Recently in Opening Shots Project Category

From Brandon Colvin, Out 1:

The opening shot of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 noir masterpiece “Le Samouraï” establishes the tone of Melville’s contemplative crime film, defines its amoral protagonist Jef Costello (Alain Delon), and introduces the connections between Costello, a hired assassin, and the concept of the Japanese samurai, particularly the ronin, or masterless samurai. The nearly three-minute shot maintains a simple but wonderfully expressive composition throughout, remaining within the drab gray-blue confines of Jef’s apartment.

Jef lies stiffly on his white mattress with black polka dots in the bottom right corner of the frame. Two windows, overflowing with soft light, balance the composition by providing visual anchors in the center of the frame. Jeff’s pet bird chirps away in his birdcage, resting on a table centered between the two windows. Chairs and dressers crowd the outskirts of the frame, completing the layout of Jef’s ascetically simple, disciplined apartment. For minutes, the only sound is the constant drizzle of rain outside the windows and the intermittent whooshing of cars on the street below, punctuated by the light cries of Jef’s bird. Jef’s lights a cigarette and when he puffs, the smoke floats up softly, stagnating in the light of the windows, rolling around as if trying to escape. The completely still shot seems as if it’s attempting to emulate the frozen camera of Ozu. Jef lies with solemnity and his imprisonment in his dreary apartment is analogous to the situation of his caged bird.

Following the credits, text appears in the top right corner of the shot. The text reads, “There is no greater solitude than that of a samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle . . . perhaps . . .” The quote is attributed to Bushido (Book of Samurai), which Melville fabricated for the film, and illustrates the connection between Jef’s disciplined isolation and the social exile experienced by great warriors, like samurai. Particularly interesting is the connection between Jef and ronin, or masterless samurai. Ronin are noted in Japanese storytelling for their lack of morality and existential listlessness, caring for themselves above all and feeling no loyalty to exterior forces. Jef exemplifies this sort of selfish existence, which, as with the ronin, fates him to a sense of dread and, ultimately, death.

From Paul Clark at ScreenGrab.com:

Despite the sensational buzz for Carlos Reygadas’ "Silent Light" at Cannes, I approached the film with a bit of trepidation when I got a chance to see it in Toronto. I didn’t much care for Reygadas’ previous features, Japon and Battle in Heaven. I could see that he was a talented director, but his attention-grabbing tactics and leaden symbolism made it feel like he was trying too hard. A director who films a shot of a man writhing in agony next to a horse’s corpse is just aching to be taken seriously as an artist.

But all of my doubts melted away during the glorious opening shot of "Silent Light." The film begins with an image of a starry sky, with nothing but chirping crickets on the soundtrack. The camera then tilts slowly downward until we see the horizon in the distance. After this, the sun slowly rises, and we begin to make out the rolling hills, and a few trees. As the sun continues to rise, the soundtrack begins to teem with life- chickens, cows, and the like- and we see a farm. All the while, the camera ever-so-slowly pushes forward toward the horizon, as the sun rises higher and higher above the hills.

If I wasn’t sure before whether Reygadas was worth taking seriously, this shot put my misgivings to rest. Simply put, it’s a stunner, partly because Reygadas makes it feel so effortless. It’s an extremely patient shot, taking at least five minutes, and in this time he acclimatizes us to the deliberateness of the film’s world. "Silent Light" is set in a Mennonite community in Mexico, far removed from fast-paced modern life, where people speak slowly and aren’t prone to snap decisions. The film’s opening shot prepares us for this beautifully.

It's probably the second shot of David Fincher's "Zodiac" that you remember best: the linear, smooth-gliding traveling shot (out the passenger window from within the car that will be the site of the movie's first "Zodiac Killer" murder) through a suburban neighborhood on July 4, 1969.

The first shot is a simple (if breathtakingly beautiful) aerial establishing shot, of the sort that will be used repeatedly to introduce timecoded segments throughout the rest of the movie. We won't know it until the next shot, but the fireworks we see are exploding over Vallejo, CA. From above, we get a sense of the terrain -- the bridge over the river, the cityscape stretching into the distance. Nobody in the movie gets to see this Big Picture this way. Everyone is limited to looking at events from ground level, trying to map out the larger view, one piece at a time, in their heads.

This is a movie about maps, about time and place and getting from one point to another and how long it takes to get there and whose jurisdiction events fall within. It is, as I've written before, an analog movie set in an analog world. It is about, and made up of, an obsession with details -- an investigation into our need as pattern-seeking animals to understand and make sense of the evidence we observe or uncover or have delivered to us by phone or mail or courier (but only rarely by fax). The Zodiac Killer proved elusive in large part because he didn't stick to his patterns. In so doing, he sent police and newspapermen scurrying all over the map, and they kept losing him in the details. (See also: Hurdy Gurdys and Aqua Velvas: Misc. "Zodiac" fax....)

The film's other establishing shots may be aerial views or more conventional exteriors or wide-shot interiors, but they accomplish the same purpose: to place the next piece of action in a particular time and place in relation to the previous one. The movie's second shot -- from the street, but with glimpses of the fireworks overhead connecting it to the first -- shows a neat row of subdivision houses. The parallel motion of the camera emphasizes the geometric orderliness of the setting, but there are glimpses of life in passing property as we glide by -- but there's also something a little creepy about them: a kid entering a house, a girl with a sparkler, a cone fountain ("CAUTION: Emits shower of sparks") erupting in a front yard, a man with a Weber, a family congregating in the rear of a driveway/alley.... The shot ends when the camera stops in front of a house and a boy runs from the front steps, down the sidewalk, and into view from the driver's POV. His face, framed in the car window, the first we see clearly in the film, will also be the last shot in the movie. That will be years later, and this boy will be a different person. "Zodiac" traces the distance from this face to that one. His face is one of the movie's maps or cryptograms.

Consider this a kind of expanded "Opening Shots" entry -- from the titles sequence of Peter Greenaway's "A Zed and Two Noughts" (1985), one of the director's taxonomy films -- in a category with "The Falls" (92 mini-bios of people whose names begin with F-A-L-L), "The Draughtsman's Contract" (twelve architectural drawings), "The Belly of an Architect" (nine months), "Drowning by Numbers" (1-100) -- about the ordering and classification of things, including images.

There's a story: Twin brothers Oswald and Oliver Deuce (played by identical twins Brian and Eric Deacon) are shattered when both their wives are killed in a collision with a pregnant swan outside the London Zoo. They become obsessed with death and decay, making time-lapse photographic studies of decomposition, beginning with an apple and continuing through the alphabet to a zebra... and then beyond. They both become sexually involved with Alba Bewick (Andréa Ferréol), the only survivor of the accident, who has lost one leg because of it. The other is later removed for the sake of symmetry.

There also a character named Venus de Milo (Frances Barber, with two arms) and a mysterious, black-clad character called Van Hoyten (Joss Acklund). The film is narrated by the great voice of BBC nature documentaries, David Attenborough.

That's the skeletal outline. "ZOO" is about ways of processing grief and facing the reality of death, and about photography as a means of recording and preserving the processes of change and decay. It's also extremely funny (emphasis on "extreme," in every way), full of visual and verbal puns and puzzles. And it's a study in mortification (again, in all senses of that word). It is also ravishingly beautiful, in a striking and painterly fashion (photographed by Greenaway's frequent collaborator, Sacha Vierney, 1919 - 2001). Greenaway's most recent film, "Nightwatching" (which I unfortunately missed in Toronto), is a deconstruction of Rembrandt's famous painting, "The Night Watch," and the murder mystery behind it.

At right: The opening of "A Zed & Two Noughts," by the numbers Some shots are separated by blackouts with film credits on them. A shot or two is left out of the sequence, for the sake of asymmetry...

So many movies have opening shots that are like overtures, condensed miniatures of the whole film. In Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" you might even say it contains the entire movie in one shot. Not only does it begin with the ending, but the movement of the shot (together with the next one) takes us from underground (the land of the subconscious, the imagination) up into the light of day -- or, looked at another way, from political and psychological repression into the liberation of the open air. This presages the momentum of the entire movie.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is so locked into the emotional and fantasy world of its protagonist, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), that the camera itself lies on its side next to her and is then plunges vertiginously into her pupil, entering her head, where the movie takes place. This initial dazzling sweep (actually a composite shot, but executed in once continuous motion) sucks us into the movie so quickly that we barely register what we've seen until the end, when we remember these prophetic first few seconds from the start of the movie.

"Pan's Labyrinth" is riddled with pupils and irises, holes and portals that lead to new worlds. In this first shot, we appear to rise out of the ground (although it's a right-to-left movement, reversing time), into Ofelia's eye into a fantasy realm of her own creation, and then moves back to the right (setting the story into forward motion), following a running figure (Ofelia herself) up a circular stairway and through another doorway, into another chamber, with another stairway. The next shot follows her up the stairs, leading through a reverse of the opening pupil-shot: an eye-hole flooded with white light. And, with that, the movie-proper begins...

Roger Ebert has published a Great Movies review of "Pan's Labyrinth. My own review, originally in the Chicago Sun-Times, is at RogerEbert.com, too, in the Editor's Notes section.

From Raymond Ogilvie, happyreflex:

This is really the second shot, following a brief bit of above-cloud photography. Let's not be too picky.

It starts with a TV set turning on. A suitable enough opening that many films have used. We know that when the movie starts with some TV, always with a healthy dose of analogue noise, we're being greeted by a commentary on the movie's world before we enter it. The TV set itself has a retro-futuristic design; the kind that was popular at least from the 20s into the 50s. All smooth curves, no sharp angles. Red and blue lights outside blink on and off, casting subtle glows onto the scene.

The TV shows a commercial from Central Cervices. An imposing logo and a happy little jingle: "Central Services. We do the work, you do the pleasure!" And already we don't trust them! It's a very Orwellian thing. We've lost freedom of choice in this society, and that's exemplified here by Central Services. All our home repair needs are now taken care of by official government employees, who can be as inefficient, bureaucratic, and unaccountable for their own blunders as they please. The customer comes last.

