dark eye socket: Tuesday Title

Showing posts with label Tuesday Title. Show all posts

3 August 2010

Tuesday Title: Lost Highway

Today: Lost Highway (David Lynch/1997)

Fade in on a fast POV view of a road at night. Car headlights illuminate the centre lines dividing the two sides of the road - a sly indication, perhaps, of the two distinct (but ultimately intertwined) narrative segments of Lost Highway, and the doubling theme employed - as ever -by David Lynch for his "21st Century horror noir".

The opening titles zoom at the screen in block yellow stencil type. David Bowie's 'I'm Deranged' cuts in: he sings, "Funny how secrets travel." We know Lynch loves his secrets. And of course he loves the open road - as long as it leads us somewhere dark and dreamy, and never, ever comes to an end.

Lost Highway constantly splits off down warped avenues, to only then converge back to the staring point - though seen from different perspectives a second, third or fourth time. And then seemingly plays again and again - down the same road, but with infinite possibilities for careering off in further new directions.

We see just how secrets have traveled come the end of the film. Time has looped around, veered left and right (but never straight down the middle), and then doubled back on itself several times over. The opening titles become the closing credits: a visual repeat, but with significant and baffling alterations. Lynch's spectacular mindfuck brings back Bowie's song (more ethereal this time) to usher the film into desperate head-morphing oblivion. Lost Highway will always fascinate me - and its titles will always give me a thrilling jolt each time I watch them.

But maybe one of Lynch's naughtiest secrets is the fact that Lost Highway's opening titles are, in fact, very similar to Jack Cardiff's for his 1968 film Girl on a Motorcycle. (You can see the opening titles sequence for Girl on a Motorcycle at the excellent The Art of the Title website - scroll down to the second post, then scroll down slightly further to compare and contrast with Lost Highway's opening titles.) Lynch, you sly ol' dog.

This is the last Tuesday Title for a while. But it is...

27 July 2010

Tuesday Title: The Tomb of Ligeia

Today: The Tomb of Ligeia (Roger Corman/1964)

The film's opening is great: Vincent Price - as the fantastically named Verden Fell (who joins Pat Hingle's Bobo Justus in The Grifters and John Hurt's Jellon Lamb in The Proposition as one of the best movie character names ever) - is standing firm over his late wife's coffin, certain of foul circumstance; said late wife's (duel-role-playing Elizabeth Shepherd, as second of these two ladies: the Lady Rowena Trevanion and the Lady Ligeia herself) eyes open, startled by a cat on her tombstone - Price explains it away as a nervous post-death twitch. She's eventually buried, and the opening titles (designed by Peter Howitt and Francis Bodker) appear over some very nice, Gothic illustrations - which look like something Francis Bacon might have dreamt up had he been a commercial illustrator.

The film is based on Edgar Allen Poe's short story 'Ligeia' and, true to his auteur status and reverence among horror filmmakers, it's his name that claims position above the title in Roger Corman's 1964 film. But Corman's unexpected and brooding use of landscape (notably his insistence on using found locations: Castle Acre Priory, Norfolk - not a million miles from me), particularly in the film's pre-opening credit sequence, is just as (visually) evocative as the discernible doses of Poe's macabre wit within the film's script, adapted by Robert Towne.

The opening is a suitably creepy and eloquent introduction to Ligeia - both the film and the wraith-like presence of Fell's almost ever-living wife. And that pesky black cat perched ominously on the tombstone proves more fateful than we first assume. (I was surprised to read that some folk see it as one of Corman's lesser Poe adaptations. I thought it was one of his most interesting and memorable; the inventive framing and expressive use of vibrant colour made the film stand out for me.)

Also worth a mention - Price has one of the best lines in the film, too. Just check out this choice slice of Fell's:

"Christopher, not ten minutes ago I... I tried to kill a stray cat with a cabbage, and all but made love to the Lady Rowena. I succeeded is squashing the cabbage and badly frightening the lady. If only I could lay open my own brain as easily as I did that vegetable, what rot would be freed from its grey leaves."

Wonderful.

