For this first entry, I was thinking about beginnings. From Terry Teachout, I learned about the “Jane Chord.” Terry describes the concept:
The idea is that if you make a two-word sentence out of the first and last words of a book, it will tell you something revealing about the book in question. Or not: the Jane Chord of Pride and Prejudice is It/them. But every once in a while you run across a Jane Chord so resonant that it makes the room shiver–the chord for Death Comes for the Archbishop is One/built–and even when a famous book yields up nonsense, it’s still a good game to play.
I wondered how well this idea would apply to film. Look at the first shot and the last shot, and maybe find a relationship between them that says something about the film as a whole.
Why the first and last shots? In standard narrative films, the story is introduced at the beginning, and resolves itself in the end. Therefore, knowing the introduction and the resolution can tell you at least something about the story as a whole. But it also relates to concepts in psychology about memory known as the primacy and recency effects. Basically, when recalling an ordered list from memory, the first and last items are the most easy to recall. And because a film can be seen as an ordered list of shots, it is reasonable to assume that viewers will be most likely to recall the first and last shots in a film.
Jim Emerson has a great resource, The Opening Shot Project, that examines opening shots from films, in more detail than you would think possible. He states, “The opening shot can tell us a lot about how to interpret what follows. It can even be the whole movie in miniature.” From the first shot, or even the first frame, great directors begin to tell their stories. And he just happens to back up my argument by saying, “The opening shot (or opening sequence) is the most important part of the movie… at least until you get to the final shot. (And in good movies, the two are often related.)”
One question: is it cheating for a filmmaker to think about the Jane Chord while making a film, and plan for it to say something interesting, or even humorous, in advance? Maybe. But ever since Eisenstein, we have been thinking about the relationships between shots, or montage, and the Jane Chord is just another outlet for that expression.
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