Now here’s the Central Services spokesperson. He’s here to tell us about how we can replace our old, unsightly ducts with newer, more fashionable unsightly ducts. They just get in the way and clutter up your living space, don’t they? The ducts are just like the bloated, bureaucratic government: they exist only for their own benefit. The public is an afterthought. You’ll see just how little the bureaucracy cares about human beings when the innocent Mr. Buttle is wrongly arrested and accidentally killed during interrogation, and no one feels any remorse: they just don’t want to be stuck with the paperwork.

From: Andy Horbal, Mirror/Stage:

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

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

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

I can't think of another movie that makes me laugh and cry within the course of its opening shot. This is "The Big Animal" (2000), a feature directed by and starring Jerzy Stuhr, based on an early screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski. You may know Stuhr from Kieslowski's first feature, "Camera Buff" ("Amator"), "Three Colors: White," "Dekalog: 10" ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods") and other films by Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi and Angieszka Holland.

This shot could serve as an introduction -- perhaps an encapsulation -- of a certain Polish sensibility dear to my heart that is both absurd and poignant. It begins in the fog -- at least, we think it's fog, but the way it's blowing it looks more like smoke. Turns out it is smoke, from a pair of circus vans, and as they move past the camera and roll off into the distance, the right side of the frame clears and... there's a camel standing there.

Why is there a camel standing there? We don't know. It appears to have been left behind for some reason. The image is comical, incongruous, absurd. But if you think about it, it's rather sad. Poor camel. It just stands there. It looks around. It reverses direction. And just at the end of the shot, the two circus trucks in the background appear to be perched on top of its humps. (Camel fanciers will know that this is a Bactrian camel, not an Arabian dromedary, because it has two humps.)

The mild existential shock of this opening image sets us up for the satire -- of bureaucracy and toleration of individuality -- that is to come. A man and his wife adopt the stray camel. At first, everyone is happy. A camel is a novelty in this village, and it becomes the man's pride and joy. He is no longer ordinary, but exceptional. He has a camel!

But then man-made socio-political reality begins to set in. How do you license a camel? Surely pets must be licensed, but there is no such thing as a camel license (shades of Monty Python's fish license sketch). A dog license is not sufficient -- possibly even illegal -- because, clearly, this creature is not a dog. It's not a horse, either. But do you need a license for a horse?

And then there are the townspeople, who begin to wonder: "Why should this man get away with breaking the rules for a camel? Who does he think he is? Why does he need to stand out and flaunt his special status? Such things should not be allowed. Or should they not, at least, be properly taxed?"

Kieslowski's screenplay, from the story "The Camel" by Kazimierz Orlos, was written in 1973 as a fable about life in the Soviet bloc. But the 1994 "Bart Gets an Elephant" episode of "The Simpsons," where Homer exploits Stampy to pay the mammoth food bills, provides a capitalistic counterpoint. I love this "Big Animal."

"The Big Animal" is available on DVD from our friends Amy Heller and Dennis Doros at Milestone Film & Video.

[This is a contribution to the Krzysztof Kieslowski Blog-a-Thon at Quiet Bubble.]

From Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Glendale, CA:

The opening of Joe Dante’s cruelly misjudged and overlooked comedy "The ‘Burbs" begins with a vertiginous and hilarious parody of the God’s-eye view shot. Fade in on the familiar Universal logo—the planet Earth spinning, surrounded by incongruously Saturn-like circles of galaxy dust, particle and stars. But the world looks a little off, a bit more animated, more cartoony than usual.

The camera begins to move in on the planet as the words “A Universal Picture�? dissolve away. The camera moves down closer and closer and closer onto the planet’s surface, onto the recognizable shape of the United States. Even closer now, dropping down into the Midwest somewhere, perhaps Illinois-ish. Closer. Closer. Now a city is recognizable. A neighborhood. A street. The camera continues “craning down�? from above the rooftops (obviously a miniature set), swooping left and down across the front of a row of houses.

Suddenly, Jerry Goldsmith’s score, which has had up to now a liltingly comic grace, turns mock haunted-house creepy with a thunderous, sinister organ chord as the camera glides over to a dwelling that looks a scosh more gothic than its surrounding neighbors. Just as suddenly, flickering flashes of light are visible through the windows into lining the goth house’s basement foundation, and crackling electrical sounds are heard accompanying the flashes. Something mysterious, and very un-suburban, is happening down there…

JE: Thanks again, Dennis! You submitted this along with several others back in July -- and I had frame grabs for it and "Used Cars" ready to go before my "hard drive fatality." Gotta go back and order "Used Cars" from Netflix again. Meanwhile, a happy belated birthday to Joe Dante ! Check out Dennis's Dantean appreciation -- as part of Tim Lucas's recent Joe Dante Blog-a-Thon.

Also don't let 2006 expire before you take Professor Dave Jennings' Milton-Free, Universe-Expanding Holiday Midterm. It counts for 25 percent of your final grade this quarter.

(And, Dennis: Thanks so much for the Christmas gift!)

From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:

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

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

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

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

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

David Bordwell (recently returned from Easter Island!), has a swell historical overview of first shots (and the Opening Shots Project) here. David notes that many classic films begin with fairly routine establishing shots and wonders:

Was there a moment when directors started to feel that they had to weight the first shot heavily, to treat it as a dense moment that the viewer should savor? The first shot of a film could be as vivid and bristling with implication as the first sentence of a novel. When might directors have begun to think along these lines?

He then surveys several of your (and my) Scanners favorites, and mentions a number of his own (from films by Harold Lloyd, Yasojiro Ozu, D.W. Griffith, Sergei Eisenstein and others):

Fairly far back in film history, directors seem to have realized that first shots should be freighted with implication. There probably isn’t only one moment when this strategy arises, but I’d suggest looking first at the period when synchronized sound comes in. Most films at the time were pretty static and theatrical in their reliance on dialogue, so a flashy opening shot or sequence could reassert “This is cinema.�? The bravura tracking shot was a common way directors chose to draw the viewer into the film’s world, as at the start of "Threepenny Opera" or of "Scarface." Maybe this is a key moment in which filmmakers began to realize that the opening shot of a film should grab or puzzle the viewer and let us reflect a little on the fact that it’s doing so.

Welcome back to the Opening Shots Project -- which has been on a bit of an unscheduled hiatus simply because I've had too much else going on. To get us back into the swing of things, I present the introduction to the great 1956 rock 'n' roll musical musical comedy, "The Girl Can't Help It," directed (unmistakably) by former Looney Tunes animator Frank Tashlin.

Our tuxedoed host (and co-star) Tom Ewell -- coming off a pairing with another pneumatic blonde, Marilyn Monroe, in the previous year's "The Seven Year Itch" -- introduces the film with the proper gravitas. No, this is not the spokesman for Mr. Carl Laemmle, warning us that we may be horrified or even shocked by the specter of "Frankenstein." Mr. Ewell, instead, plays our genial -- if a bit formal -- emcee: "Ladies and gentlemen, the motion picture you are about to see is a story of music." The set -- with musical instruments tastefully floating around the soundstage -- looks like it could be from a live-action black-and-white version of "Fantasia."

Ewell modestly explains his role in the story and proclaims: "This motion picture was photographed in the grandeur of CinemaScope, and... gorgeous, lifelike color by DeLuxe." It takes a little effort, but he manages to push the frame into the proper aspect ratio and add color to the emulsion.

[Discreet cut to medium shot here.]

In short order, the music Little Richard bursts from a jukebox -- "not the music of long ago, but the music that expresses the culture, the refinement and the polite grace of the present day" -- drowning out out Mr. Ewell completely. The montage that follows, of colorfully lit couples tearing up the soundstage floor will be evoked in the credits for David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" years later.

But for now, it's Jayne Mansfield who explodes onto the screen in the grandeur of CinemaScope and in gorgeous, lifelike color by DeLuxe -- or rather, garish, lurid color by DeLuxe, and we wouldn't want it any other way. Then it's one politely graceful act after another: not only Ms. Mansfield and Little Richard, but Fats Domino, Abbey Lincoln, The Platters, Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Eddie Cochran, The Treniers, and Julie London, Julie London, Julie London and Julie London. She can't help it.

What do we have here? It's the opening shot of one of my favorite 1970s comedies, a dark absurdist urban paranoid masterpiece called "Little Murders" (1971) written by Jules Feiffer ("Carnal Knowledge") and directed by Alan Arkin (as was the second, successful run of the play in New York in 1969; the first staging a year earlier closed in a week). As you might guess, it's a movie about windows and frames. Look out any window, and there's another one looking right back at you -- with a telescope, a camera, maybe even a gun. After a while, you don't want to know what's out there. You shut off the TV, bar the windows and bolt the door just to keep the madness... out?

Elliott Gould plays Alfred, a listless, benumbed photographer who shoots piles of dog shit. That's his subject. In this shot, Alfred is somewhere outside the window, getting beat up. That's Patsy (Marcia Rodd) in bed. The sounds of Alfred's mugging are drifting in her window, but that's not what awakens her. It's the phone -- another call from the heavy breather (in an era where "obscene phone calls" were the latest in pornographic technological phenomena). But although the image may at first remind you of Kitty Genovese (the murder victim whose screams were ignored by neighbors in Queens), Patsy intervenes. And that's the way it all begins.

Arkin jump-cuts into the scene a few times as the credits appear, in a way that reminds me of the percussive cuts of Harvey Keitel waking up (to the Ronettes' "Be My Baby") at the start of "Mean Streets" (1973). By the end of the film, the windows will be flung open again, to let the fresh air in... and the sniper rifles out.

P.S. Roger Ebert's original 1971 review of "Little Murders" gets at why I think it's such a good, and disturbing, comedy. It doesn't tell you when it's OK to laugh:

Arkin said, shortly after the film was released, that he'd only seen his movie once in a theater, and he was afraid to go again. When he saw it with an audience, he said, he thought it was a flop because there was no pattern to the laughs. People were laughing as individuals, almost uneasily, as specific things in the movie touched or clobbered them.