The film also has one of the best posters of the sixties, too:

20 July 2010

Tuesday Title: Lifeboat

Today: Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock/1944)

The opening titles of Hitchcock's Lifeboat aren't exactly remarkable for their use of inventive typography (a rather standard-for its-time title insert), but it was one of Hitch's most memorable opening sequences all the same. As soon as the film started I'd been immediately introduced to one of his best screen characters - with a nod to Steinbeck, who wrote the script at Hitch's insistence - in Tallulah Bankhead's stranded socialite Constance Porter.

It's a smart, effective and very funny opening sequence: after a masterful pan over the downed ship's various flotsam covering the ocean surface (which include a copy of the New Yorker), Hitch's camera rests on a woman in a boat. Surveying the sinking debris of the ship around her - from the relative safety of the small lifeboat of the title - the unblemished, and still impeccably-dressed, Connie lights a cigarette, glances at a ladder in her tights, and tuts, gloriously ignoring the mayhem around her.

When a survivor, Kovacs (John Hodiak), approaches the lifeboat, she grabs her camera and films him struggling to board before just about managing to lend him a perfectly-manicured hand. Capturing a good story comes first for Connie.

Bankhead and Hitchcock ensure that the opening of Lifeboat establishes just the right tone. It's an excellent and endearing film, but also gripping: amid the witty banter and hardy spirit there's some pertinent commentary on the eye-for-an-eye tactics of war that supply sufficient social-political ballast to weigh the lifeboat's passengers down. But it's eyes forward for Constance all the way. Her presence raises the film several leagues to greatness. Wonderful characters deserve wonderful introductions. Bankhead delectably helped keep Lifeboat wondrously floating along.

Sample dialogue: referring to using her fake diamond bracelet as fish bait:

"I can recommend the bait. I know - I bit on it myself."

Gawd love 'er.

13 July 2010

Tuesday Title: Jackie Brown

Today: Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino/1997)

She's still foxy and she's still called Brown, but despite the clear and present allusion to one of Tarantino's obvious Blaxpoitation faves, we're some way off Foxy Brown. Jackie Brown is a film made in Foxy's image, an avid fan's homage to Pam Grier.

I finally saw it after years of thinking to not bother, having never been someone truly taken with QT's film world. I'm glad I did eventually see it, as it may just be the best thing he's done (along with a grab bag of bits from both Kill Bills): the smart-ass dialogue is kept to a minimum - and feels like it comes from the character's mouths, not his; it features his best selection of pop-soul hits (particularly a personal all-time fave, Bobby Womack's 'Across110th Street'); and contains two of his very best characters: Jackie herself and Max Cherry (Robert Forster).

I loved the opening: Grier on an airport conveyor belt for what seemed like a glorious eternity; the Womack song accompanying her as she elegantly glides throughout the entirety of the titles. Shot in profile in a blue Cabo Air uniform, and with unblinking gaze fixed on the distance, Grier commands the film frame right from the start. The yellow '70s-style - and very Tarantino - font appears bold, filling the frame, and constructed purely in the image of his inspiration. I'll take this over the opening strutting swagger of all those Reservoir Dogs any day.

At this point I could only hazard a guess at what may have been on Jackie's mind; the shot is cleverly composed to make us ponder who she is and what might happen to her. This image is what we have; one long, uninterrupted take. By the end of the film, 154 mins later, Jackie and Bobby Womack are paired again. And Tarantino's most invigorating and thoughtful film ends on an image as striking as its first, and just a touch more wonderful: Grier's face, now in close-up, smiling and all the more knowing and relaxed for having now worked out what she wanted to do with her life. I was with her all the way.

And how is it that Grier wasn't nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for this? Forster grabbed a supporting nod, though didn't win (it should've been a lead nom anyhow), but nothing for Grier. And I'll remind you that Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson both won for As Good As It Gets. What gives? Daft and wrong, right there.

6 July 2010

Tuesday Title: Manhattan

Today: Manhattan (Woody Allen/1979)

Since roughly 1977 Woody Allen has famously used the same opening title design for each of his films, but one of several of his earlier films to not follow the long-held tradition of using white EF Windsor Elongated or Condensed on black is Manhattan. (The titles for What's Up, Tiger Lily?, Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask, Sleeper, Love and Death and Interiors appear without Windsor - the rest, to the best of my knowledge, all use the typeface.) We just have the black & white image of the vertical signage accompanied on the soundtrack by his celebrated monologue ("Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved...") and that Gershwin score.

