Conventions of Western openings

Movie introductions in general mainly aim to draw the audience into watching the full movie, this could be done by creating an eye catching settings or action. For Westerns, introductions are mainly are usually slow, and suspenseful. They'd also feature a minimal amount of characters, usually introducing the main character, and his personality. Western movies are conventionally set in desert locations, most introductions will show this setting in order to show their genre, and interest audiences by the unusual location. Django's introduction is a great example as it is extremely slow, which is quite conventional to the Western Genre. There are many exceptions such as 'The good the bad and the ugly''s introduction which features a gunfight between several men. But that too, kicks off with a suspenseful beginning before the action. Another way of drawing audiences in, shown brilliantly by Django is how unclear the introduction is. In the way that it shows a man dragging a coffin through the desert, which may seem odd, and intrigue audience's attention, to help with this, western movies do not give out too much information during the introductions and seem to include little to no dialogue at all.

Western movies tend to have very simple narratives revolving around a single character. Usually revenge, or bounty hunting. Furthermore, western movies usually include lengthy shots, which once more makes them slower. Unlike Django, Western introduction scenes such as 'A fistful of dollars''s introduction scene, do not include the score. This makes it easier to hear the foley sound effects of gun shots and other sounds. The silence would also adds good Cinéma vérité as a score would take away from the realism. 

Levi Strauss' theory of binary opposition is usually followed in most Western movie introductions. This is because it is a good way to establish the characters of the movie, showing simply who's evil and who's good. a good example of 'this is the good, the bad and the ugly'. Which not only introduced the characters very clearly, (Freeze frames), but also contained many conventionalities of the western genre such as, horses, ponchos. Very western buildings like the old wooden saloons with swinging doors.



Once upon a Time in the West has a very conventional opening, including clean cuts, minimal dialogue, and long shot lengths. As you can see it is very suspenseful because by revealing little about the character, people wonder what he will do next, which is usually very unexpected in western movies. There is no score playing and the shot/reverse shot technique is used many times to show the characters expressions, like at 2:05, the man wears an angry expression, which may convey to the audience that he is evil, which makes up for the lack of dialogue.