That's my feeling about "Little Murders." One of the reasons it works, and is indeed a definitive reflection of America's darker moods, is that it breaks audiences down into isolated individuals, vulnerable and uncertain. Most movies create a temporary sort of democracy, a community of strangers there in the darkened theater. Not this one. The movie seems to be saying that New York City has a similar effect on its citizens, and that it will get you if you don't watch out.

Excerpt from my programme notes for a double-bill of "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom!" -- the first presentation in a Brian De Palma series programmed by R.C. Dale at the University of Washington, April 14, 1981:

.... "Greetings," De Palma's 1968 anti-military/anti-war movie mélange, was the first of his films to find an audience. In fact, it was so successful that "Hi, Mom!" was conceived as a sequel (originally to be called "Son of Greetings"). "Greetings" is an ebullient comedy, and a brazenly disturbing mixture of movie-movie acrobatics and American counter-culture politics in the manner of pre-l968 Godard. Critics have emphasized over and over De Palma's debt to filmmakers such as Godard and (especially over-emphasized) Alfred Hitchcock. In "Greetings," Michelangelo Antontoni's "Blow Up," another hip youth-cult film of the time, also looms large. But the filmmaker whose specter really presides over this film is that of Abraham Zapruder, the man who made the most famous home movie of the Kennedy assassination at Dealy Plaza.

The first thing we see in DePalma's movie is a television set carrying a speech by President Johnson. In front of the set sits a book: "Six Seconds in Dallas." "Greetings," made five years after the assassination, is a picture of a nation obsessed with six seconds of 8 mm Kodak movie film. Right away, De Palma begins detailing the dissolution of the barrier between the personal and the political in American society; just as, in this and subsequent films, he will dissolve the barrier between the film and the audience, between horror and humor, between public and private.

They don't grind 'em out like "Raw Meat" anymore. I don't know if horror movies will ever seem as seedy as they did in the first half of the 1970s, when even the emulsion itself seemed to carry dread and disease. In this British horror-thriller, released in the UK as "Death Line" and directed by Gary Sherman ("Dead & Buried"), there's Something in the Underground. Yes, there's a through-line to "The Descent" here. And Guillermo Del Toro ("Cronos," "The Devil's Backbone," "Pan's Labyrinth") considers it one of his favorites.

A Semi-Important Brit (with mustache and bowler hat) is seen checking out various porn shops and strip clubs in a seamy area of London, before descending into subway where he attempts to pick up a prostitute and is then found dead. That begins an investigation by Inspector Calhoun (a tartly over-caffeinated Donald Pleasence) and long-suffering Detective Sergeant Rogers (Norman Rossington -- the put-upon manager, Norm, from "A Hard Day's Night"). Christopher Lee also appears as an MI5 operative, doing what seems to be a nutty send-up of Patrick MacNee's Steed on "The Avengers."

The opening shot itself begins with an out-of-focus blur of colors, accompanied by a dirty, grinding, sluggish, metallic guitar/bass/drums riff that sounds like Angelo Badalamenti's score for the endless-nightmare Roadhouse scene in David Lynch's "Twin Peaks; Fire Walk with Me." As the image comes into focus we see a Magritte-like silhouette of a British gent looking at dirty magazines. Then the shot goes out of focus again. The pattern is repeated throughout the titles sequence as the naughty fellow visits one unseemly establishment after another: out of focus (indistinguishable, unidentifiable); then in focus (ah, that's what we're seeing/where we are); then back out again. And, wouldn't you know it, that's the shape of the mystery (and the investigation) itself: Someone's whereabouts are unknown. Then he is seen. Then he disappears. The aim is to fill in those out-of-focus parts, to figure out where he came from, how he got there, and where he went.

I'm sure "Raw Meat" is not as shocking as it must have seemed in 1972, but Sherman's use of real, atmospheric locations is still eerily effective. And for fans of long takes, this guy loves 'em! There are whole stretches where the camera simply prowls around underground, revealing its horrors one by one. The film was cut for its original release in the UK -- some gore, a bit with a rat's head, an attempted rape -- and wasn't passed by the censors until the DVD release in 2006.

Here are some of the most popular choices we've published so far. The top vote-getters from this round will advance to the next! (I had to upgrade this thing -- it only gave me 100 "views" a day, which were used up in about 15 minutes. Now we get 2,000 views per day...) Poll after the jump >>

From Schuyler Chapman:

Down a desert road the car ambles erratically, while the motorcycle-cop watches from the far side of the road. Lapsing, perhaps, four seconds and consisting of a 180-degree pan that follows the car as it heads toward and passes the camera and police officer, it's not a terribly long shot -- but it perfectly encapsulates the film, "Repo Man," that follows.

A synthesized sound and clanging industrial rhythm accompany the automobile's desultory progress. The music that scores the first shot, like the jagged, punk rock guitar played over the credits, creates a sense of dread -- an undercurrent of menace -- that complements the bizarre Chevy Malibu. Music is integral to this scene (and the movie), establishing a sense of tension that might have been otherwise lost. Listen to the thrumming electronics and the rhythm vaguely reminiscent of heartbeats. This atmospheric touch tells us that something's not right. This auto is not swerving as the result of an intoxicated driver -- or rather the result of a driver intoxicated by the typical substances -- it's the result of something unknown and alien.

The audience is set up for the film that follows: a surreal and slightly sinister chase for an old Chevy. Another aspect of the shot clinches it for "Repo Man" offering one of the best and most appropriate cinematic openings: the movement of the car itself. How have I described its motion? Desultory, erratic -- I should also add forward. Like the story that tracks its movements, the Malibu wanders hither and thither but maintains general forward momentum toward some discernible end. There will be slight detours but they never take us far off course and, frankly, make the narrative a more "scenic" trip.

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

-- Stephen King, "Danse Macabre" (1987)

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

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

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

From Kathleen Carroll, co-founder and artistic director of the Lake Placid Film Forum (and "non-practicing film critic"):

I still smile at the very thought of Francois Truffaut's opening shot in "Day For Night," the amazingly long tracking shot that gradually reveals the film-within-the-film. I interviewed Truffaut at the time that "Day for Night" was first released in this country. This is how he explained his purpose for making the film. "I wanted to show a film to the public about the making of a film, a film that would give the most information and from which one could learn the technical aspects of movie making. The film will help those who are thinking about making films. And, as far as the ordinary public is concerned, the film doesn't spoil anything."

During the same interview Truffaut told a funny story about "Jules and Jim" which, as he explained, he deliberately tried to make "like an MGM film." There were those who did not see "Jules and Jim" as just another MGM movie. When the film was first released here, the then all-powerful Legion of Decency (which later became known as The National Catholic Office of Motion Pictures) threatened to give it a condemned rating. Truffaut was asked to speak to a group of priests on behalf of the film. He went reluctantly, feeling "like a little juvenile delinquent."

"Do you realize the girl in the film is behaving like Elizabeth Taylor?" asked one of the priests. "It was the time of 'Cleopatra,'" and the Taylor-Burton affair was all over the newspapers," recalled Truffaut. "I pretended that I didn't know what he was talking about." "It's in the newspapers," insisted the priest. "I only read film reviews," said Truffaut.

JE: Oh, Kathleen -- joy is right! This really may be the Ultimate Opening Shot in many ways, because we actually get to go back into it and critique it in the movie itself. The whole thing looks perfectly random and natural (I don't want to know how many takes it really took), as if the eye (camera) were just alighting upon one thing and then another as its interest is piqued. But we soon see how carefully and precisely it's all choreographed. Day for night. Illusion for reality. Artifice in the service of art. Notice, too the use of strong colors like red (dress, car, little girl, etc.) and white (car, overcoat, etc.) -- the alternating colors of the awning in the background -- and black (suits, car roof, etc.) to focus our attention. Doesn't this just make you want to go out and make a movie?

(Shot continues after the jump)

From Mike Calia:

Bare tree branches set against an oppressive grey sky, meeting somewhere between impressionism and expressionism and setting the palate for the whole movie (save for the blaring reds and wood tones that pop up later in the institutional settings). Then the camera points down, almost straight down (setting up the well scenes in Buffalo Bill's lair, as well), to the bottom of a hill, where Clarice Starling enters the frame and starts climbing and doesn't stop for the rest of the movie. It's part obstacle course, part fairy-tale woods, and not one frame is wasted. Add in Howard Shore's haunting score (unjustly snubbed by the Academy that year) and you have the perfect blend of modern police procedural suspense and gothic horror.

JE: Good one, Mike! This is such a deceptively simple beginning (and it takes you a little while to figure out what's going on), but you're absolutely right -- it leaves you with a feeling, of Clarice running through the cold, hazy, wintry woods, that stays with you for the whole picture. (Demme is so unfussy and elegant.) There's something about the starkness and emptiness of those titles -- white outlines filled with black -- that's chillingly effective, too. And then there's the way Clarice glances to the left -- not behind her down the vertiginous path from whence she came, but off in another direction -- before running out of the frame to the right. You get the feeling she's running from something, perhaps something from the past about to pounce into the present, and she isn't quite sure where it will come from.

View image

By the way, Dr. Lecter offers an excellent Socratic lesson in the principles of critical thinking here:

Dr. L: I've read the case files, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there in those pages.

Clarice: Then tell me how.

Dr. L: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius -- of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice: He kills women.

Dr. L: No! That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?

Clarice: Anger. Social acceptance. Sexual frustration --

Dr. L: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now...

Clarice: No. We just --

Dr. L: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?

Those words ought to be inscribed as an example in every classroom. See each thing for itself. Then consider its context. Understand how your enemy or adversary thinks. What may seem most important to you, may be only incidental to him...

