Notes
Opening credits are a contract
A title sequence is not decoration. It sets the pace at which the audience agrees to be shown things.
Slow cards on black promise patience and are a debt the film has to pay: an audience that has been told to settle will not forgive twenty minutes of hurried exposition. A cold open with the title dropped in at minute eight promises the opposite, and a film that then slows to a crawl feels like it has changed its mind.
Streaming has damaged this without much comment. Sequences are skipped by default, and films made for the platform increasingly place nothing of value in them — which is sensible and which removes a tool that cinema used for eighty years.
The films that still use it well tend to do one specific thing: they show an ordinary process at length. A meal being prepared, a road at dawn, a building opening for the day. By the time the last card clears, the audience has learned the film's speed and stopped waiting to be gripped.