Yes, but it’s the woman at the homestead, not Ethan, who hasn’t shown up yet.
Ford’s compositions in that film are fucking amazing. Pity about some of the other story elements, but oh well.
I took “shot” to be basically the same as frame. As in, camera shot. That’s what I was going for. If shot actually means all that happens before the cut, then I think only my #3 pick really works. So my picks are basically negated.
Here’s my favorite cribbing of the thing you’re talking about, from one of my entries in the 20:20 contest:
-xtien
[quote=“Gordon_Cameron, post:21, topic:128086, full:true”]Tom, not sure I understand you, but are you saying you don’t like the crawl because it doesn’t give useful exposition? Who cares? The crawl as visual element is the point, not the text it contains, which merely has to be in tune with what we’re seeing, not particularly informational.
[/quote]
Well, there’s a lot of discussion about it on the podcast if you want to hear more, but in brief, it’s superfluous. People love the crawl because they love Star Wars, not because they love the crawl. My feeling is that having someone read about your D&D campaign is a dumb way to open a movie, especially when you’ve got an amazing opening shot queued up (the corvette followed by the Star Destroyer). One of the few good things about Rogue One is that Gareth Edwards didn’t need to tell you about his D&D campaign before showing you the movie.
-Tom
Wait, what’s wrong with the story elements in The Searchers?
-Tom
The racist depiction of the Indian wife, for one thing; the rather absurd casting of a white dude as Scar (I know they were all like that in those days, but it hasn’t aged any better than Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s); and that annoying village-idiot-sidekick guy. It’s still a masterpiece, but IMO a flawed one.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about ‘superfluous.’ Visually/tonally, it’s anything but IMO. Lucas wants to immediately sock you over the head with bombast and a nostalgic callback to old serials and sci-fi movies, and the crawl is critical to that effect. The verbal content of the crawl is purely secondary in importance. It just has to fit in with what all the other elements are setting up, not tell us anything we need to know.
That statement doesn’t apply to me. Honestly I’m pretty fucking sick of Star Wars (as a “thing” or a “universe” or a “brand”) but I admire the ever-loving hell out of that opening shot and think it would be immeasurably impoverished without the crawl.
edit: One other function the crawl serves is to run out the clock while we listen to John Williams’s music. It’s essentially a mini-overture. Just listening to the music for that long over a blank starfield would feel pretty weird, and if you just tilted right down to the planet you wouldn’t have time for the full melody. Since IMO the score is one of the two best things about Star Wars (production design being the other), I think this function of the titles is very important.
From a filmmaking perspective, that’s definitely not the case. A shot is everything between one cut and the next. But if a movie’s first shot begins with a bad frame, well then, it’s probably still a bad shot!
I totally get that now, and it makes sense. I just misunderstood the term when we got the topic and I considered what I was going to do in approaching the topic for the show. I just thought about the very first image the filmmaker delivers unto us as the opening shot, and I went with that.
This does, however, force me to ask a follow-up question, and that is how we define this properly when a “shot” from a filmmaking perspective is defined as you say–as everything between one cut and the next–and yet more and more cuts are augmented in editing through special effects.
To put it more simply, is all of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) an opening shot? I know it’s described as a “one shot” movie but really, is that how we treat a topic like this?
Could we have just chosen our least favorite movies done in one take as bad opening shots in movies?
-xtien
It’s almost as if this was a topic that, had it been chosen by Kellywand, Tom would have complained about incessantly before choosing the very shots he chose, out of spite.
Deathbeds on the other hand, well, I’ve already got a lot of ideas to work with.
I actually addressed this point in an edit to one of my posts upthread:
I think at this point we’ve wandered outside a general consensus of terminology and into what feels right or rings true. Such movies are pretty rare after all.
A similar issue occurs with cases like the shot in Citizen Kane where Susan Alexander makes her opera debut and the camera booms up to a couple of stagehands on a scaffold, one of them holding his nose. A clever wipe blends the beginning and ending parts of the shot, but it’s pretty easy to spot the stitches nowadays. It’s obviously intended to read as a single shot, but it’s just as obviously not actually a single shot. Even saying ‘it would have been a single shot had it appeared seamless’ is a bit of a dodge, as to most audiences at the time it probably seemed seamless. And of course vast swaths of visual-effects shots throughout film history could be thrown into this bucket.
Are there enough such movies? I only know of two (Rope/Birdman) and I rather like them both!
But, y’know, people talk about a music video or whatever being ‘all one take’ and how great that is. It’s just a question of extending the running time. So, yeah, in theory, I’d say a single 120-minute shot that happened to outline a feature film storyline would count as one shot. Whether you accept the aforementioned pastiches as as ‘conceptually’ single-take in spite of the physical limitations of their being ‘actually’ single-take is, again, a bit problematic. I think it’s especially problematic in the case of Rope, where the intention is obvious but the chinks in the armor are glaringly apparent (Hitchcock tends to dolly in on somebody’s back for a bit too long every time there’s a reel change).