From Andrew Wright, The Stranger:

Cinematic brimstone manna for pubescent Cinemax viewers, Paul Schrader's unjustly neglected 1982 remake of "Cat People" leaves the watcher uneasily poised somewhere between needing a wet-nap and a steel-wool shower. Working again with "American Gigolo"'s visual consultant Ferndinando Scarfiotti, the director's interpretation of the wittily Freudian source material is chock full with the promise of tantalizing sex and violence, which is ultimately delivered so nastily that it's difficult not to feel guilty for enjoying it. Schraeder, a dude who knows a thing or three about temptation himself, here delivers one lulu of a cautionary tale: What you want to see may not really be what you want to see, no matter how much you think you want to see it.

Nowhere is this poisoned voyeurism more evident than in the opening shot, which quite literally unearths the film's joint fascination with turn-ons and snuff-outs. Beginning with a patch of hallucinatory, nuclear-Antonioni colored desert, a wind slowly, sensually, blows across the surface of the sand to reveal a polished human skull, and then another, and another, and yet another, until an entire boneyard is uncovered. All this, while David Bowie and Georgio Moroder are moaning orgiastically on the soundtrack. Just writing about it, I want a cigarette. And a hairshirt, possibly.

JE: Muchas gracias, Andy. That ultra-lapsed Calvinist Schrader does indeed know something about putting out a fire with gasoline. I haven't seen his "Cat People" in, let's see, 24 years, and all I remember about it is the Bowie song and the way somebody jumps, catlike, onto a table or something. That image you sent sure is purrty, though...

Three eloquent and distinctly personal appreciations of the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love":

From Nareg Torosian, ScreenPlay:

The opening shot of one of my favorite films of recent years, Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch-Drunk Love" (2002). As described on the DVD's back cover, the focal point of the movie is Barry Egan, "a socially impaired owner of a small novelty business, who...is unlikely to find love unless it finds him." On the surface, nothing much happens during the handheld shot that begins the movie, but for this first minute and a half, Anderson is able to set up three crucial elements for the rest of the film:

1. Barry's loneliness. The set is about as sparse as can be - one desk and one chair in the corner of a large, unadorned, warehouse-like room. No one else will enter the frame, and other than the voice on the other end of the telephone, no other sound can be heard. (A metallic ping that breaks the silence will attract Barry's attention and cause him to leave, thus creating a bridge to the film's next shot. Jon Brion's lush, atmospheric score/soundscape will not come to play for several minutes.) Anderson shoots the sequence in a long shot, and the resulting amount of empty, indifferent space conveys the character's sense of isolation and emotional distance; this composition is mirrored later when Barry calls the phone sex service in his apartment and when he calls Lena from a pay phone in Hawaii. Even the first spoken line ("Yes, I'm still on hold") subtly hints at his feeling of emotional repression and arrested development.

2. Barry's phone etiquette. In the opening dialogue, Barry politely and rationally explains a loophole in one of Healthy Choice's promotional campaigns to one of the company's phone representatives. This is one of many phone conversations he will have during the course of the film, and it will become clear that he is a man who (initially) seems more confident and can express himself more clearly over the phone than in person.

3. The film's color scheme. Color is very important in this movie, and the shade of blue on the warehouse wall and on the suit Barry wears will be closely identified with him throughout the film. It is not until Lena's appearance that a vibrant red will make its way into Anderson's palette, literally and figuratively signaling a change in Barry's monotonous existence.

FYI, I've still got lots and lots of Opening Shots stacked up to publish, including (off the top of my head): Truffaut's "Day for Night," Paul Schrader's "Cat People," Joe Dante's "the 'burbs," Bob Zemeckis's "Used Cars," Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rublev," Peter Weir's "Picnic at Haning Rock," Paul Thomas Anderson's "Punch Drunk Love" and many, many others. Just haven't been able to work on this stuff as much as I should because of daily reviewing obligations. But I'm gonna try to get to another batch this week, if I possibly can...

From Sam Goldsmith:

If there is any opening shot that truly shows the power of cinema, it comes from my favorite film, Richard Lester's "A Hard Day's Night." After crediting Miramax and Walter Shenson, the film makes a hard edit to John, George, and Ringo cheerfully running from hordes (not a group, hordes) of overzealous fans at Marylebone Station in London. Accompanied by one of the greatest opening chords in rock and roll history, you know that something fun is about to begin.

Also, notice the fact that George falls down, Ringo tumbles after him, and John turns and laughs. If it were any other film, the makers would probably have them do the shot again, but the spontaneity of that moment and how they react to it is real and joyous. When they finally approach the screen by the end of the shot, the magic of the film starts to weave a spell of euphoria, and we can do nothing else but enjoy the ride.

From Jerry Matthews, The Salt Shaker, Salt Lake City, UT:

The picture cuts in from black as, on the soundtrack, George Harrison's jangling 12-string strikes a kinetic opening chord. The four members of The Beatles run towards the camera on the left side of the frame, while the stampede of fans who want to touch them fills all of the narrow street. The cars parked on the street obstruct much of the crowd, suggesting the film's energetic, impromptu feel.

From Tom Sutpen, If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats:

There is no more enigmatic image in the badly underappreciated canon of Richard Lester than the opening shot of his 1968 masterpiece "Petulia." Outwardly it gives us scant information, it establishes little that could be called functional, it lasts a handful of seconds, no more; yet it instantly sets the tone for a film in which nothing fully belongs to recognizable human reality except the errant bursts of emotion its principals seem to have forgotten they were capable of.

Silent but for the sound of sqeaking rubber wheels, three overdressed, wheelchair-bound whiplash cases are guided through a somewhat dank, inactive, seedy-looking hotel kitchen by impassive attendants. Though Lester's camera never leaves the front of this odd train as it travels down a long corridor, one neck case following the other, there's no sense of real movement in the shot (as there would have been had, say, Stanley Kubrick executed it), apart from the wheelchairs and the camera seemingly joined in concord.

The people being transported . . . even the attendants ostensibly doing the driving . . . seem incidental. And the looks on their faces say it all. They could be going to a Coronation, they could be going to the Gas Chamber; they'd probably look the same in either event: Too deadened even for passivity. One almost concludes from the elements of this shot that things, objects, have more life in them, more reflex even, than humans do. Which is wholly consistent with a film where style and manners and form appear to have consumed all of humanity's natural impulses while its back was turned.

From Jeff Levin, Rochester, NY:

I’ve never seen an opening tighter or more ingeniously structured than the one for Philip Kaufman’s "Quills." It’s an opening that flips from dreamy to nightmarish and completely changes the nature of what you think you’re initially observing, all the while quickly and efficiently familiarizing viewers with the persona of the of the protagonist.

That protagonist would be a one Marquis De Sade, brilliantly played in the movie by Geoffrey Rush in an Oscar-nominated role. Starting with a black screen, you hear him announce that he has a “naughty�? tale to tell, one “guaranteed to stimulate the senses.�? He then begins by announcing that the tale is about an aristocrat named Mademoiselle Renare, as soft music begins to play and the visage of a dreamy looking young woman appears on the screen. You then see an erotic expression come over her face as the Marquis describes how her sexual proclivities “ran the gamut from winsome to bestial.�?

But suddenly, you see a man’s hand come into the picture … then two hands … then the man himself, a brute wearing a hooded mask. The Marquis continues, “Until one day … Mademoiselle found herself at the mercy of a man every bit as perverse as she. A man whose skill at the art of pain exceeded ever her own.�? The man then begins tying her hands as she pleads for mercy. Looking up at a window, she suddenly notices a figure looking down at the proceedings and it’s … the Marquis himself. It’s at this point that you realize that you’re not seeing a story acted out -- you’re seeing what inspired it in the first place: mass executions during the French Revolution.

From Edward Bowie, US Army:

I have a counter-intuitive nomination for best shot: The opening segue from the Paramount “mountain�? to the unspecified Andean mountain in “Raiders of the lost Ark.�? Indicative, I think, that what we are about to see is “…only a movie!�?

Perfect for the “just for fun�? spirit that Lucas and Spielberg intended for their paean to the Saturday serial while demonstrating the technical wizardry that gives their “effects�? movies their dazzle (and their point.) Relax, get out the popcorn, their won’t be a quiz….a masterpiece!

JE: Nothing counter-intuitive about this one -- it's intuitive all the way! I recall seeing it the weekend it came out with a friend and film professor of mine. We took in a matinee double-bill -- first "Clash of the Titans," followed by "Raiders." Within the first few seconds, I remember her leaning over and whispering: "Isn't it great to see somebody knows how to make MOVIES?!?!" Yep, it is.

Watching this shot repeatedly (I like to get my hands dirty, as it were, while getting frame grabs), I thought of a couple basic principles of improv comedy: 1) always add information to the scene; and 2) always say "yes" -- never contradict what somebody else has brought into it. Of course, this shot is anything but improvisational; it's artfully choreographed all the way -- and Spielberg is saying "yes" and adding information second by second.

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

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

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

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

This summer a friend is introducing me to the HBO series, "The Wire," beginning with the first season on DVD. Sunday nights, we eat a big ol' fresh-grilled meal (like steak, ribs, kabobs, pork loin, salmon, scallops wrapped in prosciutto, asparagus or broccoli sauteed in olive oil, garlic and crushed red peppers)... I'm sorry, what was I saying? I kept hearing from friends that "The Wire" was something great, as good as (some say even better than) "The Sopranos" or "Deadwood." Well, we're only three episodes in (we also watch a "Freaks and Geeks" -- all new to me -- after each episode), but I'm hooked.

"The Wire" is about Baltimore police (homicide and narcotics) and their investigation and surveillance (hence the title) of a city-wide drug operation run by one Avon Barksdale, a shadowy figure said to be based on a real Baltimore dealer. All threads seem to lead back to Barksdale, but the cops don't even have a photograph of the guy.

