Opening Shots #2: The Conversation

My admiration for the last shot of Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 paranoia classic, The Conversation, knows no bounds. It's more brilliant than the entirety of many other films (including some of the director's own films). Re-watching the film last week, I noticed that the opening shot (and sequence) is kind of brilliant, too, given that it's THE central event of the film. Like the last shot, it's filmed from the point of view of surveillance operatives. The event in this shot, the taping of a clandestine conversation between Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams, is the film's primary obsession. It seems so banal, too: a street fair in which some garbled communications occasionally flare on the soundtrack. But it has a delicious creepiness to it, too, and it echoes through the rest of the movie.

Oh, and the movie? It's my favorite of Coppola's movies, bar none. You can have your Godfathers and your Apocalypses. I'll take this modest character study. A better depiction of alienation I have never seen on film. It might be my favorite movie of the 1970s. Here's to you, Harry Caul.

Opening Shots #1: Contact

This is the opening shot of Robert Zemeckis's 1997 movie, Contact. I have a LOT of issues with this movie, but the opening shot is one of the best I've ever seen. It's initially cold and dispassionate and incomparably vast, but it ends up with a striking note of humanity. I wish the rest of the movie were up to it. Alas.

Opening Gambits: Suzuki's Kanto Wanderer and Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards

Both Kanto Wanderer and Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards were made in 1963, during director Seijun Suzuki's most prolific period. It's well known that he was getting bored with making stock yakuza films, and that he was beginning to dismantle the yakuza film's visual and generic conventions. This would find its fullest flowering a couple of years later, but these two films are an interesting example of the director beginning to chafe at the bit. The difference in these films is immediately apparent from their opening scenes, which are what concern me here.

Go to Hell Bastards is the more conventional of the two, but it has interesting characteristics. Suzuki tends to avoid close-ups in his opening. Most of it is master shots. But not all. The first shot is a medium two-shot of an American soldier:


Then cut to a few master shots:


The first real close-up of the movie. Note, that it's not a close up of a human being:


Cut to a couple of medium two-shots:



Then back to master shots for the mayhem that opens the movie:




Most of the interiors of the remainder of the movie are filmed from a dramatic distance, like this shot:


Even the close-ups start from a distance. This medium two-shot dollies in close for a striking face-off:



But a lot of the film is at arms length. These two shots are typical:


Well, so what? Let's compare this opening with the opening of Kanto Wanderer, which starts with a close-up:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:


And then another:

And so on, with the duration of each shot getting shorter and shorter. This is a mildly disorienting sequence for two reasons: one, we have no context for these characters. These are the VERY first shots of the movie. Second, Suzuki has unhitched them from their environments. We are looking so closely at these faces, we don't have any idea of where they are and why they are there.

What I think is going on in these movies is this: Detective Bureau 2-3: Go To Hell Bastards is exactly the kind of movie Suzuki was beginning to get bored with, and, as a result, he has adopted a cinematic idiom of distance. He doesn't really care about his characters, so he puts them at arm's length. He's deadpanning. In Kanto Wanderer, he's beginning to see the expressive potential of cinema, and he starts to experiment--not too much yet, but enough. I don't think the similarity between the title of Kanto Wanderer and Suzuki's later Tokyo Drifter is an accident. They explore the same kinds of existential anomie, but they ALSO share an exploration of cinema as abstraction. In any event, watching these two movies back to back is like watching the light bulb go off in the director's head.