For a film which has always been very much an open love letter to New York, a celebration of its romantic spaces, for him to have used the same opening titles as in every other of his films would've lessened the romance he extols and denied us the pleasure of sharing in his wonder. We wouldn't have seen the city itself as the real central character of the film. It's all in the name. The monologue, music and beautifully chosen and composed shots of Manhattan work together as an introductory, and very arty, slide show, mapping out the places Allen (as Isaac) wants to take us to over the course of the film.

29 June 2010

Tuesday Title: Shaun of the Dead

"You've got red on you."

It was at this point, right at the beginning of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's 's insanely entertaining and perceptively made partial parody of Dawn of the Dead/zombie movies (a zom-rom-com!), that I knew they had got their parody spot on. Shaun doesn't regurgitate anything from its influence, it simply responds with a loving nod; it draws great comedy - and startling moments of apt gore - from its premise.

Dawn is one of my all-time favourite zombie films (well, all-time favourite films full stop - see header image), so I was eager to see what Wright & Pegg would do with the concept (which they married to a contemporary British setting). Their firm grasp of comedy wasn't in question (the excellent Spaced came before it), and from interviews - and indeed some of the comedy references in Spaced - both had spoken eloquently about their passion for zombie films.

This opening title shot is witty, creative and doesn't hang about: undead teens trudge over the diegetically-Incorporated title: the words laid out flat on the ground if as like a corpse itself. From the opening titles onwards it just got better.

22 June 2010

Tuesday Title: The Hunchback of Notre Dame

I remember way back when I was a kid watching this version of Hunchback on a random whim with my mother and brother. I didn't know it was the Dieterle/Laughton version then, as I was about six or seven years old - clearly long before I became manic about cinema. (A spot of research in the years since revealed this '39 Hunchback to be the one we saw.) My father was overseas a lot working when I was young, and so we often watched old films on television in the evenings.

I remember it vividly for how my young mind instinctively reacted to it (oh, how Quasimodo's life must have been so sad! The unfairness of it all!... Why, mum, why... does he ring so many bells all the time?), more than any technical attributes (who notices subtlties in lighting or editing at age six?). Its opening title is more a handy reminder, a simple visual nudge, of what a great film it is - and for the fact that it's one of my earliest film-watching memories - rather than anything particularly spectacular in itself. (It's typically straightforward for its time: shadows cast over the titles "etched" onto the side of the cathedral; bells ringing on the soundtrack) But, boy, is it a good opening. I loved the experience of watching this back then, and still do. I think I'm about ready to watch it again soon.

Also, it was this film - particularly Charles Laughton's starring role - that, years later, led me to seek out and watch his one and only film as director, The Night of the Hunter; it then ended up, alongside Hunchback, as being one of my favourite of his films.

15 June 2010

Tuesday Title: The Conversation

Today: The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola/1974)

The Conversation is pretty much my favourite Coppola film. A small part of the reason for this is the incredible way it begins: a fade, from black, on to busy Union Square, San Francisco, California. Simple uppercase opening titles (in Gill Sans) unassumingly come and go. A barely perceptible jazz score plays (on the soundtrack? In the square?) as people (shoppers, businessmen, tramps, pedestrians, passers-by, anyone, everyone), like dots gradually getting bigger as the camera slowly and ominously zooms in, weave their way through their shadows and past one other.

The jazzy music increases in volume and is intermittently interrupted by electronic voices muffled and distorted by feedback or interference. The camera picks out a mime in the crowd to observe more intently; he mimics Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), the film's watcher and listener, drinking coffee; Caul walks off, often looking back over his shoulder...

Something's wrong, slightly amiss. But whether or not Caul has good reason to look over his shoulder is answered, perhaps, over the remainder of Coppola's excellent film. Is it a surveilance camera watching the scene below, or Coppola announcing from the off his exact, unsettling tone for the film? Well, indeed it's both. Or is it? Stay closely with it - eyes and ears on full alert.

The film follows a structured set of visual squares (as suggested in this title sequence). Restricting, destabilising lines - window frames, the contours of office walls, structural partitions, concrete blocks - trail off both vertically and horizontally, breaking up the film frame. This creates a sense of not only isolation, but also of being constantly surrounded: human figures appear boxed in, multiplied, looking like ants under close scrutiny.