The first image of the first episode of the first season is a close up of blood on the pavement. It lasts only a few seconds, but the camera slowly moves up the trail of blood toward its source, the body of a drug-related homicide victim. The liquid catches the flashing lights of police cars and seems to illuminate with electrical sparks like... wires. Only the middle-ground of the shot is in focus -- where it comes from and where it leads are still blurry. We don't know it yet, but the whole season has been set up for us.

From Robb Hamilton, Seattle, WA:

A few weeks ago I took my kids to see "Cars" at a theater off Aurora Avenue in Seattle. Aurora would be a perfect setting for a Clowes/Zwigoff picture: seedy motels, diners, people waiting for buses, adult book stores, etc. We were seeing the movie a week or two after it opened so the crowds had died down. The cast of characters in the lobby getting snacks (the overweight family loading up on jumbo popcorn, the chaperone with the retarded kids, the guy with the NASCAR hat) made me remark to my wife that I felt like i was in a Dan Clowes comic.

The opening shots of "Ghost World" cut back and forth between "Jaan Pehachaan Ho" from the Bollywood movie "Gumnaam" and a camera movement to the back of Enid's apartment building. We find out at the end of the shot that the movie is playing on Enid's TV. Terry Zwigoff does a great job of capturing Dan Clowes' style as well as Enid's character. All of the inhabitants in the apartments seem brain dead, while Enid's apartment is pink and blue, filled with thrift store finds, toys and a Pufnstuf poster. Later in the movie Enid is eventually able to escape the dead end that is her life. The opening shots of "Ghost World" drop you right into the pages of a Dan Clowes comic book and more importantly shows the juxtaposition between Enid and her surroundings.

JE: Muchas gracias, Hammy! (I recently wrote an appreciation of "Jaan Pehachaan Ho" here.) As you know, I love Aurora and consider it the greatest street in the entire world. (Sorry, State Street -- Seattle's my kinda town.) My theory is that every town in America has an Aurora Avenue (the old Highway 99), a main commercial drag (possibly the former primary arterial route) that takes you past parks, parking lots, and used car lots, and is littered with establishments where merchants provide for the exchange of goods and services of every conceivable type -- from birth (diaper services) to death (funeral homes, cemetaries). In LA, it's Pico Boulevard. In Spokane, I suppose it's Division. Anybody reading this should know the clogged arterial in their particular burgh. What's yours? (BTW, if you want to take a simulated drive down Aurora, you can do so right now, thanks to Amazon's fantastic A9 Local Search, which photographs both sides of streets to help you find just the merchants with the goods and services you require. Here it is: Seattle's Aurora Avenue North, between Green Lake (and Woodland Park) and 80th.)

The way I look at this opening is much like you describe. The first two shots are really a "title card," because they are really a suggested frame-within-the-frame image of "Gumnaam" playing on TV (although we don't know that yet). After the title appears, there's the first shot proper: a great image down the side of an apartment complex, with the silhouettes of wires and ceramic insulators in the foreground. In the windows receding into the distance, we see the flickering of light from cathode-ray tubes. The camera begins to move toward them. Although the rest of the sequence involves cutting back and forth between "Jaan Pehachaan Ho" and shots that slide past and peer into those windows, it feels like one continuous camera movement. I've said it before: It perfectly legitimate to talk about the context for these Opening Shots -- as Robert Horton also does for "Cutter's Way." More images after the jump...

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.

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....

From Nathaniel Soltesz, Pittsburgh, PA:

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.

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.

From Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule:

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.

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.

From Hiram M:

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.

Mickey Spillane, the creator of hard-fisted private eye Mike Hammer, has died at the age of 88. Several of his kiss-kiss, bang-bang pulp novels -- including "I, the Jury," "The Long Wait" and "My Gun is Quick" -- were made into movies, and Spillane himself played Mike Hammer in the 1963 picture, "The Girl Hunters" ("Trapped in a Quicksand of Love...").

But the Spillane movie masterpiece is, of course, "Kiss Me Deadly" (1955), directed by Robert Aldrich and scripted by A.I. Bezzerides. It is considered one of the bookend landmarks of the age of full-blown film noir, beginning (roughly) with Billy Wilder's "Double Indemnity" (1944), and one of the most florid examples of that post-war style.

Recently, we featured Kim Morgan's appreciation of the opening shot of "Kiss Me Deadly," which is worth re-visiting. As Kim describes this crazy Pandora's Box of a movie (the inspiration for the glowing MacGuffin/Great Whatzit suitcase in "Pulp Fiction"), it's filled to bursting with "stark, hard-boiled cruelty, paranoia, insanity and psycho-sexual angst." That's a great capsule description, not only of this particular film, but of the Spillane sensibility in general.

Likewise, Roger Ebert summed up essential qualities of the world created by Spillane and his chain-smoking, wise-cracking partners in crime in his brief "Guide to Film Noir":

Film noir is . . .

1. A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.

2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.

3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all....

Ken Wiley, a jazz historian and musician, has a radio show called "The Art of Jazz" that airs Sunday afternoons on my favorite station, KPLU-FM in Seattle (and online at Jazz24). He has a reocurring feature in which he chases down a musical element -- a melody, a set of chord changes, developments on a solo -- through a number of records. I've often wanted to do something similar with movies, and in researching my MSN Movies feature, "Wither While You Work" (Dave McCoy came up with that headline; I wish I had), a few ideas occured to me.

This one starts with King Vidor's great 1928 "The Crowd." The camera climbs up the side of a skyscraper (a miniature) looks through a window and a dissolve takes us to an overhead shot of an enormous diagonal grid of desks, emphasizing the regimentation and depersonalization of working life in the big city.

In one of the most famous homages in movies, Billy Wilder paid tribute to Vidor at the beginning of 1960's "The Apartment" with a tilt up the side of the building and a dissolve to the famous image of the sea of desks. Wilder shoots it straight on, from above desk level, but keeps both floor and ceiling in view, the receding lines of desks and fluorescent light fixtures converging into infinity. The scale is so immense, it's funny. Later, when 5:20 p.m. arrives and the bell rings, everybody gets up, places covers over their adding machines, puts on their coats and goes home... and another dissolve shows us C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) all alone in this vast office space, knowing there's no point in heading back to his apartment just yet.

Michael Tolkin's "The Rapture" opens with a maze of modern cubicles at a directory assistance facility. (And, yes, this is soon to be an Opening Shots entry.) Tolkin actually moves into the maze, rather than simply surveying it from above. The camera begins by rising above a cubicle wall in the foreground, then moves across to the left, down one of the paths, then back to the right until it floats over another cubicle wall and comes to rest nearly on top of Mimi Rogers' monitor. (You may be able to spot her if you enlarge the accompanying image here -- she's in the fourth box back, just right of center.) Notice how Tolkin also uses the overhead lighting to add forced perspective, a sense that the room extends even further than it actually does. And the lighting is so muted that the shot almost seems to be in black and white.

In "Fight Club," Edward Norton's anonymous narrator stands in front of a copier and describes experiencing the world through his depression as being like seeing "a copy of a copy of a copy." He's placed his Starbuck's coffee on the copier in front of him, and it rides back and forth on the top. When we look out at the office from his POV (fixed perspective), his copier lid moves back and forth in the foreground. Three people, also standing in front of copiers at perpendicular angles to the camera, are drinking their Starbuck's simultaneously, moving every bit as mechanically as the office machines. A man pushing a cart comes in from the left and moves in perfect sychronization with the foreground copier motion. The whole world has become a grid, populated by monochromatic automatons.

That's the same feeling conveyed by the relatively short, stationary shot in Mike Judge's "Office Space," where Peter (Ron Livingston) comes to work and passes across the screen in the foreground from right to left (not unlike the copier lid in "Fight Club"). This one, especially, reminds me of newspaper newsrooms I've worked in. Again, the lines of the cubicles and the fluorescent ceiling lighting converge in the distance. Whenever I see this image now, I'm reminded of dominoes -- how one thing leads to another and Peter and his friends from the office eventually knock down these walls, literally and figuratively.

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

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

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

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

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

From Dennis Cozzalio, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Glendale, CA:

When Jim invited me to participate in this survey, I accepted with enthusiasm and then immediately began to worry. Every example of a great opening shot that was coming to mind ("Touch of Evil," "The Player," "Shadow of a Doubt") had already been pawed over and written about to such a degree that I certainly didn’t think I would have anything more to add to the discussion that hadn’t already been said, and far more eloquently than I would be able to say it. And as I continued to drag my feet, I saw some of the off-the-chart top choices I had come up with ("Dazed and Confused," "Kiss Me Deadly") get snapped up and written about, again, quite eloquently, by others. Now, after digging through my DVD and laserdisc collection, I’ve finally come up with what I think are some great ones, and as usual I haven’t the discipline to hold myself to just one.

UPDATED WITH FRAME GRABS (07/14/06) JE: Dennis, the owner and proprietor of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, of one of my favorite movie blogs, has contributed several great shots and analyses. I'm going to spread 'em out over the next few weeks or so -- and try to get frame grabs for 'em. I hadn't seen "Thieves Like Us" since I showed it in the ASUW student film series at the University of Washington in about 1980, and it isn't available on US Region 1 NTSC DVD -- but I found a German Region 2 PAL version through an Amazon.com z-shop importer, DaaVeeDee.

"Thieves Like Us " (Robert Altman, 1974; photographed by Jean Boffety) Robert Altman has had more than one rich, visually stunning opening shot in his long career. From the Panavision image of helicopters racking into focus to kick off "M*A*S*H," to Rene Auberjoinois’ mysterious lecturer announcing a series of avian themes and questions while surrounded by bird skeletons and other classroom at the beginning of "Brewster McCloud"; from Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe stretched out on a bed, counteracting the proactive image of Raymond Chandler’s private eye to the strains of “Hooray for Hollywood�? [and "The Long Goodbye" -- ed] to open "The Long Goodbye," to the K-Tel-esque record commercial that serves as the opening credits of "Nashville," to the raising of the flag by bugle call leading into the staged massacre that opens "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson" (proclaimed on-screen with satiric bombast as “Robert Altman’s Absolutely Unique and Heroic Enterprise of Inimitable Lustre!�?), Altman knows how to kick off a movie.