Ah. I missed the Edit. Sorry about that.
Your use of “grammatically” is particularly interesting. I like that term.
However, I think it moves things more into my arena.
-xtien
We cinema majors bloviate endlessly about the ‘grammar’ of film. It’s a thing.
Sweet, I finally got put in Qt3 jail! Also, I actually did type “Umbrella shoppers”. Clearly my best effort!
I’m surprised nobody mentioned movies with overtures. Lawrence of Arabia, for example, starts with several minutes of a black screen while the emotionally manipulative score plays.
I actually considered this for a moment because of the opening of [i]West Side Story[/i]. Now that is an amazing overture. West Side is one of my favorite musicals–movie or otherwise–and I recall being so bored by that overture when I was younger. All I could think was, “Come on! Let’s get on to meeting Amber Tamblyn’s dad!”
But then I got to be in the thing on stage in college. And now, watching that movie opening, and understanding what an overture is supposed to do, I really love that whole sequence. It’s heartbreaking and so beautiful. But, really, that’s just because of the music, and I know what each element of the music is foreshadowing, because I know that musical so well.
Plus, I didn’t really understand the topic because I interpreted the word “shot” incorrectly. So the whole idea became moot. The resolution of the emerging drawn image into the picture of Manhattan is just incredible, so I guess I could have gone with that, but I went super strict and interpreted the topic to mean frame instead of shot.
But I did consider it, and I’m happy you brought it up!
-xtien
“Well, that’s the way it’s done, buddy boy.”
That’s kind of what the Star Wars discussion morphed into, I guess. @Gordon_Cameron defended the crawl as an overture. But, really, overtures are a dated convention from another medium, and there’s no reason for movies to bother with them. An overture is a holdover from opera or symphony, where it was an excerpt from the full piece played to tell everyone to shut up and take their seats because the show’s about to begin. Movies don’t need that. Furthermore, movies have far more effective ways to set the stage than by making me listen to their soundtrack, or worse, by making me read the director’s D&D campaign notes. For instance, all the stuff that happens in the five minutes of Star Wars after the crawl! :)
-Tom
And yet the opening of Star Wars remains astonishingly effective for its brio, its bombast, its manifesto-like quality. And film is packed with conventions from other mediums. And nothing is dated if it feels alive.
Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. I’m not budging!
2001 and Ben Hur are two other movies with actual overtures. (I don’t consider Star Wars’s opening to be an actual overture in the sense of those films, but it does serve some of the same functions.) I think Gone With The Wind had one. I suppose it’s meant to add a “touch of class” or accommodate people filing in, or something. I’m not particularly fond of it, but it does seem to have an awfully high correlation with quality films, even if they are self-consciously “quality” films.
[quote=“Gordon_Cameron, post:38, topic:128086, full:true”]And yet the opening of Star Wars remains astonishingly effective for its brio, its bombast, its manifesto-like quality. And film is packed with conventions from other mediums. And nothing is dated if it feels alive.
Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this. I’m not budging!
[/quote]
Oh, I definitely agree with “bombast” and “manifesto-like quality”! And I was never trying to budge anyone. I’m just explaining why I think it’s a terrible opening shot. It’s the same reason baren suggests Lawrence of Arabia, but instead of black screen, Lucas needs to tell you the Empire is evil, the Rebels are pro-freedom, and the Death Star is so terrible it should be written in all caps. Because, you know, the concept of “show don’t tell” hadn’t been invented yet.
-Tom
You keep talking as if the crawl matters in terms of exposition, but it doesn’t, nor is it meant to. It’s not about exposition; it’s entirely about style, pacing, callbacks to old movies/serials, etc. And I cannot imagine any improvement in a version of the film where we go into the action so quickly that we can’t enjoy a good slice of Williams’s magnificent score, without which the film would be vastly inferior. The crawl is a clearing of the throat, a “Hwaet!” or a “Sing in me, muse,” if you like; and if Lucas is not up to Homer as a poet, it doesn’t diminish the overall function.
Lucas was a well-educated filmmaker who was deeply versed in the work of Kurosawa (among others) and had made two previous feature films that didn’t have opening crawls. He knew about show vs. tell, and he knew what he was doing. If you think he wasn’t aware that all the action in the Blockade Runner sequence fully established who the good guys and bad guys were, then… I dunno.
I think we’re just running over the same ground at this point, though.
I’m not sure defending it on the grounds that Lucas was a competent filmmaker who wouldn’t over-egg the demarcation of good and evil in a movie is really a solid position to be arguing from.