Snatch opening sequence: A story within a story

Guy Ritchie's Snatch (2001) is widely regarded as a good follow up to his 1998 debut film Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It is well regarded with critics, as well as fans, as a great twisted and witty telling of an underground crime story, and is often awarded merit because it is well written and well acted. While Ritchie's editing style has been both criticised and praised, the film won several awards, as well as being nominated for best British film and best editing from the PFCS. Whether you enjoy Ritchie's choice of fast paced MTV generation editing or not, most will agree that the opening montage is a well made and spectacularly edited scene.

The one minute opening sequence manages to introduce every key character in the film by name while giving us a brief glimpse of the characters motivations and style. It tells a brief story of greedy, corrupt and violent characters through it's use of fast paced punchy editing that times perfectly with Klint's Diamond. The scene is not so much telling the actual story of the film but simply introducing the key themes and how the characters fit into this world with this fictional one minute story. The editing is used to push the story forward, in this sequence we see a large diamond (that we see being stolen in the opening scenes) handled and traded by the characters who are either seemingly involved in making money from the sale of the diamond, or causing pain and being malicious in pursuit of it.

The clip has no real master shot as it is a montage but it does begin and end with the image of the diamond bringing the small story full circle. Considering the scripting for this piece is so simple:

CUT TO: MUSIC,A CLOSE UP OF THE DIAMOND. MIX TO: ANOTHER DIAMOND BEING HELD BY AN OVERWEIGHT BLACK MAN. CUT TO: MONTAG INVOLVING ALL THE CHARACTERS IN THE FILM. DEALING OR HAVING SOMETHING TO DO WITH DIAMONDS OR THEFT. ONE SHOT AND SET UP TAKES US SEAMLESSLY INTO ANOTHER SHOT AND SET UP. THIS GOES ON FOR THE DURATION OF THE CREDITS. CUT BACK TO:

It's easy to see how the editorial choices did much for this iconic sequence, with no other direction other than the words  'montage' and 'seamlessly' this amazing story is told in a highly stylised and memorable sequence. Damn Jon Harris, whatever it is, you've got it.

Snatch II: The Edit Awakens

It was a rainy Tuesday as we sat in the grey muse-less classroom staring a blank sheet of paper. "Choose any one minute sequence to recreate for your editing module...any one minute sequence..." what could go wrong?

We submitted three seemingly amazing ideas for our sequence. The car scene from Goodfellas, the opening sequence of Snatch and Vince's speech from Pulp Fiction (looking at our choices it's not hard to surmise the collective gender of our group).

We were confident on our choices and all agreed that we would put the work in and go for something ambitious with plenty of shots. Unfortunately Snatch was the only one to be approved as the others were deemed too ambitious and unlikely to yield results; we were able to choose from any of the approved clips from the entire class but for us the choice was already made and so our saga began.

"This looks fairly simple" we all thought when first studying our chosen clip, "It's going to be so badass and so much fun to do" we pondered. Instead of collectively unravelling the clip to see the tangled web of jump cuts, sped up/ slowed down scenes, freeze frames, zooms and the great number of locations and actors used in the scenes and rethinking this  everest of a task, we were busy deciding who we would each like to appear as in what was going to be the pinnacle of our second year editing module.

May the force be with us.