The Varieties of Cinematic Experience

In the beginning, watching our first films as children, everything is strange. A lion roars listlessly through a hole, searchlights scan some implausibly monumental lettering. The logo having done its inscrutable thing (what is a twentieth-century fox, anyway?), we are subjected to lists of personnel before the story can begin.

 It seems a strange way to grab your public’s attention, as if this article began not just with the name of author, but editor and typesetter and paper manufacturer and where the trees grew.

In the beginning, as the credits drip by, filmmakers have found they can serve up almost anything: an abstract film that sums up the mood of the feature to follow, a humdrum series of events establishing the main character’s routine, documentary shots of the city where the action is laid. Things that would be rejected by audiences if they happened later, when the story’s begun, are cautiously welcome at the start, with a typographical alibi.

In the beginning, movies had no credits. But audiences came to recognize their favorite players, leading to a demand for information. Also, the film companies liked to put their stamp on their product to combat piracy. Soon films began not just with titles but with lists of cast and crew.

By the coming of sound, these displays of printed matter were long enough to require illustration—for ­instance, Dracula (1931) inscribes its makers’ names over a cobwebbed candle. So the idea of the title sequence as a means to establish mood was well established by the time things got crazy in the ’50s and ’60s. Sometimes a film might run through its dramatis personae in a series of portraits, where the actors smile shyly or engage in some character-appropriate bit of business. In the Flash Gordon serial (1939) kids’ matinee audiences could get in some preemptive cheering and booing before the characters had even done anything to deserve it.

With a few exceptions—The Palm Beach Story (1942) begins in media res with a frantic slapstick chase, freeze-framing at intervals to permit the insertion of text—films did not alter their approach greatly for two or three decades. The illustration might be moving now—a nocturnal road rushes at us in On Dangerous Ground (1952)—but such...