Cinematic Overtures

How to Read Opening Scenes

Annette Insdorf

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780231544061
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A great movie's first few minutes provide the key to the rest of the film. Like the opening paragraphs of a novel, they draw the viewer in, setting up the thematic concerns and stylistic approach that will be developed over the course of the narrative. A strong opening sequence leads the viewer to trust the filmmakers. Other times, opening shots are intentionally misleading as they invite alert, active participation with the film. In Cinematic Overtures, Annette Insdorf discusses the opening sequence so that viewers turn first impressions into deeper understanding of cinematic technique.

From Joe Gillis's voice-over in Sunset Boulevard as he lies dead in a swimming pool to the hallucinatory opening of Apocalypse Now, from the stream-of-consciousness montage as found in Hiroshima, mon amour to the slowly unfolding beginning of Schindler's List, Cinematic Overtures analyzes opening shots from a range of Hollywood as well as international films. Insdorf pays close attention to how the viewer makes sense of these scenes and the cinematic world they are about to enter. Including dozens of frame enlargements that illustrate the strategies of opening scenes, Insdorf also examines how films explore and sometimes critique the power of the camera's gaze. Along with analyses of opening scenes, the book offers a series of revelatory and surprising readings of individual films by some of the leading directors of the past seventy-five years. Erudite but accessible, Cinematic Overtures will lead film scholars and ardent movie fans alike to greater attentiveness to those fleeting opening moments.

1

The Crafted Frame

Saul Bass, Talk to Her, Knife in the Water, Camouflage

My point of departure is close analysis of the opening sequences of motion pictures. When discussing films, I share with other viewers how superior movies provide within the first few minutes the thematic and stylistic components that will be developed throughout the film. This is of course similar to how great novels offer in the initial two paragraphs the keys by which to unlock the rest of the book. In addition to establishing the tone—whether tense, ironic, romantic, frightening, comic, nostalgic, or self-conscious—the opening introduces meaningful motifs; these can include windows, circular images, or elemental imagery such as water and earth. The opening makes us aware of the point of view: who is telling the story. Once upon a time, “once upon a time” were the four words that introduced a tale. The voice of the omniscient third-person narrator framed the story with a soothing movement into a past. Film is also “once upon a space”—or, more appropriately, “once into a space”—as the camera explores the space of the frame. Psycho and Sunset Boulevard provide fine examples, moving voyeuristically from an exterior “objective” shot into a window, penetrating a room’s intimacy.

Why focus on the instigating moments of a motion picture? Victor Hugo called opening signals “inexorable revealers.”1 This quotation appears in an excellent article by Victor Brombert; while his essay “Opening Signals in Narrative” refers to the beginning of literary texts, his description is fruitfully applicable to cinematic ones. And I share Brombert’s appreciation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty when he ascribes the following assumption to this philosopher: “That the choice of every artistic technique ultimately corresponded to a metaphysical perspective. Indeed, all narrative structures, because of the notion of a beginning and an ending, necessarily set up a tension between linear and cyclical structures. And the specific nature of this tension in any given work also engages a conceptual, moral, or philosophical debate.”2

My chapter divisions—much like my Schoff Lecture titles—are not rigid but fluid and overlapping. An opening can be both a prelude and a misleading introduction (for example, when the voice-over narration is spoken by a character who turns out be dead). And an opening can be part of the action while providing the equivalent of a frame around a painting. Philip Kaufman’s Quills (2000) is a vibrant illustration, opening with the image of a beautiful young woman as the male voice-over says, “Dear Reader, I’ve a naughty tale to tell, plucked from the pages of history. Tarted up, true, but guaranteed to stimulate the senses.” While these lines (from Doug Wright’s adaptation of his own play) prepare us for an erotic encounter, the camera gradually reveals an executioner at the guillotine. The public brutality counterpoints the purple prose of the Marquis de Sade: the woman is about to lose her head literally rather than figuratively. Kaufman invites the viewer into active participation with the film, foreshadowing both the sensuality and self-consciousness of subsequent scenes. And the opening of The Queen (2006) acknowledges that the function of a frame is to hold the picture and keep it in place. In a long take, Queen Elizabeth (played by Helen Mirren) poses for an official painting—an appropriate introduction to a character whose public image is imperious and immovable—before turning to the camera. As in his earlier film Dangerous Liaisons (1988), director Stephen Frears excels in female portraiture.

