Thoughts on the Opening of M
Okay, I’m going to be quite honest and say that this took a couple of views to even understand what the heck was going on! The lack of English really killed it for me. That being said, I’m going to attempt to put my thoughts together and give you all an impression of what I saw.
The first piece of crucial information I noticed was the setting of this. It seemed to be based around a little girl and someone I’m assuming is her mother. I did not pick this up till the end when she was calling for the young girl. However, the girl was gone because she was either killed/kidnapped. I know this much because of the balloon that floated away that the mysterious man bought for her, and the fact that there was a ball with no child (yeah that’s right, a good ol’ driving principle rule).
The second piece of information that was conveyed very well was time shifts. Now, in most movies that have color, this is no problem since you can visually display what time of day it is and show this based off of other things. However, I counted at least 3-4 focuses on the clock which show the first seven minutes occurred from 12:00pm – 1:15pm. This was something that I found interesting, especially for a person that does not watch old movies (or foreign ones for that matter).
The third piece of information that I thought was interesting was the importance of making a mysterious individual. The person that picked up the little girl was a silhouette the entire time. With the exception of when he bought her the balloon (which you only got to see his back), you have no clue as to who this person is. However, I feel as though the time focused on that sign on that pole gave some information as to who that person might be. As the girl and him spoke, the camera still stayed focused on the sign.
My current unknown is the relationship between the two women at the beginning. Again because I could not understand a thing they said (and had no subtitles), I could not decipher whether they were friends/family/servants/etc.
That is about what I got in two watches of the first seven minutes.
It was pretty interesting to actually focus on these elements.
