Opening Scenes in Three Films: Easy Rider, The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Pelican Brief
The opening scene of a film establishes what sort of film is to follow and the tone that will be taken. If the opening scene does not do this, it may lose the audience before long. The audience wants to know what it is watching and decides how to watch the film based on the opening scene. If the scene is comic, the audience will expect a comedy. If the scene is serious, shifting to comedy may be confusing. The opening scenes to three films shows how the tone can be set. Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969) would be classified as a road movie. The film became a model for a generation, suggesting the importance of personal freedom as well as opposition to conformity and to the Establishment in the late 1960s. in a way, the film suggests that the idealism of the sixties is giving way to disappointment and disenchantment, specifically to the realization that the ideal will not be met. The film covers a large portion of the American landscape, touring through deserts, cities, rural areas, mountainous regions, and different kinds of community of the time. The tone for what follows is set in the opening scene. Interestingly, the film begins not in the United States, where the rest will be set, but in Mexico, introducing the two main ch
The color values in both cases are bright and naturally lit, and the idea of travel is imparted in this transition, along with a sense of living outside the mainstream and without regard for laws. This shift in scene also cuts down the brightness of the exterior for the darkness of the interior. After the testing, the leader gives each a box of drugs as they give him the money. For just a moment, the viewer may see this image as a nineteenth century scene, until the voice on the soundtrack calls to her in a way that says this is a film being made and not a reality. 3)The photography here is textured by the foggy day, and the colors are muted for the same reason. Sje walks way on the jetty and becomes a smaller and smaller black spot in the center of the frame, seeming to move more and more into the past as she does so, which evokes what will,happen in the rest of the film as characters from the present seem to sink into the past. The film The French Lieutenant's Woman (Reisz, 1981) is a romantic story that connects two time periods, with different camera work depending on whether the story is in the present or the past. The tone is set just after the credits, though the credits as well create an image. The transition also shifts from the crowd, meaning the many, to these individuals and so to the more individual and personal. aracters as they complete a drug deal. The scene is set by the opening shot of the La Contenta Bar, an image of a foreign bar somewhat outside the local town, and frequented by a group of locals. The sense of crowding is broken as the camera moves up and over the crowd to show the Supreme Court building, immediately identifying the location and evoking the majesty of the law standing over the hurly burly of the demonstration. The film The Pelican Brief (Pakula, 1993) is a legal thriller, quite a different sort of story than that in the other two films.
Common topics in this essay:
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,
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Acceptance Essays
