Titles Analysis: The Third Man

The Third Man is thought to be the best Thriller film of the 20th century and because of that, I decided to also analyse this film's title sequence. Although I was unable to embed the video on our blog, the trailer can be found in an article here.

To begin with, there is no music during this title sequence. All there is is a shot of Big Ben (and Big Ben's chimes donging in the background), with titles next to it stating "A London Film Production". This is written in a  font that closely resembles old-fashioned handwriting, giving it a slightly more personal feel to Skyfall's title sequence.

The text does not fade in and out - instead, the text is essentially 'embedded' on the image of Big Ben, and only fades in and out when the image does. This has a different feel to Skyfall's sequence and personally I do not prefer it because it feels a lot less natural. Allowing for the action to carry on in the background whilst the titles fade in and out seems more aesthetically pleasing in my opinion.
As the music begins, there is then an ECU of a zither and it is playing music. This music is not very stereotypical of a Thriller film and instead is quite relaxing. Titles fade in and out whilst the zither continues to 'play itself', this time using a font that looks more computer-generated. Similar to Skyfall, the names of people are capitalised but everything else is lower-case. This emphasises the importance of the people involved in the film.
Over the same zither playing, the name of the film, "The Third Man", is then displayed before continuing with showing the names of people who are associated with the film in the same style as before.

.... and that's it. That's the title sequence. It is ever so minimalistic when compared to such complex sequences like Skyfall but I think it is very effective because it means more of the audience's attention is on the names of people involved in the film. I much prefer it in many ways because of that.
However, similarly, this film dedicates time exclusively to the title sequence and this is something that we cannot afford to do with the time limit we have in our Thriller opening.
Similarly to Skyfall, the soundtrack played throughout the title sequence was composed especially for the film and this sequence was a real watershed moment for audiences all over the world because music like this had never been heard before during a film. The instrument used, a zither, was largely unknown until this film came about. However, unlike Skyfall, the same music was played throughout the whole of the film - whenever there was a transition or important moment in the narrative, the same music would play and this links the title sequence in nicely with the entire film.