Opening Lines

This essay argues that the “line” serves as a formal principle through which these film openings map a work’s own formal thinking, extending Tom Conley’s claim that openings establish a geography for spectatorship. Through a close analysis of Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957), and Tsai Ming-liang’s Days (2020), it argues that lines—graphic, architectural, and intervallic—anchor structures of framing, duration, and montage where abstraction operates most intensively. The discussion draws from Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books to describe how lines modulate perception, delay action, and generate compositional thought. It further mobilizes Marco Frascari’s notion of drawing as facture to frame Kurosawa’s spatial construction and Irene V. Small’s “organic line” to elucidate Tsai’s seams, thresholds, and adjacencies as topological operations. Taken together, these examples show line as a transmedial method by which cinema composes, reflects, and builds its world.