One of his most beautiful opening shots, however, occurs at the beginning of "Thieves Like Us," a shot that artfully prepares us for the somber mood, the deliberate, unhurried pace of the film as a whole, and its naturalistic attitude toward the story it intends to tell, that of the doomed relationship between a young escaped convict and the naпve young woman with whom he falls in love.

"Star Wars" has, not surprisingly, been the popular favorite among Opening Shots contributions. Here's how several of you saw it:

From Barry Toffoli:

"Star Wars" opens with a shot of space and the soft sound of John Williams score, then the shot shifts to a planet. So right away we know we’re in for adventure on foreign soil, in outer space no less. Then a small vessel comes from the top of the screen. This is quickly followed by a series of blasts as the score turns into that famous booming on sound, akin to Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars’ [from "The Planets"]. This is all quickly followed by the enormously famous and copied shot of a behemoth star cruiser coming in from the top of the screen and going on forever. It doesn’t take long to figure out that this story is a tale of good versus evil, the little guy getting bullied by the big guy. Even the planet in the shot plays into the theme, representing a new undiscovered world a new hope for freedom and life. But we know the journey will be hard as the star cruiser looms over everything from the rebel ship to the planet below to the audience watching it in the theatre.

And long before the death star ever shows up we fear this massive beast could blow up the planet below just as easily as it could blow up the tiny ship, setting the stage for one of the greatest adventures in film history.

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

The opening shot of Joseph Losey's "Accident" (1966) begins under the main-title credits and runs for a minute or so after they have concluded. We're looking at the front of a good-sized but hardly palatial house in the English countryside -- the home, as it happens, of an Oxford don whose academic career has been less than stellar. It's nighttime, tangibly well into the wee hours. No lights are burning, no activity within is apparent. The credits roll without musical accompaniment. On the soundtrack we detect an airplane passing overhead; onscreen, a slight alteration of perspective on the surrounding tree boughs makes us aware that the camera is slowly nudging closer to the house. After a moment, there is the sound of an automobile approaching. The noise grows loud; the engine is racing. Then, a screech of tires and the sound of impact and shattering glass, abruptly cut off. There is a further pause. Then the front door of the house opens, only a hint of light glimmering in the interior. Hesitantly, a man steps out, then begins advancing into the night. Cut to several murky shots impressionistically marking his progress as he moves toward the scene of the titular accident.

The shot, though plain as, uh, day, is remarkable for several reasons. One, of scant concern to most of us, is that with it the director and his first-time cinematographer Gerry Fisher achieved their goal of shooting a color scene that actually looks like what it's supposed to be: a nighttime exterior as seen by moonlight, rather than a day-for-night fakeroo or some other conventional attempt to imitate nighttime via filters and technical trickery. Losey and Fisher went to extreme pains with the film lab to get the shot to look exactly as they wanted it -- even though, as Losey ruefully observed in interview, they knew most theaters would bathe the screen with mauve houselights for the benefit of late-arriving seat-takers, and in any event a few passes in front of the projector's carbon arc would soon alter the image on the emulsion.

So, technically, a real, if effectively unnoticed and ephemeral, coup.

From Robert Humanick, a film odyssey:

I'm not sure if this applies to the "opening shot" rules, in that it is included as part of the opening credits, as well as the fact that it was digitally rendered (some people are picky about such things). But having already read (and agreed with) many of the other submitted choices (particularly "Aguirre," my personal favorite), I felt this one needed a voice of its own.

"Fight Club" opens from remote darkness into unrestrained chaos, the camera pulling back at near-breakneak speed out of an unknown quarter through various layers of strangely textured substances, the frantic nature compounded by the Dust Brothers' pulse-techno soundtrack. Ultimately, the microscopic journey reveals itself to have been taking place within the brain of the film's unnamed main character (Edward Norton). The point-of-view shot exits his body through a pore on his face (a bead of sweat rolling down from it just as the camera retracts from the skin), pulling further back over more differing terrains to ultimately reveal a hazy human figure. Just as the picture comes into focus, revealing the figure to be at the mercy of the film's quasi-villian (who has a gun shoved mercilessly into his mouth), the recurring voiceover begins: "People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden."

In case you hadn't noticed: Comments are working, and some good discussions have been started -- annotations to particular Opening Shots and (especially stimulating) various reactions to my diatribes against the Slate writer who bashed "The Searchers" for his own anti-intellectual, anti-"film geek" reasons that have little or nothing to do with the movie. (And will somebody please respond to Kevin's questions about the character of Debbie?) I've set it up so that the newest comments are at the top bottom -- like the blog itself (or an e-mail thread). Let me know how that works for you.

I've got LOTS of Opening Shots contributions backed up, but not to worry: I plan to work through them for as long as it takes. Some people have written asking if it's too late to submit something. Hell, no! It will never be too late. Even if everybody else stops sending them in, I'm going to continue indefinitely. This is an inexhaustible subject; I can't imagine I'll ever run out of opening shots to think about, write about, and savor.

Shane Carruth's ingenius "Primer" (2004) offers a textbook example, if you will, of a "What are we looking at?" opening shot. Linear and rectangular or trapezoidal patterns of light dot the dark screen. Then the irregular, vaguely chevron-shaped object at the top of the frame flickers, illuminates, and... we see we're inside a residential garage, near the ceiling, looking at the door, which begins to lift to the accompaniment of odd, but still somewhat familiar, electronic and metallic/mechanical sounds. Even once we know what it is, something about it feels like science fiction -- as though this door were opening up to a new dimension or something. The next shot orients us: a more conventional exterior establishing shot, showing the grinding, squealing door from the outside and four young men walking into the space. This is the (twisted, inside-out) story of these garage-based tech entrepreneurs, and they won't understand what they're seeing, either, when they accidentally invent and/or discover something incredible in that unassuming structure. Or, maybe, they already have... -- JE

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

“Nights of Cabiria�? (1957)

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

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

From Ali Arikan, Istanbul, Turkey:

The first shot of "Withnail and I" is deceptive in its simplicity. As the camera opens on the eponymous "I" of the title, obviously depressed and downtrodden, we see a 30-something-man at the end of his tether, drowning in angst; both literally and figuratively, trying to breathe. A desk lamp, the single light source, and the books and notepads scattered over a desk in front of him betray the possibility that he is a writer. The rest of the furniture has that all-too-familiar aura of the maudlin British middle class. All this, combined with the sluggish zoom of the camera and the melancholy use of the last ever King Curtis live performance of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum, presents the audience with an irrevocable feeling of denoument. Almost as if this is the final shot of a film and not its first.

Does this shot look uncannily familiar? A man asleep, or almost asleep, with his head against a window as the twilight world outside floats by. This one's from Richard Linklater's "Slacker," but we've also featured a similar opening shot from Sophia Coppola's "Lost in Translation."

I love the way the window, besides being a frame within a frame (suggesting a slightly fuzzy, abstracted reality in the background that's distinct from, but related to, what we're seeing in the foreground), is almost like a cartoon dialogue bubble, but instead of words it's filled with images. A dream, perhaps? It certainly has a dreamlike quality. And, of course, the sleeper/dreamer in this shot is the filmmaker himself, Richard Linklater. And the movie we're about to see is filled with stream-of-consciousness monologues and long, winding shots that drift from one character to another until the very end when some kids throw the camera itself off a cliff. Linklater (unlike Bill Murray in Coppola's movie) is on the right of the frame, with the window images moving from left to right. Linklater's face is on the strong axis, in terms of traditional composition, and the flow of motion seems natural and unforced, kind of like the path-of-least-resistance flow of the whole movie. Murray, on the left with the images moving right to left (against the way we Westerners read) seems to be swimming upstream in an Eastern world. (Speaking of upstream: You rarely see images of spawning salmon leaping left to right; upstream always seems to be right to left. See "My Own Private Idaho.")

From Robert Daniel, Birmingham, AL:

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

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

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

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

From Brad Damare, New Orleans, LA:

"Dawn of the Dead" opens with an close-up of one of the lead characters, asleep against a blood-red carpeted wall. She seems both alone and surrounded by the red -- an echo of what will be the film's finale, in which she has to escape the mall rooftop alone, possibly alone in the world. But Romero jump-cuts with something of a joke: She's only dreaming, and she's actually in a room full of people. But that room full of people is in full-panic mode: She's awakened from one nightmare into another.

JE: Thanks, Brad, for mentioning one of my all-time favorite horror movies. It's like she's in a red-shag womb, about to be born into a world that's worse than anything she could have dreamed. That jump-cut happens as she cries out, waking herself up -- and at the same instant a man pops into the frame and grabs her: "Are you alright? The shit's really hitting the fan." And the zombie head is really hitting the helicopter blades... A TV station colleage, watching a debate on a monitor ("We don't know that," says a man on the screen. "We gotta operate on what we do know!"), observes: "Still dreaming..."

From Jeremy Mathews, The Salt Shaker Magazine, Salt Lake City, UT:

It may be a recent film, but I don't think it's too early to canonize Michael Haneke's "Caché" opening shot as one of the greats. Haneke's first image prepares the viewer for his film's astounding distortion of the cinematic lens.

A static shot of a house at the end of a Parisian street during early morning seems perfectly banal, as Daniel Auteuil's character walks over to his car. But then, in voice-over, Binoche and Auteuil begin to discuss the workings of the shot — they didn't see the camera, so how was this footage created? One of them comments that the shot is too clear to be shot through glass (i.e. hidden in someone's car).

Until the scanlines appear as the characters rewind the tape, there are absolutely no clues from the image's quality (resolution, interlacing, etc.) to suggest that it isn't from a professional film. When the next shot, of Auteuil and Binoche in their house looking at the TV, comes up, there is no discernible visual difference between the tape and what we assume isn't a tape.

