The Opening Scenes

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Comedy, Drama, Adventures)

The opening of this movie portrays the very best of Wes Anderson’s specialities. First appears an introductory text which states that the events took place in the Eastern Europe. The people who live there are regarded as more simple and frank than the majority of the Western population, so the connotation is that the characters and the plot will be odd or comical.  Then the camera takes a high angle, extreme long shot of two people with a cemetery wall and a city behind them. Despite that the town is obviously further back than the cemetery, this background seems flat. The pallet is mainly dull, but some minor objects have brighter, standing out colours.

Then comes a high angle, tracking long shot of a girl walking through the cemetery, this is juxtaposition because the liveliness of the camera movement and the nostalgic surroundings contrast with each other. Humour and oddness are added to the scene by three Jewish men seating motionlessly on a bench as the camera glides past them and by the keys with multiple shapes which were attached to the monument of the dead writer. The opening is concluded by a close up on a bright pink book in the girl’s hands, which acts as an element of a visual shock after the previous frames which were dominated by the dull colours such as brown and gray. All four scenes were with a soundtrack of a chorus singing high pitch folk songs. The combination of the visual and sound effects set up a mood for an equally comical and dramatic movie, exactly like The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Moonrise Kingdom (Comedy, Drama, Adventure, Romance)

This Anderson’s film starts with a series of tracking and spinning shots. They give the impression that the movie will be lively and light-hearted. The characters of main attention in these scenes are children who make the connotations of innocence and playfulness, so the audience believes that the plot will be funny and active.

However, there are deliberate signs of disturbance. The girl, who appears in the frame the most and who the audience assumes to be the main heroine, is distanced from the other family members and has an unusual hobby of searching for objects with a binocular, which is a prop that suggests her seeking for something remote. Her face expression is always gloomy, with compressed lips and shifted eyebrows. The presumable parents are not contacting with each other, but are separated by thin walls in each scene. The audience gets a feeling that their relationship isn’t going well and the family is dividing. The adults’ facial expressions and body language suggest boredom, their props such as cigarettes, glasses of wine and newspapers show that they are trying to amuse themselves with the basic means, rather than with each other. To complete the depressing mise-en-scene, the opening is filmed in a house during a thunderstorm.

The three little boys are used as a contrast; they are playing, laughing and show interest in the simplest things, while the elders are occupied with thoughtfulness. The bright colours of the set and the costumes are also contrasting with the mood and bring more focus to the characters’ grim behaviour. The soundtrack of “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra , Leonard Bernstein” can be called a juxtaposition, because it is a recording of a little girl’s voice analysing a complicated and intense classical piece. Therefore it contributes to the visual contrasts of the scenes. Anderson used the different volumes and sections of the piece to highlight the moments of importance, such as the appearance of the movie’s title and opening of the letter around which the storyline will spin later.

Memento (Thriller, Mystery, Crime)

The opening of this thriller is a reverse action of the main character shooting the other one dead and taking a picture of his body on a Polaroid. The connotation is that the movie will be about finding out the past, likely dark and violent. The close up on a photograph is the longest shot in the opening, which suggests that the process of taking these pictures is an important element of the plot. The shots of the killer are low angled and lasting to highlight his authority in the scene, the shots of the victim are high angle and short to convey his vulnerability and keep his personality a mystery. The fact that the murderer is in a suit, clean and young makes him more appealing than the victim, who is dressed in dirty clothes and is much older. The cutaways closing on separate objects made it clear that it is a murder scene before the killing was revealed, to build up the expectations and increase the action’s impression.

The soundtrack began with slow violins; their sounds built intensity until the photo was put away and were substituted by less pleasant due to big differences in its pitches non- sounds, which increased the intensity but allowed the audience to concentrate more on the movements. The high pitch sounds were getting louder until the action reached its climax (one shooting the other), where they were the most distinguishable. Such an opening supposes to shock, confuse and engage the audience, so they would have the desire to continue to watch such a slowly unrolling thriller as “Memento”.