'Watching' Documentary

"Films need to seduce their audience into long term commitment. While there are many types of seduction, the temptation to go for instant arousal is almost irresistible."

I believe that when Thomas Sutcliffe says this, he means that what makes a good film is how well the film is able to engage its audience, and that mostly this engagement comes from the beginning of the film. In response to that, as part of the audience, I agree that the film must engage the audience from the beginning. If I start watching a film that the beginning is so terribly boring I don't even bother watching the rest of it. As he said in the documentary, the darkness and the silence of the cinema is when the audience is waiting anxiously for the film to start, the film must attend the audience's expectations of excitement. I think the beginning must create intrigue and the engagement must be kept up throughout the whole film.

Jean Jacques Beineix suggests problems with instant arousal. The consumers sometimes want everything instantaneously, the feelings, the emotions, but he believes that these can be grown throughout. If the audience is aroused at the very beginning, there is a risk in not being able to arouse the audience anymore in the rest of the film. 

"A good beginning must make the audience feel that it doesn't know nearly enough yet, and at the same time make sure that it doesn't know too little."

I think what is meant by that is that the beginning must have this balance of information because it shouldn't say too little that the audience doesn't understand about it and feel so unclear that they cannot understand the rest of the film. However, it shouldn't say too much, making the audience feel confident enough about the rest of the film so that it loses engagement. The beginning needs to create intrigue, so that the audience doesn't know clearly what is happening, but they want to find out and they will find out later on. 

Film openings are important not only because it establishes characters and plot, but also because it establishes the tone of the film, and therefore it instructs us in how we should watch the film and how are we going to respond to it. Stanley Kaffmann explains that the reason why classic openings with establishing shots work well not only because it is establishing the setting, the character's position, but also showing that everything (the state of the world) is in order, in equilibrium. Like Todorov's theory of narrative structure suggests that the a film begins with an equilibrium which later on will be disrupted. The classic opening establishes this equilibrium.