From Girish Shambu, Buffalo, NY:

"Flowers of Shanghai" (1998), by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien, has an opening shot that lasts — I kid you not — eight minutes! Jazz bassist Marcus Miller once said about James Brown’s music that no matter how small a piece of it you took, like DNA, it had the “funk in it.�? That’s how I feel about this shot: it contains, in its eight minutes, the entire film.

The camera is an observer at a table in a 19th century Shanghai brothel or “flower house,�? where several clients are playing a drinking game. Most of them are young, dressed in dark and gleaming silk robes. The only light in the shot is provided by a couple of curved lamps. (In fact, we will discover that the film will never venture outdoors.) Next to the patrons, standing, are their “flower girls.�? Every now and then, promptly but gracefully, they light opium pipes or pour wine for their clients. Like a plaintive sigh, a melancholic melody-drone accompanies the shot.

From Jonathan Pacheco, Anna, TX:

Seemingly too easy of a choice, this film's first shot meets your criteria perfectly. After a slightly creepy overture, we are blessed with shot of a barely visible moon. It slowly moves down as the earth rises above it, and even more distant, the sun rises above the earth.

All of this happens as "Also sprach Zarathustra" beams in the background, a song and tone poem based on a book that spoke about the journey in the evolution from ape to man to superman. Already, Kubrick is telling us exactly what will happen in the next couple of hours with just the music. The visuals are telling us exactly how his film should be approached: as a slow but massive epic, a film with concepts and visuals that should be pondered and revered, much like one is awed when looking up at the heavens. As an added bonus, the final shot in the film uses the first shot and takes it to the next level.

JE: Right you are, Jonathan. Kubrick composed his films with a thoroughly musical technique unlike any other director I can think of. (I've said it before: "Eyes Wide Shut" is ridiculous if seen as a straight narrative [it is, after all, based on a "Traumnovella" -- or, "Dream Story"]; it's magnificent when you look at it as a musical composition, using imagey the way musicians use sounds -- thematic statements, colors, tempos, structure, repetition, development, variation...)

When we see the image of the planets and the monolith in alignment at the beginning of the film's last movement (the psychedelic star trip into inner/outer space), we have that momentous sense that this is the climax of the picture, and it could take us anywhere -- even if we don't understand exactly what's going on. And then, in the last few moments of the film, the spherical, planet-sized Star Child drifts into view...

I saw "2001" at the Cinerama Theater in Seattle when I was 10 years old. My life has never been the same since. Kubrick finds expression for the mystery and awe of being alive in this universe, at this time, by invoking images of the unimaginably distant past ("The Dawn of Man") and the unimaginably near future ("Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite").

Here goes. For the time being, I'm just going to offer up the answers to the Opening Shots Pop Quiz, without further elaboration or analysis in most cases -- because these shots are so great they deserve full Opening Shots treatments of their own. (And you, by the way, are welcome to provide them if you are so inclined!)

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

From Leonard Maltin:

The one that first comes to mind is from a film I fell in love with thirty-some years ago, "Scarecrow," directed by Jerry Schatzberg and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. I revisited it when it finally came to DVD last year and felt exactly the same way. It opens on a static shot of a wood and wire fence alongside a two-lane highway, as a figure makes his way down a hill toward the fence (and us)...the sky is gray behind him. We're riveted to this image, eager to find out who this is, where he's coming from, and where he's headed. I haven't timed it to see how long the shot actually runs, but it's long, and absolutely mesmerizing: an opening shot that draws you in and makes you want to watch the movie.

JE: Thanks, Leonard -- it's a beauty! The dark gray clouds contrasting with the pale tan of the dry, grassy slope; the light playing across the hillside that makes the clouds shift even darker; the sound of thunder echoing in the distance -- it's the kind of shot where, seconds into the movie, you can almost smell the setting: The ionic scent of the approaching rain, the dusty pollenated aroma of the baked grass. And it's also funny, as Gene Hackman attempts to extricate himself from the fence. Anyone who's attempted to climb over, under or through barbed wire knows the pain and frustration of this moment all too well! It looks like the shot was originally even longer, and is interrupted by a few cutaways to Al Pacino watching from behind a tree -- perhaps to substitute different takes. And you're right: Now I'm going to watch the whole movie. (Love Pacino's introduction: "Hi. I'm Francis.")

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

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

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

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

I still have plenty of excellent Opening Shots submissions to edit and post -- and I'm doing my best to get frame grabs to accompany them whenever I can. (Quiz answers coming soon, too.) To no one's surprise, "Star Wars" (1977) has been the most popular nomination -- and for good reasons. But do keep 'em coming. I think of new brilliant opening shots every day, so if your initial ideas have already been mentioned, keep thinking. (Or, if you'd care to add to the discussion of a particular shot, Comments have supposedly been enabled on certain posts -- though I have to approve 'em first.)

A few notes about terminology, just so we can be sure we're all speaking the same language:

shot: a continuous image on film, from the time it begins (when the camera is rolling) until a cut (or fade out or dissolve) takes us to the next image. Sometimes the word "take" -- as in continuous shot -- is used interchangeably, although it is more specifically used to refer to one of several attempts to "get" a certain shot during filming. The editor often chooses between several takes of a given shot, and may cut them into shorter shots, or inter-cut different takes with other shots.)

pan: when the camera pivots horizontally, usually on a tripod. If a shot is strictly a pan, the camera does not move from its location, it just swivels -- as if you were standing still and turning your head. It can, of course, be used in various combinations with any of the other techniques below. The opening shot of "Psycho" is a simple pan. Later, a zoom and a crane shot are used in the opening sequence.

tilt: like a pan, but a vertical movement rather than a horizontal one. The camera does not "pan" up the exterior of a skyscraper from a position on the sidewalk across the street; it "tilts" up. The last shot of Robert Altman's "Nashville" is a simple tilt up to the empty sky.

dolly shot: a shot in which the camera actually moves -- usually when mounted on a dolly or a crane, and often on tracks which have been put down to ensure a smooth-gliding and precise movement.

tracking shot: sometimes used interchangeably with "dolly shot," but technically a shot where the camera moves with, or "tracks," another moving object in the frame -- whether from above, below, ahead, aside, or behind. (See opening shot of "Birth" -- which also appears to use a crane and a Steadicam.)

crane shot: a movement where the camera is mounted on a crane (and sometimes a dolly as well), usually to rise above, or descend to, the scene of the primary action. Lots of movies end with crane shots that raise up on a crane and sometimes dolly back at the same time (think of "Chinatown" or "Silence of the Lambs").

handheld shot: any shot in which the camera operator simply holds the camera manually, whether standing in one place or moving around within the scene. Often characterized by a certain shakiness that we're used to experiencing as more immediate, immersive, or documentary-like than a solid, mounted camera, which can feel more detached and "objective."

Steadicam shot: a Steadicam is a gyroscopic device that, as its name indicates, can be used to eliminate the shakiness of handheld shots for a smoother, more fluid movement -- as if the camera is floating on air. (See "Halloween" for a dazzling example.) In a landmark shot at the beginning of Hal Ashby's "Bound for Glory" (photographed by Haskell Wexler), the Steadicam operator is actually on a crane and lowered to the earth, where he steps off and continues the shot at ground level.

zoom: a zoom lens is simply a sliding telephoto lens that smoothly enlarges or reduces the size of objects in the frame optically, like looking through a adjustable telescope. The camera doesn't necessarily move (though it sometimes does that at the same time), but appears to magnify or decrease whatever it's looking at. As you zoom in on something, the image appears to "flatten." (Recall the famous shot of Omar Sharif riding toward the camera across the desert in "Lawrence of Arabia" -- he never really seems to get any closer because of the long telephoto lens that is used.) The dizzying "Vertigo" effect (after Hitchock's innovation in that film) involves dollying in and zooming out at the same time (or vice-versa) -- an effect employed memorably in a shot of Roy Scheider on the beach when a shark is sighted in "Jaws."

From Mark Roberts, Calgary, Alberta, Canada:

I am such a fan of movie opening moments (sounds strange I know, but a great opening moment is something I really treasure), that I had to respond to your call for favourite moments (and I'm going to have to see "Barry Lyndon" now too...). They're all pretty literal... nothing terribly deep in terms of artistic impression... but that shouldn't disqualify a great opening.

"Superman"
I always get caught up by the opening moments. As the child narrator speaks about the Daily Planet, the curtains pull back to reveal the first issue of "Action Comics", moving to the "live" shot of the Daily Planet, and then into space and the opening credits. John William's score draws us through the open curtains and into the other world of the movie. I still get a little leap in my chest when the theme reaches its first crescendo and the title "Superman" leaps into view.

From Scott Gowans, Web Manager, WOSU Public Media, Columbus, OH:

I had been reviewing films for four or so years before I decided to take some film courses at Ohio State. One intensive, joyful seminar was the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose films had just been re-mastered and were showing in pristine condition at the Wexner Center on campus. His work is both frustrating, fascinating, illuminating, and always puts me on edge. For anyone who doesn’t get him or his work, I understand, and I’m also sorry. He’s hard to watch and abstruse, but when you get it, nothing looks the same anymore. My professor hates the way society attached the term ‘genius’ to anybody who shows above-average intelligence, but he had no problem with putting Fassbinder in the same class as Goethe and Shakespeare.

One opening shot sticks with me, though I could site others. The first shot in “Beware of a Holy Whore�? has the camera at waist-level looking slightly upwards at Deiters (played by avant-garde filmmaker Werner Schroeter), who has brown hair spilling over his shoulders, and is dressed in a black cowboy suit. Behind him is sky. Deiters, whose role in the film is an odd photographer, delivers a soliloquy about Goofy (the cartoon character) in drag, who teaches kindergarten, gets beaten up by his students, meets Wee Willy, a gangster who is "the size of a 3-year-old," takes the crook home, and feeds him. Though the police arrest Wee Willy, Goofy refuses to accept that his new friend is less than perfect.

