(VIDEO ABOVE MISSES OUT LAST PART OF THE OPENING)
(VIDEO BELOW IS MY SPOKEN ANALYSIS OF THE OPENING)
(VIDEO BELOW IS MY SPOKEN ANALYSIS OF THE OPENING)
In any opening of a film, we expect to be
wowed and for it to engage us. We expect to be introduced very briefly to the characters
and to understand the time and setting without it giving too much away about the
rest of the film.
A lot of the things you find out in the
opening of Back to the Future are inferences that you can make from the
abundance of minor details littered throughout the first 5 minutes.
We can initially infer that time is a heavy
feature of the film due to the clocks ticking and eventually finding out that
Doc set them 25 minutes early. Our original question, as with any film, is ‘who
are these people’ but this, in particular, also makes us question ‘why has he
done this’, and ‘what does he want to achieve’. It also makes us question how
he knew Marty was going to be in his house at the exact time at which he
phoned. It creates a sense of confusion and the unknown in the chaotic mess of
his home. The clothing, the radio and the other various electronics show us
that it is not in our time, 1985 to be exact.
We find out that Marty, and Doc, are the
main characters. We can only see Marty and so know that he is quite young and
still in school. The way he turns everything on etc. makes him seem slightly
irresponsible without a care in the world. However, this also tells us that he
may be quite familiar with the house (as shown from him opening the door with
the spare key under the mat). However, we don’t see Marty’s face until the
medium shot when he plays the guitar and damages the amp. Before this we have a
sense of intrigue as the close-ups make us question who this is and what he
looks like, all we see are his feet.
The abundance of ambient noise, with the
clocks ticking, the radio and the news station on, we find out various bits of
information as we pan around the room. We also get minor details from the close-ups
of newspaper clippings and things up on the wall. This helps us to try to
understand the context of the film. For example, when we see the case of
plutonium, it makes us question the characters, as we initially hear it has
been stolen by terrorists.
The opening creates many questions, but doesn’t
answer very many of them unless you are looking very carefully for certain
things. There isn’t really any kind of establishing shot, but the radio and TV
make up for this by setting the scene with little details. We also don’t find
out much about the story or the characters, only what we can infer. This makes
us more intrigued to continue watching the film. The phone call telling Marty
to go to the mall in the middle of the night intrigues us also as we want to
know what the mysterious man, we haven’t yet come across, has to show Marty in
his ‘breakthrough’.