This approach to cinematic study is exploratory rather than exhaustive, a complement to approaches organized by theory, chronology, nationality, or genre. It originated in a course I introduced at Yale University and developed at Columbia; “Film Narrative” explores how movies from different countries tell a story in a uniquely cinematic manner. I organized the syllabus according to topics such as the Camera as Narrator, Meaningful Montage, Expressive Sound, Voice-Over Narration, and Black and White Versus Color, selecting films that illustrate the expressive power of cinematic elements. The one constant—despite differences of country, period, genre, directorial style, and story—was that the opening sequence provided the class with a fertile starting point for discussion. Instead of simplistic articulations of personal taste, the students had to begin with close analysis of the film, allowing the movie to lead them. The result (usually including a second screening of the first few minutes) was an elaboration of how cinematic language was utilized to tell the story.

Not all masterpieces boast an opening sequence that makes us sit up and take notice. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), for example, has a straightforward introduction that is typical of classic Hollywood cinema: it sets up perfectly the movie’s theme of military rigidity. Moreover, a few stunning sequences open films that do not live up to expectation. For instance, The Naked Kiss (1964) packs a wallop in its first two minutes as a scantily clad woman (Constance Towers) lunges at the camera, attacking a man. Even when he yanks off her wig and reveals her baldness, she keeps swinging. After knocking him to the ground, she takes exactly seventy-five dollars from his wallet and stuffs the cash into her black bra. However, Samuel Fuller’s film later veers from vibrant rawness to implausible melodrama. And many classic movies need little explication to bring the viewer in. However, I am drawn to those films that benefit from close analysis. Whether it’s the screenwriter or the director who is primarily responsible, the first scenes prepare us for a sophisticated appreciation of the motion picture that follows.

While this book covers only fictional films, a few superlative documentaries exhibit the same creative shaping, as exemplified by Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence (2015). This probing and moving companion piece to his Act of Killing (2012) returns to the continuing oppression and dishonesty of contemporary Indonesia vis-à-vis the murder of its own citizens in the late 1960s. The opening crystallizes a literal and figurative concern with perception: glasses with colored corrective lenses make us aware of the act of seeing.

Adi, who turns out to be both an optometrist and a quiet investigative figure, watches an older man singing on a TV monitor. Throughout the film, Adi asks discomforting questions to locals about the murders committed by death squads working for the military. They tell him he asks too many questions, preferring to live in metaphorical blindness, while he tries to clarify sight. As the son of a now-dead perpetrator later puts it, “Forget the past, and let’s be happy like the military dictatorship taught us.” But the footage of the past is too haunting, especially for Adi. And we cannot forget how the man in the TV tape of the opening laughs about choking someone, boasting—like the proud villains of Oppenheimer’s previous documentary—of his violence.

FIGURE 1.1 From The Look of Silence

The focus on beginning sequences leads to the inevitable question, when does the opening end? Whereas David Mamet proposed that an audience will give a film ten minutes, the precise amount of establishing time varies in each movie. Some start with a stylized prologue that is not really part of the action but sets a tone or introduces a theme, as in Apocalypse Now or Raging Bull. Both films truly have overtures, in that the music figures prominently, whether Italian opera or a song by The Doors. And many overtures are in fact credit sequences added by title designers. A fine mainstream example is Dirty Dancing (1987), whose writer and coproducer Eleanor Bergstein begins the DVD commentary by talking about the slow motion opening of different couples dancing sensually to the song “Be My Baby”: “The film did not work until we came up with it. Richard Greenberg did the titles.”3 (Bergstein also added the voice-over of her teenaged protagonist “Baby,” recalling, “That was the summer of 1963,” setting the action prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War.) Whereas her original vision incorporated only the “clean teen” music associated with “Baby” in the first scenes, “the credits let you know the dirty dancing is somewhere in the future,” she explained.

In this context, graphic designer Saul Bass is a towering figure, having created Hitchcock’s title sequences (and posters) of bold mobile grids for Psycho and hypnotic swirls for Vertigo. Jan-Christopher Horak’s book Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design provides a comprehensive overview of the artist who gave a distinctive look to the opening of films including Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Anatomy of a Murder (1959), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962), as well as Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955).4 His opening sequence for Storm Center (1956), in which Bette Davis plays a librarian who is labeled a communist after refusing to withdraw a controversial book from the shelves, is gripping: it shows the text of an open book over which a boy’s eyes are superimposed. The extreme close-up of his glance moving laterally (and sometimes looking directly at the camera) is then menaced by flames at the bottom right of the screen. They slowly burn the pages until the frame is engulfed. This opening suggests not only the Nazis’s book burning but the incendiary anticommunist hysteria of the 1950s. For Seconds (1966), directed by John Frankenheimer, Bass used evocative fragments of a distorted face to introduce the story of a man who fakes his death and undergoes plastic surgery toward a new identity. His masterful blending of haunting images with the kind of commercial exigencies found in advertising influenced such popular Hollywood franchises as the Pink Panther and James Bond movies, as well as Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002) and the AMC television series Mad Men. His legacy is also visible in the strikingly crafted outer frames of contemporary titles designers.

