'Watching' Documentry on Film Openings...

In today's lesson with Bernard we watched a documentary called 'Watching'. It was talking about the openings of thrillers, how directors try to use techniques to capture the audiences interest throughout the whole film and so on.. It was quite interesting as we got to find out how opening sequences are planned out. It was almost like a 'behind the scenes of thriller films' documentary.

The narrator of the documentary said something that stuck in my head "Films need to seduce their audience into long term commitment. While there are many type of seduction, the temptation to go for instant arousal is almost irresistable." By saying this, he simply means that when making a film directors need to think about the best possible ways to create the film in a way that will keep the interest of the audience up throughout. There must be many plots, twists and turns and you have to try and keep the audience's anxiety high all the time so that they always feel the need to watch the whole of the film to feel complete. However, the easiest way out is to use the 'instand arousal' method which means that the audience get the shock at the beginning of the film, rather than the film building up suspense and then revealing the shock at a later moment in the film. Instant arousal, usually gets the audience looking like this.................

As you can see the audience looks shocked.. they were obviously not expecting whatever it was that they were seeing. This may mean that they want to watch the whole film to find out what other shocking things will happen...

However, Director Jean Jacques Beineix thinks it can be risky when it comes to using 'instant arousal'...

He thinks that when you use instant arousal, it means that you have to work extra hard to make the rest of the film interesting so that the audeince don't get bored. He feels that building up suspence is a better away as it will engage the audience more as they want to find out what is going to happen.. In one of his detective thriller films, in the first scene he used a women singing an Opera and this lasted for 3 minutes into the film. Other directors said that this was a bad idea as audience would lose interest and doing that is like 'commtting suicide!' But he argued back saying it builds up tension and that audiences need to learn to 'accept and wait for their desire... wait until their satisfaction comes to them...'

Another director in the documentary said "A good beginning must make the audience feel that they don't know nearly enough yet, and at the same time make sure that they don't know too little" This simply means that the beginning of a film should always give the audience a little hint as to what may happen later on. The hint should be suspenseful and really interest the audience so that it will engage them and make them feel that they don't know enough information yet, and so they want to watch more and more of the film.

Look how excited these kids look! They definately seem like they want to watch the whole film...

What is a Classic Opening?

One other things that critic Stanley Kauffmann talked about is the 'Classic opening'. A classic opening usually used in films sets the setting of it.. it consisits of "establishing shots of,  for example... New York city, tilting shots of tall buildings, close ups of windows.. then maybe inside the window.. past the reciptionist desk, then into the private office.. and so on". The aim is tell the audience where the film is taking place, tell the occupation of maybe one or some of the main character(s) and so on...



Look how beautiful these buidings look... the tilting angle shot make help make the buildings look very tall



New York City....

What is it meant by 'Film Noir'?...

'Film Noir' ('or the trick of film noir') seems to have two meaning. In one sense it can mean when the film starts with the ending. The ending of the film shows at the beginning, and then the rest of the film shows how the event that was first shown occured. This can be effective as it will leave the audience asking questions like 'how did that happen?' 'why did it happen?' 'who caused this to happen?', and this will engage them in curiosity and will encourage them to watch the whole film to find answers to their questions...

There is also a sceond meaning. Below is a video...


Premiers, Reviews And Trailers:
Film Noir - Explained

There was a shot clip of the opening sequence to the film called 'The shining' (which I have actually watched before when I had to analyse the order of the subtitles in a previous lesson). The documentary talked about how the opening sequence built up suspence...

In the sequence, they used a 'helicopter shot' to follow the vehicle that was on the road, leading to somewhere in which we as an audience did not know of. The camera follows the car like a predator, high up and from behind, so it makes it look as though the perosn driving the vehicle is unaware that they are being followed.. we as an audience get the idea that the vehicle is travelling in the wrong direction... all this creates suspense and we get the hint that it may be a thrilling film...