The design of the film is clean, and more importantly, acutely subtle (much like the film’s rightly celebrated sound design - courtesy of the great Walter Murch), and its atmosphere is muted and discordant, as if entirely composed of (aural and visual) white noise. It's drained of colour almost; every scene is lit and framed in such a flat and near-monochromatic manner that the overflowing blood, when it appears in the toilet late in the film, is all the more shocking for its abrupt inclusion - it acts as a signifier of danger, or perhaps of dirt, within the otherwise hermetic surroundings.

It's a disquieting and compulsive film. This opening shot is tantalising and intriguing, and signals Coppola’s genius for framing disquieting images which retain their vivid intensity throughout every scene - from first to last. It also sets the tone for the film perfectly. It's all about the watching and listening.

8 June 2010

Tuesday Title: Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

1987. Ext. Harlem street. Day. A COLD WIND blows a bright red scarf tangled high on a street lamp.

This is how Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire starts. On screen the title appears as 'Precious (Base on Nol by Saf)' - with the full title in parenthesis underneath: an abbreviated, personalised and slang-style reconfiguring of the film's full name. (And it's often reduced to just 'Precious'.) A sense of place is clearly established, and the reoccurring motif of Precious' (Gabourey Sidibe) red scarf is the first thing we see. She carries it around with her everywhere - in her hair, wrapped around her wrist, or at times to be spotted somewhere in the background of a shot (as in the opening titles here).

Maybe it's an emblem that provides some kind of meaning in her life: lost, found, caught up, passed around; tied up in knots, wrapped up in her own private world, and finally let free. I haven't read the novel, although I'm sure it may very well explain the true significance of the red scarf and what it means. But going into the film cold, with no idea of its importance (if any), it can mean everything and nothing. Is it a symbol of Precious' personal state, a key visual token of her life - or just a favourite accessory? (It also relates, more obviously, to blood and anger, too.) Either way, red is the colour thematically chosen throughout the film to represent Precious.

Intentionally misspelled, personalised or just plain quirky plays on a film's title can often be annoying; simply there just to appear different for its own sake (I'm thinking of S1m0ne, Thir13en Ghosts, (500) Days of Summer and (groan) Inglourious Basterds here). But Precious is born out of an integrally personalised journey - an exploration of one girl's interior fantasies and sadly distressing real existence (she keeps a journal; the wording likely come straight from her) - so the title, in its own particular way, should show outwardly this in a visual manner.

The way the red scarf chimes with the red of the individually scrawled hand-drawn type, imposed over the image of the underside of a bridge on a chilly and downbeat Harlem morning, was clearly Lee Daniels' pertinent, visually arresting and distinct way to introduce us to the film, and his main character, and to give everything its own personality. Not since Julianne Moore wore that mauve headscarf in Far from Heaven has an accessory stood for just that little bit more than itself in a film.

The promotional posters for Precious are also some of the most artistically inventive and striking I've seen in a while, too:

1 June 2010

Tuesday Title: Back to the Future

Great Scott! If you're of a certain age you may well have drawn this opening title - or is it more of a logo? - in a sketch or exercise book. I did. But it never looked as good as it did at the start of the film of course. Impactful, colourful (gradient red to yellow, "electric" blue outline), immediately recognisable and exciting. Type bent (leant?) out of shape: the 'back' pushed, by the arrow, back to the past; the 'future' zooming headlong into the future. So simple and - yes, groan - it's filled with nostalgia. I look at it now and feel like watching the actual film - I can almost hear Huey Lewis and his News (though is that a good thing?). Where's Doc Brown when you need him?

25 May 2010

Tuesday Title: Footprints/Le orme

I saw Footprints only recently (on DVD via the excellent Shameless label), and from its first frame onwards it riveted my attention to the screen. I'm a major sucker for explorations of psychological imbalance in - more often than not - female main characters (films such as Carnival of Souls, Red Desert, Safe, Mulholland Dr. fit this template nicely) and Bazzoni's 1975 film joins their ranks. The film follows Italian translator Alice Cepsi (Florinda Bolkan) as she tries to piece together three missing days in her life.

