8 result(s) tagged “Opening Shots”

As part of the Krzysztof Kieslowski Blog-a-thon at Quiet Bubble, Culture Snob recorded a commentary track for Three Colors: Blue, with some assistance from Bride of Culture Snob.

The commentary track deals with a handful of themes: the blunt use of color contrasted with the almost tangential way the movie deals with its ostensible theme of liberty; the use of visual and aural cues to indicate the subjective nature of the film; Julie’s progression from isolation to active engagement with the world; and the relationship between the concept of “freedom” and Kieslowski’s obvious interest in responsibility. Plus, I call Juliette Binoche a “two-faced bitch.” How can you resist?

This entry also includes a short essay dealing only with Blue’s first shot, inspired by Jim Emerson’s Opening Shots Project.

Because I do have a memory — not a very good one, but a memory nonetheless — I can save myself some work by providing filmmaker Rupert Murray with a few lessons I’ve learned from other movies and simply link to previous essays.

Lesson number one: Let the story tell itself.

Lesson number two: When you’re dealing with people who have lived in front of cameras, you have an additional burden of proof to establish their credibility.

Murray’s Unknown White Male is a fascinating but headstrong and immature documentary about amnesia. The film’s subject found himself on a New York City subway one morning in 2003, not having any memories of his previous life.

Now that filmmaker Robert Altman has died, we’ll find out how prophetic his 1990 film Vincent and Theo turns out to be. The movie, ostensibly a portrait of the relationship between Vincent van Gogh and his brother, operates most forcefully as a screed against the commercial pressures foisted on artists, and it’s easy to see as a metaphor for Altman’s own career.

The movie’s framing device is blunt yet elegant. It begins with the contemporary auction of a van Gogh painting, and when it jumps to Vincent’s life, the auctioneer’s voice can still be heard, the bids climbing ever higher. That slowly fading audio juxtaposed with an idling Vincent, anxiously adjusting his pipe while sitting on his bed, suggests that the artist had an inkling of his talent, and perhaps even foresaw his destiny: posthumous riches following a life of poverty.

Altman avoided that equivalent fate, barely, kind of. Nominated five times for the best-directing Academy Award, he was given an honorary Oscar this year.

Yet while the gold statuette is the pinnacle of respect in the eyes of the casual movie-going public, it’s an inadequate honor. Martin Scorsese will one day get his own lifetime-achievement Academy Award, but — this week at least — he seems merely a highly respected filmmaker. Altman made a far deeper connection with his audience, as evidenced by the profound grief that has greeted his passing; it’s almost as if a family member died, which is all the more remarkable considering that (1) movie directors are at best secondary celebrities, and (2) he was 81 years old.

Some starting points: Dana Stevens at Slate, assessments and an open thread at The House Next Door, the Robert Altman Blog-a-thon from earlier this year, and Jim Emerson’s Altman moments.

We rarely take a Faulkner sentence and examine it in isolation. We generally don’t inspect a song’s introduction, or chorus, or bridge, without even dealing with the context of the whole. We don’t study the corner of a painting, pretending that there’s nothing beyond it.

Maybe we should.

Matt Zoller Seitz beat me to the punch in citing what appears to be a trend in online movie writing:

“[I]n recent years — particularly in the last six months, for some reason — there’s been an exponential growth in Internet-based writing that dares to talk about what movies are actually made of: shots and cuts.”

What’s unfortunate about Michael Haneke’s Caché is that the writer-director has created a movie that requires such intensive decoding at its terminals that it’s easy to overlook the rest of the movie — to, in fact, miss its entire point. By spending so much time and effort on the beginning and the ending, we neglect essential questions: What is the film trying to say? Is this an effective way to communicate that message?

In Calendar, writer-director Atom Egoyan offers a film version of musical minimalism, with its emphasis on long shots, repetition, and minor variation, and with just a handful of camera setups. Nothing is superfluous.

Calendar stands as Egoyan’s masterpiece, a lean, elegant, rigorously composed snapshot of a relationship allowed to deteriorate.

(This brief essay was inspired by Jim Emerson’s “Opening Shots” project.)

A man’s hand holds a Polaroid photograph, but who would want to commemorate such a gruesome scene? The picture shows a body lying face-down on a floor, blood everywhere.

This might be a crime-scene photo, but that conclusion doesn’t feel right. If the man were a police photographer or officer, why would he linger over this particular image? It’s mundane for that line of work, yet the man holds it for half a minute, as if studying it.

Then he shakes it, and we notice something on his hand, dark but unclear. And the photograph begins to fade. We might observe that the darkness on his hand is a tattoo, with letters: “i” and “s.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson is running a series on the opening shots of movies. In his introduction, Emerson writes:

“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. ...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.)”

So far, the project includes two quizzes along with commentaries on the opening shots of everything from His Girl Friday to Miller’s Crossing to The Crying Game to Halloween (below).

While these short essays (some by Emerson, but mostly submitted by readers and other critics) are about individual movies, they collectively represent a short course in watching film seriously.