Inspired opening sequences

I’ve been thinking about this lately: the opening sequence of a film. It’s typical for a filmmaker to go the narrative exposition route–that is, he/she front-loads all the essential information about what has happened prior to when the film begins so that audiences can feel comfortable, informed, aware, and be absorbed into the diagesis. There are exceptions. Some of the James Bond films give us “pre-credit sequences” that are more like sideshows, and these sequences do not, in any way, prepare audiences for the film as such (I’m thinking of Goldfinger, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Octopussy, and so on). What I’m interested in, however, are opening shots, or sequences of shots, that do not provide anything in the way of narrative info, but do, in some way, capture the overall theme or tone of the film. The thing is that, upon first viewing, these shots or sequences of shots, may slip by us. We may not recall them, we may not process them, they may, in some cases, even hinder our efforts to “get into” the film. But upon subsequent viewings, they seem to resonate.

The best example I can come up with is from Coppola’s The Conversation. The film begins with an extreme long shot, from above, of Union Square (I think). The camera just wanders around, capturing the crowd. It then locks in on a mime (still the same shot, no cuts), who randomly dances and spins though the crowd. No one seems to mind the mime, even those who are mimed. While the camera zooms in very slowly, the mime attaches himself to a man in a grey raincoat. The man in the grey raincoat is visibly uncomfortable, and he tries to shake the mime. But the mime doesn’t relent, and he follows the man as he tries to walk away. Eventually, the man shakes the mime off. Of course, in the next shot, we learn that the man in the grey raincoat is a surveillance expert on duty (Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman), and maybe (maybe, but I doubt it) we can use this new info and then, retroactively, make sense of the previous shot. But I think that is unlikely. It takes a second viewing. Knowing what I now know about the film, this opening shot is about as perfect as the final shot of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, in that everything that is the film is built into that shot. And yet, in the case of The Conversation, the shot comes at the opening of the film and is therefore, in terms of narrative exposition, pointless.

Did Coppola film this opening shot late in the shooting schedule–perhaps at the very end, when he had a strong idea of what his film was about? Even if he did not, one can still make the case that the opening sequence of this film can help us change the way we conceptualize film spectatorship. Seldom do we consider, or make explicit in our analyses, the subsequent viewing (perhaps because the “subsequent viewing” is generally treated as an economic unit). I don’t know.

I guess I’m wondering if there are other films whose opening shots become signifcant only after subsequent viewing. Any spring to mind?