Film List - great openings

Last month's list featured the most "challenging" films I've enjoyed showing to Chinese students. Another exercise I've enjoyed running a few times here in 'film studies' classes is to show a brief selection of opening sequences. This can be great fun. There's so much to talk about: the establishment of character, setting, and genre; the use of music and sound effects; editing, pace and rhythm; point-of-view and camera movement; suspense; the exploitation, and occasional subversion, of audience knowledge and expectations.

The best film openings


Brazil
(Dir. Terry Gilliam, 1985)

Breathtaking! My problem with this one is not being able to stop. The first 8 or 10 sequences are so fast, so brilliant, so diverse, and establish so much of the story, I can't resist showing just a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more. And there's really too much to talk about in this. I adore the first scene in Sam Lowry's office, with the camera swooping through the frenetic bustle of the file clerks, perfectly matched to the incongruously jaunty theme song; it's a magnificently choreographed piece that fills only a few seconds of screen time but overwhelms your senses.

Blade Runner
(Dir. Ridley Scott, 1982)

A wonderful establishing shot, soaring over the dystopian Los Angeles of the near future: huge but apparently decaying buildings loom out of the darkness, some intermittently (inexplicably, irrelevantly!) belching flames into the sky like oil derricks; pollution and foul weather have shrouded the city in a perpetual twilight gloom; a few flying cars swoop and hover. And the camera homes in on a vast office building, coming in through a window to discover two men facing each other tensely across a desk. Now, I have to say that I find the conceit of the Voigt-Kampf Test to be one of the most glaring of the many annoying plot holes in this film (why try to identify the cloned humans through a psychological stress test when you could just screen their DNA; and when, in fact, the chief of the Blade Runner squad already has photographs of them??), but this first scene is undeniably very powerful (partly, at least, because of its initial incomprehensibility: why is Man A asking these weird questions, and why is Man B getting so twitchy about it?).

Get Carter
(Dir. Mike Hodges, 1971)

I didn't think the recent Stallone remake was too bad, but one has to prefer the Michael Caine original - surely one of the most brutally amoral and downright bleak crime films ever made. I love that my Chinese students, of course, have never heard of it; also that, having little alertness to varieties of speech or other cultural indicators, they never twig that there's such a stark contrast between the expensive clothes, brandy, and cigars enjoyed by the characters we find in the opening scene and their coarse manners, their working-class accents. "What kind of film is this?" "We have no idea, teacher. We haven't seen enough of it yet." "Oh yes you have. You can tell within 5 or 10 seconds that these people are gangsters!"

The credit sequence is tremendous as well: the distance between Caine's gangster turf in London and his old hometown in Newcastle where he now returns - a dangerous distance that isolates and weakens him - being emphasised by the length of the journey, starting in daylight, arriving at night (I remember the first time I made that trip in the late '80s it took 4 or 5 hours rather than today's 3; god knows how long it took 20 years earlier); lapses in time elided by intervals of blackness when the train enters a tunnel (which provide the opportunity to display the credits in white script); Caine's boredom, and the obsessive-compulsive quirks of his personality; and Roy Budd's memorable score. Wonderful.

Saving Private Ryan
(Dir. Steven Spielberg, 1998)

I don't love the very first sequence at the war cemetery: I think it's a bit too long drawn-out and heavy-handed. I also feel it's a bit of "a cheat", cutting from the old man's face by the graveside to Hanks's face in the landing craft, thereby implying that the old man is Hanks's character rather than Ryan (do we get a chance to read the name on the grave? I can't remember). There are a few subtle touches, though, even here that are worth pointing out to Chinese students: the juxtaposition of the American and French flags; the inclusion of some Star of David grave markers as well as crosses. And then the Normandy landings sequence really throws you into the midst of the action: so many talking points about POV here. (I occasionally show the opening of Jaws too, just to highlight the shark POV!)

