opening shots

There's a fascinating thread on this blog http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/opening_shots_project/

discussing the first shot of films. It's like a contest for the most perfect opening shot. For anyone interested in actually making films, or for those of you who just love the form, this is really a must read.

Bordwell's blog (under Movie Matters in our links section) also discusses this thread. He has a theory that the opening shot is more important today than in the past. It's a very smart piece well worth reading.
.".. Was there a moment when directors started to feel that they had to weight the first shot heavily, to treat it as a dense moment that the viewer should savor? The first shot of a film could be as vivid and bristling with implication as the first sentence of a novel. When might directors have begun to think along these lines? Did it start, like so much else in cinema, in the 1960s, and Kubrick entered the first-shot sweepstakes?..."