From Robert C. Cumbow:

(An excerpt from my book, "Order in the Universe: The Films of John Carpenter):

Following the main title shot-a slow track-in on a leering jack-o'-lantern-the opening sequence of Halloween is a spectacular tour-de-force, a four-minute single take that builds up to the brutal murder of a teenage girl in a quiet home in a quiet neighborhood in quiet Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween, 1963. The take ends as the murderer's mask is removed and a shock cut reveals the clown-suited killer to be the victim's six-year-old brother. The camera stares, then backs off, becoming a 15-second crane shot up away from the silent, blank-faced boy holding the bloody knife as his parents look on, questioning.

Thereafter, as in "Jaws," the shift to subjective camera often deliberately signals the presence, or possible presence, of the beast. In addition to imputing guilt to the audience, the subjective camera also serves the purpose of concealing the killer's identity in the crucial opening scene. The subjective camera technique was taken up by "Friday the 13th" and the raft of "Halloween" imitators that followed and became such a convention that it was parodied in the opening to Brian De Palma's "Blow Out" [1981]. But it became a convention for a purely utilitarian reason -- preventing us from seeing the
killer's face -- and acquired the unfortunate side effect of creating a sadistic woman-killing persona as the point of audience identification, something many critics and viewers reacted against.

From Christopher Long, Reviewer and Features Editor, DVDTown.com:

In terms of narrative structure, the opening shot of Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger than Paradise" is a perfect "mini-movie." The film opens with a shot of Eva (Eszter Balint, seen from behind) standing to the far right of the frame; in the background, we see a plane park on an airport runway. Eva watches a plane land, very slowly picks up her luggage (a ratty suitcase and a shopping bag), turns around (glancing around in almost a full circle) then walks (again, very slowly) left and towards the camera until she exits the frame.

The shot lingers, however, long after Eva has departed to witness the parked plane as it begins its takeoff. Here is the entire story laid out in miniature: "Stranger Than Paradise" begins with an arrival by plane (Eva coming to America from Hungary) and ends with a departure by plane (Willie [John Lurie] flying to Budapest).

From Edward Copeland:

When Jim asked me to submit something about my favorite opening shot from a movie, I was at first flummoxed -- it seemed all the best ones were obvious and would have been written on to death, so I dug through my memory to try to find a less-obvious choice.

What I settled on was "The Crying Game." I was fortunate to see "The Crying Game" for the first time long before the hype about the "twist" kicked in, so I was genuinely surprised at the direction the film went in and I think, upon rewatching its opening, that the beginning was helpful to that end.

Percy Sledge's great "When a Man Loves a Woman" plays on the soundtrack (the irony of that song will only sink in later) as the camera moves slowly under a bridge across a lake where on the other side sits an amusement park with Ferris wheels and various rides going round and round. If you had no idea going in where this film was headed, you certainly couldn't have figured it out by these images, though you'd be mesmerized nonetheless.

From Kim Morgan, Sunset Gun:

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

And then I reflected more.

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

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

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

From Mike Leto, Bethpage, NY:

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

"Aguirre, The Wrath of God" -- The first shot sets up the mood for this film perfectly. First, the opening titles tell us that this is a doomed mission but we didn't even need message. We cut to a mountain covered in fog but as the fog starts to drift away we see a long line of men walking down the side of the mountain. This image, along with the music, sets a tone of failure and desparation before things actually start to go wrong.

"Dazed and Confused" -- I know what you're thinking but I happen to think that this film is a masterpiece and the first shot (just like "Aguirre") sets the perfect mood. When you hear Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" and you see the car making the turn in slow motion it brings us back in time. Not to 1976. But to our teenage years. We don't have to worry because it brings us back to a time in our lives where the worst thing that happens is that the party got cancelled.

I'll be publishing your Opening Shots submissions all this week. And I'll provide the answers to both my Opening Shots Pop Quizzes (and further appreciations of the shots themselves) on Friday or over the weekend. While nobody's correctly identified all the shots on either of the quizzes, all shots except one have been identified by at least one person. The Most Mysterious Shot: Number 8 on Quiz #2. Also, I thought some of the images were showing up dark on my desktop PC (though not on my PowerBook), so I lightened 'em up a bit.

Remember, send quiz entries and your nominations for great Opening Shots (along with your explanations for why they work at setting up the film) to jim at scannersblog dot com. (Link above.)

Also, if you want to discuss individual shots, I've enabled Comments on some of these new posts. I still have to approve them before they're published (Sun-Times policy), but I'm hoping it will help generate more lively and informative discussion hereabouts.

From Nadia Aboufariss:

"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" begins with a shot of a huge, wooded mountain side, shrouded in the mist. We can just barely make out the figures who are slowly descending the slope, little bigger than specks on the screen. As in other Werner Herzog movies ( such as his recent film "Grizzly Man" ) this opening shot suggests the utter indifference of the natural world to the exploits of man. The Spanish conquistadors who are descending the mountain, with their priests, women, and slaves are embarking on a noble quest to find the lost city of gold, "El Dorado", while simulataneously bringing the grace of God to the local savages.

From Dave McCoy, Editor, MSN Movies:

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

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

From That Little Round-Headed Boy:

"His Girl Friday": Anybody who ever worked in the journalism business, or wished they had been around for newspapering's madcap era, must feel a quickening at the opening tracking shot of Howard Hawks' classic comedy. As the camera tracks from right to left across the city room of the Chicago Morning Post, a smoky, hustling, chatty ambience hangs over the enterprise, as an editor yells out for a "Copy boy!", reporters are decked out in rolled-up shirts and green eye-shades, the women wear fashionable hats and the blue-collar switchboard gals are yammering in overdrive. The scene sets the fast-paced theme, and it never lets up.

JE: Good grief, TLRHB, that's a great one! (This should give readers an idea why they should check out TLRHB regularly.) As someone born with ink in his veins (red ink, I'm afraid), I know well the quickening of which you speak!

"Altered States" opens with the image of a fluorescent, egglike shape surrounded by darkness. It is a window. From below, in comes a floating human figure (William Hurt as Prof. Eddie Jessup), who appears to be immersed in liquid. Surrounded as he is by the dark oval frame of the window, he resembles an embryo inside a mother's womb. The camera slowly tracks back to reveal that Jessup is inside a horizontal tank in an empty room. As it tracks back even further, the viewer detects the edges of a second window, rectangular this time. In front of that window sits a bearded scientist in a laboratorium, who carefully monitors the room with the tank holding Eddie Jessup.

In the film, science tries to discover the essence of the Self by use of altered states of consciousness. The opening shot prepares the audience for this very process by taking the viewer through different layers/windows of counsciousness: from the symbolic birth of the Self, via self-awareness, to self-examination; from subjectivity to objectivity. The soundtrack amplifies this trajectory, going from bubbly water effects and steady breathing through an oxygen mask, to the buzz of lab equipment and clicking of buttons.

Peter Gelderblom
founder / contributing editor
www.24LiesASecond.com

JE: Beautifully done, Peter! I love the use of sound in this shot, too: From the very first moments you have this feeling of being immersed in an individual's interior consciousness -- which is where the drama of the movie really plays out.

OK, I know the Opening Shots Pop Quiz is difficult -- mainly because, even though many of the movies are famous (or by famous directors), they're very personal favorites of mine that most people wouldn't necessarily think of right off the bat.

So, I thought I'd do another one that didn't require so much detective work. It's also a kind of companion to my 101 102 Movies You Must See Before You Die list, in that these are 10 11 of the most celebrated films, and most famous opening shots, ever (plus one relatively obscure one by a favorite director of mine who also has a shot on the OS Pop Quiz -- a little extra hint. Another clue about that one [BONUS #2] here).

So, not only should you have seen all these movies (and you probably have), I hope you won't have too much difficulty remembering these classic opening shots, and why they're great. Feel free to send in your answers via the e-mail link above -- along with your comments. I'll publish the first correct answer, and any of the interesting comments you have about the shots themselves. Just click the link below and start the clock ticking...

We've received some terrific contributions to the Open Shot Project. Thank you so very much. And please keep 'em coming in. (And tell your cinemaniacal friends.) I'm going to start posting them next week. But remember: We're talking about single opening takes, not entire sequences or montages. Doesn't matter if the image comes before, during, or after the titles -- just as long as it's the first image. (Of course, the first shot of a montage could be significant and wonderful and worth considering on its own, especially when you consider how the succeeding images build upon what it establishes.) I'd even include this shot from David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" because, although it is really a combination of layered opticals, it gives the illusion of being a single, unbroken take -- no clear cuts, just a lot of overlapping fade-ins, fade-outs and dissolves.

Today, I've decided to offer a little pop quiz. What follows after the jump are single frame-grabs from some of my favorite opening shots in some of my favorite movies from the '20s to the '00s -- some famous, some fairly obscure. I don't necessarily expect anybody to get them all (unless they know me personally!), but see what you can do. In most cases, the frames are taken from the first second or two of the shot. Some shots last only a few seconds, others a minute or more, and some begin as dissolves out of the opening titles. Keep in mind that filmmakers often like to hit you with a distorted image you can't quite make out -- an extreme close-up, or a reflection, or a shot from a peculiar angle -- just to grab your attention and pull you in. Ready? Begin...

Any good movie -- heck, even the occasional bad one -- teaches you how to watch it. And that lesson usually starts with the very first image. I'm not talking necessarily about titles or opening sequences (they're worth discussing, too -- but that's another article); I'm talking about opening shots. As those who have been reading Scanners (and my Editor's Notes on RogerEbert.com) know, two of my cardinal rules for movie-watching are:

1) The movie is about what happens to you while you watch it. So, pay attention -- to both the movie and your response. If you have reactions to, or questions about, what you're seeing, chances are they'll tell you something about what the movie is doing. Be aware of your questions, emotions, apprehensions, expectations.

2) The opening shot (or opening sequence) is the most important part of the movie... at least until you get to the final shot. (And in good movies, the two are often related.)

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