Goodfellas in High School? Well, probably not...

2-8-08

The opening two minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is perhaps one of the most shocking and brilliantly filmed pieces of cinema of the twentieth century.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBohe2dezjM&feature=related

The film starts with a simple black background, with white credits. The credits roll from right to left, accompanied by traffic sounds, evoking the image of a car on the highway before the actual scene begins. The white on black credits are deceptively simple. While this movie appears fast-paced, the white and black imagery connotes a simple morality and journalistic reporting of the truth. The final opening message of “This film is based on a true story” adds to the initial impression of journalistic integrity.

The opening shot is a slow zoom onto a Pontiac GTO driving down a country highway at night. The shot seems to be from a car passing the GTO. As the camera draws next to the GTO, however, the shot cuts to a 3 person shot of the interior of the car. We are now inside the GTO, almost directly in front of the driver, played by Ray Liotta. Robert Deniro is half-asleep in the passenger seat, and Joe Pesci is looking out the window in the back. There is a bumping noise in the car, and the three characters exchange some low dialog, almost inaudible. The only very clear line is from Pesci, stating that the driver should pull over so they can investigate what is wrong with the car.

The next shot is an establishing shot of the three men standing behind the vehicle. Liotta is holding the car keys, Deniro seems to be holding a shovel, and Pesci is grasping something under his jacket. What is most interesting about this shot is the lighting. The three men are bathed in the red taillights of the car, and the rest of the setting is the darkness of the nighttime. This lighting is obviously symbolic – the three men covered in red and standing in darkness indicates evil and sin. The camera slow zooms onto Deniro and pans across the three men, and then zooms in on the trunk, from which the bumping noise is emanating. When Liotta pops the trunk, we see a bloody man wrapped in bloody white fabric, and he is brilliantly lit by the bright white trunk light. Each of the three characters steps into this light, and his role in the movie is “brought to light” by his actions against the man in the trunk.

Pesci swears and brutally stabs the man with a large butcher knife he had in his belt. His character is immediately established as psychotic and unstable.

Deniro calmly and coolly then steps up to the trunk and shoots the bloody man four times. While Deniro is also murderous, he is dispassionate and businesslike.

Liotta then walks back to the trunk and closes it. The camera zooms in on his face, and his character is established as the narrator of the film as Liotta begins voice over, with the famous line “As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Tony Bennett's "Rags to Riches" swells festively in the soundtrack.

We then return to the black screen, this time with the title credit of “Goodfellas”, but this time the text is written in red. The “black and white” reality of the opening credits has been changed, and characterization has been made. We have seen the fellows that this movie will portray, and they are certainly not “Good”; the red letters indicate the blood-stained crimes they have committed.

While it is probably not going to be acceptable to teach this particular scene in a high school setting, this sort of film-making perfectly illustrates why it is so important to teach film to students. The “literary terms” of characterization, symbolism, point-of-view, and narrative are all utilized in the first two minutes of this film. And if we want to connect the concepts we teach in class to a what students would consider a “real-world” medium, there is no more effective means of doing that than film. I often tell my students that great directors – like Scorsese and Michael Mann and Stanley Kubrick – use film in the same manner that writers like Hemingway or Fitzgerald use the blank page. Every scene, every image, every shot is carefully planned, and the visual fabric of the film emphasizes the narrative and thematic structure of the story itself.