Its opening title shot is a simple visual representation of Luigi Bazzoni's (and uncredited co-director Mario Fanelli's) overarching themes in Footprints. It's the figurehead image which connects Alice with the unaccounted for psychic gap in her existence. The image of the moon haunts her throughout the film. Its origin is either that of the dream she has - which seemingly and inexplicably lasts three days - or from the old black and white film (perhaps featuring the stranded astronaut that we see over the opening titles, and who intermittently pops up throughout the narrative) that she barely remembers watching years ago. Or maybe both. The film never tells us. Luna and lunacy are entwined in her mind: she may very well be the lost astronaut herself.

The all-caps, yellow and giallo-esque typography boldly appears on the screen, very nearly encapsulated within the expanse of the blueish-green moon behind it. It's a mysterious and - accompanied by the beautiful organ-lead score by Italian film composer Nicola Piovani - enticing first image. It leads you into the narrative unaware of exactly what form the plot will take. The lunar flashbacks/dream memories/film clips sit somewhat at odds with the remaining visual style of the film - although the flattened, neatly structured visuals of the film's first 20-or-so minutes that directly follow the opening (Bolkan is often shot behind layers of glass or dwarfed by austere architecture) are as coldly visualised as the blue-tinted black-and-white of the moon imagery.

Connections are made visually as well as psychologically, from the title onwards, and through to the fraught and despairing climax: astronaut-sized footprints are embedded into the sand on a beach in Garma, which, in an ultimately sad and terrifying manner, make for an uncanny parallel to the moon footage of the opening title. Footprints is a beautifully-made and truly unusual celestial horror film.

18 May 2010

Tuesday Title: Elephant

The spare typography (simple white Helvetica by Title House Digital) and imagery (a fixed shot of a telegraph pole and a streetlamp against a jade-green evening sky which - through Eric Edwards* time lapse photography - morphs into inky nighttime) that opens Elephant, the second film in Gus Van Sant's loose, unofficial 'Death Trilogy'** - after Gerry (2002) and before Last Days (2004) - is as unfussy, clear and direct as the actual film itself initially appears to be.

Elephant is all these things, but it does contain more within its seemingly slimmed narrative than what physically occurs on the screen in front of us. Of course, the visual scheme of the film includes horrific events (a fictionalised account of a high school shooting, essentially Columbine), but the crucial, dazed poetics of how Van Sant depicts these events (repeated sequences from varying perspectives, long, slow tracking shots over characters' shoulders, or tailing close behind them, slowed-down instances of interaction between one or more characters) hint at volumes of meaning beneath its surface. The film has innumerable buried complexities. Everything is frighteningly normal, but just ever-so disquieting: this is just a day, but not just any old day.

Its almost tactile, ever-shifting camerawork, shows us no symptoms or reasoning for what was about to happen, but it shows us - in a variety of fragmented, perhaps movable, scenes and moments - an unsolvable puzzle, a day broken up into, simply, the things that occurred before, during and just after the shootings at the school. The film's intelligent, artistically clear boldness is hinted at in the uncluttered elegance of the opening titles. Van Sant gets straight to the point because there's much to say here (or, more pertinently, much to leave judiciously unsaid).

Van Sant didn't need to open his film with anything other than a simple introductory image/text combination - we need to know what before the series of suggested whys, whens and hows. The following visuals told us everything we needed to know, piece by piece, and without much in the way of exterior complication. News coverage of real life events such as those depicted in Elephant look at every conceivable angle through journalistic means (as they should), but this is very much the artist's view: nonliteral and full of questioning; all content, and with a simple "headline". In this context the word 'Elephant' means many different perplexing things.

*Eric Edwards, Van Sant's sometime cinematography collaborator, did the time lapse photography in some scenes in Elephant; the great Harris Savides was the main, credited cinematographer

**or perhaps quadrilogy, if you count Paranoid Park (2007), which I do - each of all four of these films pairs untimely and/or unexpected death with youth in a variety of ways.

11 May 2010

Tuesday Title: Antichrist

As with his 'certification of authenticity' title frame for The Idiots (under his self-proclaimed 'Dogme95' manifesto - each Dogme95 entry opened with the same 'certified' title shot bearing the film's name) von Trier's opening title for Antichrist appears as a still-frame intertitle - a scratched, chalk-marked board with the film's title crudely etched onto it in red (lipstick? Blood?); the final 't' fashioned into the female gender symbol. It's inserted suddenly onto the screen, unaccompanied by no other title information.

