The Godfather

Tagged as: classic, montage, review

The Godfather is weighed down by respon­si­bil­i­ty.

The Godfather (1972) famous­ly opens with a close-up and the words “I believe in America.”

The speaker’s sur­round­ings are grad­u­al­ly revealed, fol­lowed by the back pro­file of a man lis­ten­ing atten­tive­ly. The pro­file belongs to the Godfather him­self, and the set­ting is his office. He is vis­it­ed by sev­er­al guests ask­ing him for favors, for as explained, it’s a Sicilian tra­di­tion that a man nev­er refuse a request on his daughter’s wed­ding day.

We see very lit­tle of the wed­ding in the begin­ning, but can tell from the loud music that the par­ty is right out­side this somber room. The scene soon shifts there, and we’re shown the fes­tiv­i­ties in all their col­or­ful, noisy glo­ry. From this exte­ri­or van­tage point, we now see the Godfather peer out of his office win­dow from behind a cur­tain to catch a glimpse.

OPENING SCENE OF THE GODFATHER • Click on each image for a larg­er view.

Stills tak­en from DVD of the film.

That is how in this famous open­ing scene, direc­tor Francis Ford Coppola first tra­vers­es an ini­tial bound­ary, the begin­ning of the film itself, and direct­ly fol­lows it by defin­ing anoth­er bound­ary, name­ly that between the Godfather and the rest of the fam­i­ly. By defin­ing this new bound­ary so close to the begin­ning of the film, Coppola estab­lish­es it as a major the­mat­ic ele­ment that spans the entire film and its two sequels: it rep­re­sents the strug­gle of the head of the Corleone crime fam­i­ly to keep busi­ness and fam­i­ly sep­a­rate, and iron­i­cal­ly alien­ates its patri­arch from the chil­dren he spends his whole life try­ing to pro­tect.

“Just lie here, Pop. I’ll take care of you now. I’m with you now. I’m with you.” — Michael Corleone to his father.

Francis Ford Coppola was a big part of an era of American cin­e­ma in the 1970s dur­ing which a group of young direc­tors fresh out of film school made some of the best work in the his­to­ry of the screen. From start to fin­ish, The Godfather is a mas­ter­piece of pac­ing and mood, and an excel­lent exam­ple of how the estab­lished rela­tion­ship between cin­e­ma and  archi­tec­ture can be upheld while being used in com­plete­ly fresh and excit­ing ways.

Several scenes in the film are notable for their use of intel­li­gent edit­ing to invoke a sense of real­ism and place, or of sus­pense, mys­tery and romance. The film’s style is con­trolled, build­ing on a long tra­di­tion of film tech­nique, while breath­ing new life into the stale crime genre of its time.

Another mas­ter­ful exam­ple of the use of archi­tec­tur­al bound­aries in The Godfather comes in the final scene of the film, one of the most famous end­ings in all of cin­e­ma. In case you haven’t seen the movie yet, go do it! Then come back and read the hid­den sec­tion below.

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Michael Corleone’s takeover of his father’s role as head of the crime fam­i­ly is com­plete, and with this tran­si­tion the once warm and lov­ing young man turns into a cold and cal­cu­lat­ing Don, as he shuts out every­thing else in his life. Walter Murch, who was sound edi­tor on the movie, explains.

Something as inno­cent as a door-close. If you approach it coher­ent­ly and seri­ous­ly, you under­stand that there are many door-clos­es that would have been wrong for that scene. First of all because it is the last sound in the film – oth­er than music – and sec­ond because it is the deci­sive moment in which Michael is clos­ing the door on his wife Kay, and on a whole part of his emo­tion­al life.

The door-close […] has to be true to what we per­ceive objec­tive­ly; the phys­i­cal­i­ty of the door and the space around it. But it also has to be true to the metaphor­i­cal impact of that door-close, which is, “I’m not going to talk about my busi­ness, Kay.” That ka-lunk, that artic­u­lat­ed sound of solid­i­ty, has to express some­thing of the final­i­ty of the deci­sion.

CLOSING SCENE OF THE GODFATHER • Click on each image for a larg­er view.

Stills tak­en from DVD of the film.

This end­ing per­fect­ly coun­ter­points the open­ing scene of the film, and shows how two char­ac­ters enjoy lit­er­al­ly the same seat of pow­er, yet fill it in very dif­fer­ent ways. This is a chill­ing end­ing and a pow­er­ful use of archi­tec­ture in film to reveal the psy­cho­log­i­cal and social spaces in which these char­ac­ters live.

The Godfather is dear to my heart because at its core, it’s about the love between a patri­arch and his son, and the strug­gles of a young man to car­ry on his father’s lega­cy. Both men put fam­i­ly before all else, but the ques­tion is at what expense.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola • Starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton

This sto­ry is from Meedo’s upcom­ing book mon­tage­space: Cinema and the Making, Un-Making and Re-Making of Architecture. Please feel free to con­tact us for more details and read relat­ed sto­ries here.