Susana Sevilla Aho composed a probing video essay entitled “Things Are Not What They Seem” when she was a digital design student in 2013, tracing the evolution in motion graphic design from analog to digital (“remixed visuality”). With abundant clips, she explores the credit sequences from films by Hitchcock as well as David Fincher (often created by Kyle Cooper). Sevilla Aho compares Bass’s superimposed graphics that introduce North by Northwest (1959)—a pioneering use of typography, with titles that are part of the landscape—to the oneiric credit sequence of Se7en (1995), whose fragments of a killer’s notebook suggest the influence of experimental filmmaking.5 Bass’s work demonstrates how strong graphic design places the viewer in a self-consciously hybrid visual domain: when reality is abstracted before coming into focus, the fragments prepare spectators for an unfolding mystery.

Many of Pedro Almodóvar’s movies begin with dazzling scenes that self-consciously reflect the Spanish director’s delight in artifice. His international breakthrough was What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), a farce that cheekily undercuts conventions, shunning Spanish history as well as political correctness. Its colorful credit sequence is like an eyewink to the viewer, smacking of postmodern pastiche. Similarly, the titles of his immensely successful Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) appear amid fragmentary images of red fingernails, lipstick, roses, and female figures from lingerie catalogues, accompanied by songstress Lola Beltrán’s rendition of the ballad “Soy infeliz” (I am unhappy). Talk to Her (2002) reveals a greater depth of both emotion and formal layering (see clip). Almodóvar’s doubling and intersecting of two men’s stories is bookended by performances of the Pina Bausch Dance Company. The title “HABLE CON ELLA” is printed on a curtain that rises to reveal a stage: like sleepwalkers, two female dancers slowly, silently, and despairingly knock against the wall as a man runs to take chairs out of their way. In this staging of Bausch’s Café Müller, the women’s closed eyes anticipate the film’s recurring image of a coma. Two men in the audience, seated together by chance, observe this metaphor for mute imprisonment: Benigno (Javier Cámara) turns out to be a nurse who is recounting the Café Müller dance to a beautiful young woman in a coma; Marco (Darío Grandinetti) is a writer enamored of a female bullfighter who was gored by a bull. The act of storytelling links all the characters, whether verbally, visually (through dance, bullfighting, and silent film), or musically (through an intimate performance at a party of “Cucurrucucu Paloma” by Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso). And the haunting score by Alberto Iglesias connects Almodóvar’s myriad time frames and emotional registers.

The role of music in creating a film’s tone is equally crucial to Knife in the Water (1962), the first feature directed by Roman Polanski. Given that the Communist regime dismissed jazz as a form of Western imperialism in his native Poland, the percussive and syncopated score by Krzysztof Komeda constitutes a sensually defiant opening. (Censors initially shelved the film, partl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Crafted Frame (Saul Bass, Talk to Her, Knife in the Water, Camouflage)
• 2. The Opening Translated from Literature (The Conformist, The Tin Drum, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, All the President’s Men, Cabaret)
• 3. Narrative Within the Frame: Mise-en-Scène and the Long Take (Touch of Evil, The Player, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, The Piano, Bright Star, In Darkness)
• 4. Narrative Between the Frames: Montage (Z; Hiroshima, mon amour; Seven Beauties; Schindler’s List ; Three Colors: Red; The Shipping News; Shine)
• 5. Singular Point of View (The Graduate, Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, Come and See, Lebanon, Good Kill)
• 6. The Collective Protagonist (La Ciudad, 3 Backyards, Little Miss Sunshine, Le Bal, Day for Night, A Separation, Where Do We Go Now?)
• 7. Misdirection/Visual Narration (The Hourglass Sanatorium, Before the Rain, Ajami, Under Fire, The Conversation, Rising Sun, Psycho, The Truman Show)
• 8. Voice-Over Narration/Flashback (Sunset Boulevard, American Beauty, Fight Club, Badlands)
• Notes
• Index
• Series List
• Illustrations