It's as boldly confrontational and attention-grabbing as von Trier himself is known to be - especially with his appearance at last year's Cannes Film Festival where Antichrist premiered (and where he archly claimed, with the film as his proof, that he was "the best director in the world!"). His provocation was duly felt; audiences and critics alike went ga-ga over his controversy-baiting exploration of a grieving couple adrift in a self-made 'Eden' somewhere in a godless, but stunningly photographed, backwoods.

Fantastical Mr. Fox says: "Keep Fox Hunting Banned!... Oops, too late. I mean, Chaos Reigns!"

I think that the impact of this title on an audience's perception and understanding of the film's themes and ideas is perhaps limited and negligible; it effectively stands out as aesthetically inspired from most opening titles (not many title shots feel both as goading and, at the same time, as throwaway as this one) but it's essentially a nifty visual ploy, accompanied by ominous sound design, to simply draw us into the mysteries of the narrative. But it works well: a complimentary red and green typographic concoction to lull us with visual fascination. As soon as the film's title appeared I was on edge: partly intrigued and partly reluctant to find out what was about to happen in von Trier's forest of female fury.

Self-disemboweling, talking foxes, close-up genital mutilation, leg-vs-millstone-based torture and an abandoned thesis on gynocide, and - to top it all off nicely - three chapters headed Grief, Pain and Despair, all get thrown into von Trier's mixing pot (he sure knows how to draw the crowds in, huh?), but I'm not sure if chaos exactly reigned though. I got the feeling that all of it - the self-conscious artiness of both the opening title and the resulting film itself - was all provocation with a side order of chest-inflated bluster. Maybe von Trier surely hoped the fox's words (as well as the audacious closing dedication to Andrei Tarkovsky) were meant as nudging directives to all the critics that to cry hellfire about his film. From the title onwards: was the devil merely in the detail?

4 May 2010

Tuesday Title: Blue Velvet

It's all blue. A swaying pair of curtains (blue velvet of course) - perhaps cut from the same cloth as the gown covering Dorothy Vallens' (Isabella Rossellini) bruised, beaten body, and, therefore, the strip snipped from it that Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) fondles when she sings "and I still can see blue velvet through my tears" - move and ripple on a darkened stage. Or is it a floating barrier, shielding us from the deeper recesses of David Lynch's imagination?... Which he then parts anyway, to reveal to us over the following two hours just what goes on in his version of smalltown America: it's the doorway to severed ears, nightclub singers and the mysteries of love and Lumberton logs.

Lynch lives for these curtains - usually red, but here blue; deeply textured and hiding a world of waking nightmares. The film's titles appear slowly - very slowly - over these inky-hued drapes; all beautifully flowing in a whitish serif script - embodying film noir but with a Sirkian tint. They emerge (accompanied by the drum roll of Angelo Badalamenti's noirish '50s-inspired and -sounding main theme music) not quite letting on what Blue Velvet itself might be about, but bearing a promise of mysterious events to come: is it actually all down to the Bobby Vinton title song? Or is the meaning of the film's title, and indeed the fabric used to conjure it up, merely an early visual nod toward a plot maguffin - the kind to make Hitchcock grin from beyond the grave with glee? Or does it simply sound... just too dreamy?

The score and type together suggest a torrid romance, a heightened drama in a retroactive style (this was 1986 looking back at, and fused with, the 1950s); it could be a parodic glance back to the innocence of middle America three decades prior. But it's more deceptive than that: it's an opening that invites us fully into Lynch's smalltown detective story in a fateful, all-encompassing way. Because of how evocatively and suggestively Blue Velvet begins we all become budding detectives, budding Jeffrey Beaumonts.

The words and images that start Lynch's '80s masterpiece position us perfectly to enter into Frank and Dorothy's world. And by the time the words 'Directed by David Lynch' bring the titles to an end, and the blue curtains dissolve to reveal his stage to be the bright skies above the picket fences and neatly-ordered rose bushes of Lumberton, we know there's no going back. And in fact, we don't want to - however long it takes for the robins to finally come.

And remember: "Logs, logs, logs. Lumberton, U... S... A...!! At the sound of the falling tree, it's 1:30, and this is the mighty voice of Lumberton, the town where people really know how much wood a woodchuck chucks."

