May 2011 Archives

Nicholas Ray's directorial debut, "They Live By Night" (1949), begins like a trailer and then slams us right into the opening titles of the feature. An attractive young couple (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell) are nestling in close-up by the flickering light of a fireplace. They smile, they kiss, and then something off-screen (and unheard on the soundtrack, though signaled by an jarring shift in the musical score) causes them to react with fear and alarm.

"They Live By Night" is a prototypical young-couple-on-the-run movie ("You Only Live Once," "Gun Crazy," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Badlands"), and this tabloid-style opening sets it up breathlessly. The shot seems to exist out of time -- perhaps an idealized moment they once shared, or would never have. The man who would later direct "Rebel Without a Cause" establishes them as innocents and outsiders, star-crossed lovers who "were never properly introduced to the world we live in..." Dissolve to an aerial shot of a truck barreling through a dusty wasteland.

We soon discover that, at the point the title appears, the boy and the girl have yet to meet. So, the whole film could be seen as a flashback -- a noir convention that emphasizes the forces of fate, since the ending of "their story" (even if we don't know what it is) has already been determined from the opening shot. Or perhaps it's a flash-forward to a memory they'll cling to for the rest of their lives. Or an imprint of their fugitive state of mind...

The opening shot of Wim Wenders' moody color noir "The American Friend" (1977), based on Patricia Highsmith's 1974 novel "Ripley's Game," isn't anything fancy or complicated -- no intricate tracking or crane movement -- but, wow, does it announce the movie. First we hear the sirens and the traffic noise behind a black screen, over which the title is immediately emblazoned in electric red-orange block letters: "DER AMERIKANISCHE FREUND."

Bam! We're there, at street level on the lower West Side of Manhattan. We get a look at a few cars and a truck heading uptown, and the ghostly outlines of the World Trade Center towers that stand in the distant haze -- modern New York looming over this less imposing block of old New York. (They also provide a Roman numeral II to mark this sequel to the Scanners Opening Shot Project, which is why I chose this shot for last week's announcement of Part 2).

If you followed the gossip from the recent Cannes Film Circus, you will have heard that there were two incidents of scandalous behavior by directors who had films in competition. One of them involved Lars von Trier, who felt so alienated during the press carnival for his film "Melancholia" that he tried to inject some provocative humor into the proceedings and wound up making Nazi jokes that didn't go over at all well. As he later told Dennis Lim in the New York Times: "I got carried away. I feel this obligation, which is completely stupid and very unprofessional, to kind of entertain the crowd a little bit."

Von Trier's actions got him declared "persona non grata" by the authoritarian Board of Directors, while the other filmmaker, Terrence Malick, got the Palme d'Or by behaving even more shockingly (if some of the press reports were to be believed): He didn't walk the red carpet or attend press conflagrations for his movie, "The Tree of Life"! Strange as it may seem, some people -- even movie directors -- don't crave the attention. Brad Pitt, the extremely famous movie star who did a fine job fielding mostly inane and redundant questions from the keyboard paparazzi after the press screening, noted, as did others, that Malick prefers not to be hailed as a demigod in a festival atmosphere. Imagine that.

Nearly five years ago (June 16, 2006), I announced what I called the Movies 101: Opening Shots Project, and I figure it's past time for a re-launch. I want to elaborate a little on what I wrote back then, when I started off with the opening title/shot of Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon":

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.

... and Germans and Jews and Albert Speer and Susanne Bier, etc., at the post-"Melancholia" press conference at the Cannes Film Circus. The quotations I've seen in print have been fragmentary and/or inaccurate, and understandably can't convey tone. This isn't the whole press conference, either, but, for the record, it should give you a better idea of how the thing actually unraveled, and how it played in the room. It's excruciating to watch somebody flounder and dig himself in like this (how much of it is meant to be a provocative joke? a perverse publicity stunt? an artistic confession?), but from this angle you can also see Kirsten Dunst squirm in mortification. She and the moderator try to interject and rescue him, but he won't give up.

To me, it appears he has some vague idea of where he's going (something about understanding the worst in human nature, perhaps?), but gets hopelessly lost on the way there -- until, in apocalyptic von Trier fashion (hey, he just made a movie about the end of the world), he throws up his hands and drops the bomb in a desperate attempt to dissipate the gathering tension by saying exactly what everybody is fearing (or hoping) he'll say... And what was the question again?

UPDATE (05/19/11): The festival has now declared von Trier "persona non grata," though what that means is not entirely clear. Ben Kenigsberg of Time Out Chicago reports from a post-press conference gang-bang interview with von Trier:

From Jason Haggstrom (haggie), Reel 3:

The opening shot of Robert Altman's "The Player" establishes the film as a self-reflexive deconstruction of the Hollywood system and those who run it. With its prolonged shot length, the take is also designed as a means to introduce the bevy of players who work on the lot and to setup the film's general plot--or at least its tone--as a thriller/murder mystery.