Apocalypse Now
(Dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Another modern classic that hardly anyone in China seems to have seen! I'm not sure that I've ever shown the whole film, though; partly, at least, because it seems to be impossible to get anything other than the 'Redux' version on DVD, which is just too darned long and not an improvement on the original. The opening sequence - the lush serenity of the jungle suddenly erupting in a storm of napalm, accompanied by The Doors' 'The End' - is just stunning. I like to emphasise the visual and aural reminscences that blend this dream-like opening montage of Vietnam images with the establishing scene of a wasted Martin Sheen lying in his hotel room (and the great opening line: "Saigon - shit!"): the whirr of the ceiling fan recalling the rotor blades of the helicopters, Sheen's face as expressionless as the monumental sculptures in the jungle. (I sometimes follow up with one or both of the most celebrated transitions in film history: the thigh bone tossed skyward by the brawling apemen becoming a space station at the end of the 'Dawn of Man' episode in 2001 and Peter O'Toole's breath blowing out a match in a dingy office in Alexandria becoming the wind blowing across the dunes of the Arabian desert at sunset in Lawrence of Arabia.)

For A Few Dollars More
(Dir. Sergio Leone, 1965)

This is my favourite Leone film. This is quite often the opening that I show first, sometimes indeed as a preparatory teaser at the end of the preceding class. I just show the very beginning, the pre-credit sequence, which is a masterpiece of establishing mood, genre, and suspense; it's also an outrageous piece of cheek, because it serves no other purpose than that - no connection is ever established to the characters or the story that follow in the film itself. The camera on a high vantage point looks out across a deserted plain. In the middle distance a man on horseback is riding diagonally across the plain, slowly drawing nearer to us. What, we wonder, is going to happen? How soon will we recognise who the rider is? Is this Clint Eastwood, the star of the film? Just how long will the director dare to stretch out this rather uneventful shot? (I remember seeing an interview with David Lean once where he said that in retrospect one of the few regrets he had about the choices he'd made as a director was that he had not made Omar Sharif's first entrance in Lawrence - slowly morphing from mirage into man as his camel plods across the desert towards us - even longer.) Well, in fact, we never find out who the man on the horse is. After a few seconds a rifle shot rings out, the rider falls to the ground dead, and the startled horse gallops away. We've been sharing the POV of an unseen assassin lying in wait on the cliff top. We never know who the victim was. We might assume that the shooter was Eastwood's character, but we're never told, and it doesn't really matter. The scene just establishes that these are tough times, life is cheap; this is a film about bounty killers.

Delicatessen
(Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)

Another marvellous opening, one that achieves a remarkable balance between being (disconcertingly!) amusing and also genuinely terrifying. It sets the tone and style of the film very strongly in the opening thirty seconds: the cartoon-like zest of the action, the distorting close-ups, the rapid camera movements and slick editing, the grand guignol production design.

The Fisher King
(Dir. Terry Gilliam, 1991)

I feel this film takes a bit of a turn for the worse when Robin Williams appears, but I could watch the opening again and again; and in this case, it's more about the script and the power of the actor than the inventiveness of the director. Jeff Bridges' portrayal of the egotistical radio phone-in host is magnificent. You will never again see a character so thoroughly established, and then so utterly destroyed in such a short space of time; it's a little reminiscent of Daniel Plainview's story arc in There Will Be Blood - but here it takes only a handful of minutes rather than nearly three hours.

Once Upon A Time In The West
(Dir. Sergio Leone, 1968)

In one of the most celebrated of all cinematic openings, Leone manages to drag out the credit sequence to several minutes - in which period there is almost no dialogue at all, and just about no 'action'. It is an essay on boredom, yet thoroughly compelling. Three hired guns stake out a remote rail stop waiting for a man to arrive on a train. The train is late, and they have to kill time. Even Hitchcock would be in awe of the extent to which Leone manages to prolong the suspense here. One of the gunmen walks out to the railway track and looks off into the distance for a sign of the train. I'd be willing to bet that in just about any other Western where something like this happens, you'd see the puff of a smokestack away down the track or hear a distant train whistle. Here, you can see clear to the horizon and there's no train: it's going to be a long wait.

And oh look, it's on YouTube! Well, I couldn't find a complete version; this one is missing at least the first three or four minutes! Oh well, it'll do for now.