Yours from the Opening Frame
Short dispatch on 750 Film's new title
Bernard Shea Horne, Roll Film Holder, 1916–17, platinum print. MoMA.
Dear moviegoers,
A matter of bookkeeping — the blog has a new title — The Opening Frame. It was rather a long hunt. I always thought of the old name, 750 Film, as a placeholder, neutral and inoffensive, but necessary. If I had waited for a good title, I would never have written anything at all, and would in due course have abandoned the whole venture. And yet, the bureaucratic mediocrity of the old name could not be denied.
My plan was to steal. I read through old articles by a few beloved critics—James Agee, Delmore Schwartz, Renata Adler—and came away hopeless. They had plenty of good lines, but nothing with the needed compression. A title is a very specific genre. So I bought new books: a volume of film criticism that turned out to be mostly jargon, and a poetry anthology called Reel Verse. That second book has exactly the kind of title I hate, something “clever” in the smuggest way. But I concede it can be remembered—that stupid pun on “reel” and “real”—unlike 750 Film, which reads like an office number.
The Aha-Erlebnis, as my professor used to call it, came from a poem in that much resented anthology. I read the first stanza of “For Ingrid Bergman,” by Christopher Buckley:
I first loved you in ‘58
In the back of the auditorium—
while the other students fidgeted
or whispered in the dark, I was rapt,
yours from the opening frame.
The poem was only okay, but I didn’t care. I had found my phrase. Yours from the opening frame. I feel that way about all my favorite movies and directors: they have me right from the start. The metaphor is possession. To have someone. Or to say, I’m yours. Some people distrust cinema for that reason; they see something nefarious in its immersion. But I have never had any trouble giving myself up to a movie, being taken by it, and still seeing how it works on me.
So then. Something of cinema’s magic, and something of a critic’s role. Because the opening frame that pulls you in also tells you so much about a movie. You know whether you’re in good hands, I think, from the typography of the credits. From the first moment of silence or music or sound. From that first exposure of light.
More movies soon —
Matthew