watching a documentary

In Today’s lesson we watched a documentary about film openings as a class. There were interviews with directors such as Jean Jacques Beineix, Orson Welles, and critics such as Thomas Sutcliffe and Stanley Kauffmann. The documentary was about differing opinion and reasons concerning the question “how should a film opening work”. This was interesting as we were asking the same question and trying to consider the best approach, whether such as brutal as a killing should take place or should we prolong the thrilling events.

T.V critic Thomas Sutcliffe described films that “need to seduce their audiences into long term commitment and that the temptation to go for instant arousal is the most irresistible.” I Which i think means they need to be given a reason to be enticed by your movie and the best known way of doing this is to excite them from beginning to end.

Others have a different opinion such as  French director Jean Jacques Beineix,” the risk of having instant arousal in the opening of a movie is that you may not be able to answer the questions afterwards, or even not be able to make the rest even dramatic than the beginning.” Beineix relates to me more than Sutcliffe does to give the audience what they want straight away makes it hard to produce a film that can go the distance instead of just have one particular great scene but everything else is flat.

Stanley Kauffmann talks  the classic opening with “a long establishing shot of the city, a mid shot of the shops, a long shot of the building and a mid shot though the window to the main character.” He says that this type of opening works because it allows the audience to know that everything is well before the dilemma kicks in. Which is true, it sets the tone and represents the calm before the storm.