Opening Title Sequence Analysis
Jaws
Jaws, a staple classic that kick started Steven Spielbergs lineage of classics, is a beautiful created film with a phenomenal attention to detail sorely lacking in today in the genre is helped to create. With its fantastic cast, grounded script, amazing practical effects and drop-dead gorgeous cinematography and coloring, this film has endured the tests of time. However, there was a time when the idea of jaws was nothing more than the hype off of Peter Benchley's book, leaks of production issues and the clever new advertising strategy Universal had employed so when movie goers sat down in theaters for the first time, those opening moments were crucial. History, I think, speaks to its effectiveness.
"Ah Jaws! That all too classic film and one of my personal favourites of all time! Infamous for its many, many technical issues, Spielberg’s foray into Hollywood was a block buster! Taking the nation by storm and impacting pop culture for years to come! But it all started here, with a beach and a girl who wanted to go swimming. Shot on traditional film, our OTS begins after the now iconic theme plays to a POV shot of the Sharks perspective crawling through the magnificently coloured under sea. With a dolly shot of the characters silhouettes marking their escape from the suggested warmth of the camp fire, we follow Chrissie and our drunk friend along a darkened beach front, seething with its sinister sanguine colour swatch. Whether or not intentional or merely a result of the wide angled lens naturally adding in this feature, the shots that center on Chrissie are bordered by a shady vignette, focusing the viewers’ attention through the minimalistic light to her figure. The two strip down in an untraditionally restrained way for motion cinema with all nudity concealed behind the clever lighting contrast before we’re given our first sign of light since the camp fire, our setting sun. As a caveat, there are two techniques at work here from different sectors, the use of the foreboding, unsettled pallet consisting primarily of blues pitted against the piercing orange of the sun is a graphic design style known as contrasting colours where in the opposite samples on the colour wheel are placed together. This particular pallet has been favoured by film makers for a long time but has had a recent boom with the introduction of digital colour correction and is used in the majority of action films as a visual cinematic short hand. Secondly, this foreshadowing of the theme of safety being far away by the light of the fire having left them and the storm like weather engulfing the distant sun is known as pathetic fallacy, a technique where the environment dictates the mood. Notice that the sun, the implied safety of the scene, is consumed entirely by the clouds once she has run into the water, an aesthetic indication to the audience that reinforces the fact that danger is looming. Even the shots of her in the water are lit by distant sources. Having said that this is where my continuity hat must go on as, for starters, the sun shifts from being behind the clouds to in the middle of clear sky several times during the scene and this famous shot of chrissie swimming in top-lit by a white source, presumably the moon, which has would not be as prominent as it is when the sun hasn’t even fully fallen. As she swims through the maw of the surf, John Williams iconic score pipes up, tingling lightly to build the tension. Whilst shots above the water show Chrissie happy and smiling, below is a different tale with an approaching POV shot again swimming closer to her kicking legs, filmed with one of these beefy fellas. Suddenly she is dragged under, dipping to the music’s swell before being drag down over and over, ironically pulled past a life buoy as we jump back to the safety of the beach, the only sign of help is asleep. She screams, panics, thrashes in the waves and then silence, the world is quiet again, and our actress had been dragged away. Although shocking, I’ve always found this scene interesting from a production stand point as it wash shot at sea rather than in a still tank to capture the ferocity of the water on film. To get the motion of her being thrown violently around, divers where co-ordinated either side of her, heaving and releasing in synchronicity as to avoid damaging her spine, mimic the sharks thrashing.
Sinister
Unlike the majority of sequences here, Sinister sets a tone with its unique and horrifying depiction of violence. Continuous shots are a staple of Horror media and do a great job of building suspense, grounding the viewer in an unbroken scene where the anticipation and anxiety builds in tandem with the characters in the scene. On the 'Analysis of Cinematic Technique' page, I've gone into greater depth on several cinematic techniques and their uses, one of which is the use of a continuous shot in one of my personal favorite films 'Children Of Men' to build suspense and generate a sense of danger.
"Although short, the sinister opening is probably one of the most memorable in recent memory; in roughly a minute it sets a tone, atmosphere and style for the rest of the movie, relying on the continuity of the shot and the scratchy ambience of a super 8 film to create something truly disturbing. The aforementioned long shot is a technique notably favoured by film makers like Alfonso Cuaron with ‘Children of Men’ and ‘Gravity’, Kubrick with ‘The Shining’ and more recently Alejandro González Iñárritu with ‘Birdman’, used for its ability to build tension so effectively by not giving the audience the chance to breath, the shot lingers on the grizzly scene like the audience does on the ends of their seats with the barely audible sound creating an unsettling soundscape for the OTS. When the shot is first established, we’re give a decent amount of time to comprehend what is going on in the scene, with a degraded film reel coloured the mournful shades of autumn giving us a visual grounding in the events, we’ve just enough time to identify the family, follow the rope across the wide shot to the branch and notice something sawing through the bark. Once the scene is established, our unsettling score pipes up, a deep horn-like swell just subtle enough to inform the viewer of its non-diegetic nature but just present enough to be deeply unnerving. Then we get it, they’re hoisted up at an agonizing crawl of a pace and left to dangle, to swing, to kick and rave but alas it is to no avail, their bodies flop lifelessly, the interspersed static is replaced by the clicking of a film projector and we’re given our title, Sinister, the perfect word I think you’ll agree to punctuate what we have just witnessed. It’s so nice to see horror films moving back to a more original realm of terror, where cheap jump scares all but abolished from this film and where the story is told with the language of cinema rather than through expository means. This opening is also very clever in terms of its design as it duck tails nicely with the films conclusion in what some could call foreshadowing and because it sets up the major plot devices, stakes and just general aesthetic of the experience the audience is about to watch. Thank you for enduring "