan across the inside of a darkened cabin. We see a saddle, boots, pistol, and sleeping cowboy. Suddenly, the door is kicked open, and the peaceful scene erupts into a chaotic gunfight between the suddenly awake and armed cowboy, and various bad guys, most of whom are only identified by the holes appearing in the walls of the still dark cabin. The sounds of gun shots, and shell casings hitting the floor are loud in the confined space, especially after the earlier silence. When the last bad guy finally crashes through the ceiling, the cowboy finally opens the door and walks outside to face the new day - which abruptly transitions from the claustrophobic view inside the cabin to a panoramic western vista. The music comes up, and you know you're in for a fun ride, and an homage to some great classic westerns.

JE: The one at the top of the Opening Shots Project Index page is from a great classic western, all right: John Ford's "The Searchers"!

As in that post in The Dark Knight OS, I just have to push for the inclusion of George Miller's "The Road Warrior," and "Happy Feet." It's an imperative.

Hi, Jim,

This is a great project, and I wanted to contribute in some way. Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but one of the first blog posts I ever wrote (almost exactly a year ago) was about the opening shot of Bela Tarr's Satantango ('Nine Minutes of Cows'). It's a bit shaky, but I was trying to get my students interested in the film, but also trying to explain what I found so fascinating about something that is apparently so mundane. The link is below. Feel free to copy and paste: http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/nine-minutes-of-cows/

Jim,

The first film that comes to mind for me is Cinema Paradiso. We open on a shot of the ocean as seen from a balcony. The lines separating the pale blue sky from the deeper blue of the water of the Mediterranean and the railing from the water of the sea separate the scene into three neat sections, the sky being the smallest at the top and the wall the largest at the bottom. On the railing of the balcony wall, dead center, is a ceramic pot with a single green sprout coming out and up at an angle to the right. The balcony wall is likewise split into two sections, straight white slats on the right and left, a thick, square white column separating the two sections, the lack of lines on the column creating a void compared to the close lines of the slats on either side. We hold on this image as the principle credits roll, the only motion visible a white curtain waving in the breeze, occasionally obscuring the sky.

The white curtain completes four neat bands of color, darkest at the bottom and getting lighter as we move up, the pure white of the curtain entering and leaving the shot as it moves.

The camera pulls back, slowly, revealing that the shot is through a pair of doors looking out onto a balcony. The camera moves down, making the balcony wall and the doors more and more prominent, and revealing a bowl of lemons sitting dead center of both the shot and a small square table with a neat white tablecloth, also waving a tiny bit in the wind. The pillar on which the pot sits seems to be coming out of the bowl of fruit.

As the credits end, the main title card comes up, in simulated neon. A blue neon arc neatly traces the shape of the planter at the top of the title card and the bowl of fruit at the bottom. The waving curtain causes a flicker of shadows to play across the square white tablecloth. We hear a woman's voice, and she leans in from the right side of the frame, talking on the telephone and the camera moves right to take her in.

This image is evocative of many that come later, in the visual motif of arches and things seen through doorways, but is repeated in form in the most prominent shot repeated throughout the movie: Images projected on the screen of the titular theater, framed on either side by columns, literally on a stage in front of a curtain, a neat arrangement of seats on a square floor divided down the middle creating vertical lines with a void for the aisle down the center when seen from above. The view is often obscured, as by the bowls, by having the camera placed behind someone watching a movie.

The opening elements of the shot are timeless--the ocean, the railing, the wall could be from virtually any time right up to the moment the woman, holding a telephone (which we a moment later see to be a touch tone phone) leans into the picture, firmly anchoring the end of the shot in the modern day. It's a journey from the past into the present, and from a brightly lit exterior to a dark interior.

Throughout the remainder of the movie images and themes from this shot are quoted visually, the shot functioning much like the overture before a musical or one of the great movie epics as shown in the movie palaces of the past.

Gilda

I take every inch of a movie seriously, even how the credits roll. So how the movie introduces itself is all-important because it prepares me for the next several hours. Here are three of my favorites:

Poltergiest (1982)
One of the best horror movies ever made opens with the booming chorus of "The Star Spangled Banner" and a few credits on a black screen, but what really waters our eyes is that the image fades in to an extreme close-up of a television set during the station's sign off. We see patriotic images of Iwo Jima and The Lincoln Memorial but we are invited to look between the lines, between the dots to see something else. We are invited to see what someone else would see, a little cherubic 5 year-old who communicates with the dead through the television's snowy image. From there, the entire film will take place from her family's point of view, not to simply stand back and observe them but rather give us their perspective.

Juno (2007)
Our first shot in Juno is amazing for reasons we don't understand until the movie is over. Juno stands on her front lawn at sunset with a jug of Sunny D and looking at an overstuffed chair - the one in which she got pregnant (the Sunny D is to get fuel for a pregnancy test). The sunset is the closing of her immaturity, she is about to begin a journey that will end with her awakening to the realities of the world.

Juno's story is bookended with a motif of chairs. She narrates her story and first tells us "It started with a chair" and we gaze upon a big, worn-out comfortable-looking chair. Near the end she tells us "It ended with a chair" and we see a wooden rocking chair. The large, overstuffed chair represents her world at the moment, cushioned, overstuff, comfortable. The slimmer, less-comfortable rocking chair at the end represents a slimming-down of her perception of the world. They are a symbol of how far she has travelled as a person.

WALL E (2008)
If there is anything that dazzles me about an opening shot, it is an image that isn't what it first appears to be. WALL E contains such an image as we see a post-apocalyptic cityscape, the sky is a reddish-brown and we see skyscrapers. But as we look closer we realize that we're not looking at a city at all but rather a series of stacked metal cubes that are stacked in such a way that they look like tall skyscrapers. Our focus becomes the lone little bot who is in charge of stacking all those cubes. This revelation makes us realize not only that this is his job but now LONG he's been doing it.

Joss Whedon's "Serenity". Yeah, I know, a movie based on a cancelled TV show... But the opening of the movie is amazing, and it's debatable what actually *is* the opening shot of the movie.

The first thing on screen is the Universal logo, of course... and then that logo *becomes* the first shot of the movie as the camera begins to move in relation to it and things start to happen on the surface of that familar looking globe spinning in space (OK, that's not an entirely original trick, but keep reading). But the image we're watching turns out to be merely an education video being shown to class of children... which turns out to be a scene in not the movie we're watching anyway, but rather one that's being either created or replayed in the mind of one of the characters, and from which we are awakened with jolt, to see her real situation as a cpative, from which she is then rescued... during which a voice interrupts, and the image freezes, and we realise we *still* haven't got to the start of the actual movie we're watching.

Although maybe we have *now*...?

The message of the whole opening sequence is: "What you are watching - what you are *allowed* to watch - is a stored and manipulated image. Trust nothing you see here."

And that, of course, is the message of the whole movie.