The first image in this extended opening shot is of a film set--a painting of one, to be precise. We hear the sounds of a film crew before a clapper pops into the frame. The (off-screen) director shouts "And... action" informing the audience that the film should be viewed as a construct, a film. The camera tracks back to reveal its location on a Hollywood studio lot where movies are described not in accolades of quality, but of quantity with an oversized sign that reads, "Movies, now more than ever."

The lot is filled with commotion. Writers come and go (some invited, some not) as do executives, pages, and assistants. The political hierarchy is highlighted through dialog and interactions that expose the value system of Hollywood. The most powerful arrive by car; high-end models pervade the mise-en-scène in all of the take's exterior moments. An assistant is made to run (literally, and in high heels) for the mail, and then -- before she even has a chance to catch her breath -- to park an executive's car.

The challenge: Pick the five best and five worst Woody Allen movies from the 40-something features he's directed since "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" (the Japanese spy movie he re-dubbed and re-cut in 1966). Here are my choices, loosely ordered, for MSN Movies. (Having just re-re-re-re-watched "Another Woman" for an Opening Shot entry -- I can't pull myself away from it once it starts -- I might now rank it higher than "Crimes and Misdemeanors," I think....) I recently caught up with or re-visited all the movies on my lists and quite a few more (yes, I sat through "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" again, though I confess I only made it through the first half hour of "September -- more than enough to confirm my memories of how wooden it was.) From my introduction to the full story at MSN Movies:

"I've contributed my share of mediocre and very bad films, just like everybody else. I've been working on the quantity theory. I feel if I keep making films, every once in a while I'll get lucky and one will come out OK. And that's exactly what happens."
-- Woody Allen, in Robert Weide's film "Woody Allen -- A Documentary," to be released in the fall as part of PBS's "American Masters" series

In case you don't remember, there was a time when Woody Allen was kind of a big deal. From the late 1970s through the early 1990s -- roughly from "Annie Hall" to "Bullets Over Broadway" (the last time he received an Oscar nomination for Best Director) -- Allen was considered by many to be one of the most vital and interesting American auteurs. His reputation as a serious (though often comedic) filmmaker seemed all the more impressive coming from a former TV gag writer and stand-up comic.

If his achievements seem less significant from the viewpoint of the 21st century, there are likely several reasons.... [from his advanced age to the Soon-Yi scandal]

Woody Allen's "Another Woman" (1988) begins with a shot that is the whole movie in miniature. As followers of the Opening Shots Project know, that's one of my favorite approaches, and I think "Another Woman" is one of Allen's best movies.

A woman (Marion Post, played by Gena Rowlands) appears at the far end of a dark hallway and strides toward the camera, passing in and out of light. She is wearing a long coat, and she puts a scarf around her shoulders as she walks. She's a woman who knows where she's going. We don't get a good look at her until she moves into medium close-up, adjusts an earring and comes face to face with herself in the mirror. (Bergman reference intentional.) Her reflection is obscured from our point of view, but for a moment we see her look directly into her own eyes.

Marion, who has recently turned 50, thinks she knows herself and what kind of life she has led. But what she encounters when she steps out the door will overturn her establish notions of who she is and what she has done with her life: her memories of the past, her marriages, her lovers, her friendships, her relationships with her own family... Everything she though was solid and certain is swept out from under her feet and she goes into free-fall. With wit and insight, the movie details her unexpected investigation into what she's made of herself. And as the illusions crumble around her, she notices her mother's tear stains on the last line of a favorite poem, Rainer Maria Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," which reads: "... for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

David Lynch's ad for his coffee. Starring David Lynch's hand and a Barbie head.

(via Steven Santos)

They don't teach cinematic grammar in elementary schools, though they ought to. But somehow kids understand it anyway -- even before they understand spoken and written language. David Bordwell ponders this mystery in a post about final shots called "Molly wanted more," in which he describes a friend's three-year-old daughter crying out for "More!" as Snow White and the prince ride off into the sunset at the end of Disney's 1937 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

"How could she know, on her first pass, that the story was ending?" he wonders. Using examples from "Snow White," "The Wild One" and "The Silence of the Lambs," among others, DB examines one of the conventions for entering and exiting movie stories, in which we move in on the characters (or they approach us) at the beginning and pull back (or they move away from us) at the end:

Thanks to the visual nature of movies, the widening or closing-off of the story world can mimic the act of our entering or backing out of a tangible situation. That's what we see in "Snow White" and my other examples. In a sense we greet the characters, and after spending some time with them we bid them farewell. [...]