27 April 2010

Tuesday Title: Demons 2/Dèmoni 2: L'incubo ritorna

Archetypal '80s horror movie music - all tinny, dramatic synth, electric guitar and drum machine ungodliness that goes for a cheese-topped Gothic effect - it's grandly daft as only the opening of cheap 1980s Euro-horror can be. This music (by acclaimed musician Simon Boswell, who did an amazing 11 scores for Bava in four years), matched with the ragged and scratched lettering (it shakily pulls forward onto the screen), perfectly captures the type of horror flick that I lapped up during my formative scary movie-watching years. Talk about the feeling of anticipation in waiting for a film to start!

Lamberto (son of Mario) Bava quickly followed up his first Demons (1985) film with this sequel. Everything about it was fast and frenzied, choppy and cheerful. Both films' opening titles - and in fact both films - are as good as each other, in their own no-fuss, low-grade way - just the way I like them to be. But this sequel just edges out its predecessor as the slightly better film. It's a great entry in the trapped-in-a-high-rise-so-let's-fend-off-demonic-forces canon** (it sits just a floor beneath Cronenberg's Shivers (1975), for me). It's also notable for being Asia Argento's feature film debut, too (dad Dario wrote and produced).

* Some versions have the on-screen title as: Dèmoni 2: L'incubo ritorna (Demons 2: The Nightmare Returns).
** If there is such a canon - and in my world, there is.

20 April 2010

Tuesday Title: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Shadowed male faces ogle writhing Go-Go-Dancing women - shot from below, as if the camera is viewing them as statuesque be(s)hemoths (as indeed they are). Cut to a car radio, then to Tura Satana, as Varla, laughing maniacally in the driver's seat (and she was firmly in the driver's seat throughout the film): the opening title appears on the screen with a thud - to the tune of The Bostweeds' 'Faster Pussycat' - as Varla and her girls bomb down the highway.

It takes three scrappy, (im)perfectly cobbled-together typefaces to handle the words Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The rest of the titles follow as the girl gang, intent on murdering, beating and kidnapping their way to finding a hidden stash of cash, race to a life of turning the tables on a world of man idiots.

Tommy: Look, I don't know what the hell your point is, but...
Varla: The point is of no return and you've reached it!

A Film by Russ Meyer indeed.

It's such a great film opening, completely redolent of his shabby, B-Movie style, and one that in its own demented, crazy-cool way perfectly sets up the titillating hijinx that follow.

Also worth another look, as ever, is this wonderful theatrical poster for the film:

"Don't race the fastest Pussycats -- they'll beat you -- to death!"

13 April 2010

Tuesday Title: Pickup on South Street

Each Tuesday I post a still from the opening titles of a film - as a celebration of great title sequences, cinematic use of typography and the feeling of anticipation in waiting for a film to start...

Today: Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller/1953)

Pickup on South Street is an amazing film experience and one of my all-time favourite films. I love the way the opening titles boldly usher the film in with due haste as if its very playing out was a matter of utmost urgency. Which, really, it is. Quick drum intro, music starts: Twentieth Century Fox presents Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter...

Simple black-shadowed white type, grey background. It reads like a headline: Attention grabbing: in your face! Fuller knew how to make words matter. More than that he knew how to shoot words (titles, script, dialogue - the whole pocketful), turning them into some of the most abrasively significant images of the era.

Who are these three people? What happened on South Street? Watch the film to find out. And in keeping with Andrew Sarris' statement on Fuller, "[he] is an authentic American primitive whose works have to be seen to be understood. Seen, not heard or synopsized,"* it's much better to see why I adore this snappy opening title than for me to waste another word explaining it:

* The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, Da Capo Press Inc, USA, 1996 ed, p93

6 April 2010

Tuesday Title: Caché/Hidden

The title sequence of Michael Haneke's 2005 exploration of guilt and surveillance consists of just one shot which, in visual terms, simply and effectively encapsulates the entire thesis of his film. The image (and here the image is everything - and possibly nothing also) is a static, fixed perspective shot of a house situated among several others on a street (rue des iris) in a seemingly tranquil part of Paris' 13th arrondissement. The opening titles scroll out word by word over this one image, from top left to bottom right. It's unlike how titles normally appear in the majority of films: production companies, cast and crew names and the film's title itself all sit alongside one another in a solid block of text.

