“I went down to The Piraeus yesterday…”
Image 18. - “Psycho”, Hitchcock (1960)
A film would call this opening line “the establishing shot”. It is the moment at which the basic co-ordinates for the rest of the action are put in place. It provides the key location, establishes context and concepts. In classical film styles, it is often shot from a distance, from an aerial angle.
For example, in the opening to Hitchcock’s’ “Psycho” (1960), a panorama of a cityscape rolls from left to right, and over the long drifting minute of slow zoom we are informed that this is ‘Phoenix, Arizona’…, ‘Friday December the Eleventh’, … ‘Two Forty-Three P.M.’ and then we are taken through an open window to see our central character, Marion Crane. She is half-dressed with her boyfriend, and neither of them knows that the next time she has a shower, she will be stabbed to death with a kitchen knife by a cross-dressing psychopath called Norman. This opening line of Plato’s ‘Republic’ is his “establishing shot”. It provides the place, the time and the characters, the significance of which will become clearer over time.
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