The shot lasts roughly between four and five mins., and nothing eventful occurs during this time - behind the text it's just a street scene. Or is it? After the titles all together finally fade - and after a few pedestrians enter and exit the film frame - the shot changes to a closer view of the house: a woman and man depart, then the man returns moments later alone. Suddenly we're aware that the same (film) image we've been watching has turned to that of a videotape image (diegetic film has morphed into non-diegetic VHS). Static fast-forward lines are visible: we are now rushed into the central mystery of Haneke's film.

What's so good about this opening is that its minimalism is both deceptively enthralling and frustrating at the same time. Nothing much is outwardly happening, but the very (stationary) image itself seems to be telling us more than we might initially assume. Is something vital occurring on the image's periphery? Do we need to pay close attention to the inactivity taking place? Is this just a rather dull and uneventful establishing shot - and are we being nudged in the ribs to infer a layer of meaning within it that isn't actually present? Haneke doesn't - here and by the film's close - explain what's what to any obvious degree. We are left to work out what we want to; he's just the one pointing the torch in the (generally?) right direction.

Are we meant to see something - a clue, a vital piece of information - amid the text on screen, as the title of the film itself hints at? What the titles do do is make us aware of both the limitations and the very expansiveness of the film frame. Haneke is effectively telling us to notice anything and everything that may happen in any corner of the (1.78:1 aspect ratio) screen, and at any time during the film. He's slyly pushing us to use our sense of detection, to search out hidden ideas and themes from the very start. He's saying, if you want a mystery here it is - but I'll make you do all the work.

It's a great opening shot: visually striking, foreboding and typographically elegant - and, in a cheeky, artful way, it embodies all the hard graft and vexation of a particularly unfathomable jigsaw puzzle. All eyes front and centre, everyone!

30 March 2010

Tuesday Title: Session 9

'Fear Is A Place' says Session 9's strapline, and the title shot from its opening title sequence sets the scene and backs up this statement effectively. The film opens on a long, upside-down shot of a dilapidated wheelchair at the end of a dark hallway in an abandoned mental hospital (the Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts - the sole setting for the film), where a five-man asbestos clean-up crew are working alone. The camera slowly tilts clockwise, accompanied by increasingly unnerving music, which seems to echo with the sounds of far-off screams, as if they're emanating from one of the hospitals many empty rooms. The title gradually appears (in an inverted version of Joseph Coniglio's typeface Carbon 14 - a type used to create plastic labels with Dymo tape markers) as the camera continues to tilt.

The typeface is perfectly chosen considering the themes of the film's plot: whilst working, the team discover a collection of nine tapes left in the hospital that contain recorded interview sessions with former patients (eight are of innocent patients - the ninth is a mysterious unknown) - the kinds of tapes that would've very likely been labelled with Dymo tape. The shot, in one camera move, brilliantly sums up the truly unsettling tone of the whole film. After the title fades, and several scenes later, the main character Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullen) stumbles upon the scene of the wheelchair: as he stares at it in a curious manner, he hears a voice from out of nowhere very creepily say, "Hello... Gordon." The voice belongs to the patient on the tape marked 'Session 9'.

23 March 2010

Tuesday Title: 28 Days Later...

Each Tuesday I'll post a still from the opening titles of a film - as a celebration of great title sequences, cinematic use of typography and the feeling of anticipation in waiting for a film to start...

First film is: 28 Days Later... (Danny Boyle/2002)

Simple. No fuss. Direct. White sans-serif type on black. No capital letters. Positioned to the lower right-hand edge of the screen like a footnote or a prompt to 'turn the page'. Unassuming, yet ominous. Danny Boyle's film's title (designed by Creative Partnership) appears after an intro scene where animal activists release a caged chimp not knowing it's infected with a deadly 'rage' virus which will turn people into bloody-eyed "zombies". It tells us: twenty-eight days have elapsed, now what? The ellipsis is the key; it suggests bad things are to come, and it's gonna get much worse. And much worse it got. What I like about the way this title is used (apart from the fact that it avoids the usual horror film clichés of fractured lettering or red to denote blood) is that after the main part of the story finishes, it appears again - after the freeze frame of the surviving characters in the back of the taxi - before the film's epilogue: another twenty-eight days have gone by and this is what happened next. It's a great, minimal title which is all about dreadful pauses and menacing what-ifs. It's entirely apt in setting the right tone and then helping bring closure to the film.