ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts the opening sequences of cinematic serial narratives from the 1930s to the 21st century, taking a particular interest in their specific “politics of engagement,” that is, in the ways these opening sequences articulate a film’s preferred mode of reception. These opening sequences establish the following films as parts of both chronologically told serial narratives and of more widely sprawling, “non-linear” transmedial clusters, referencing comics or other media and making use of their particular aesthetics to self-identify as fragments of a larger series and to delineate trajectories for further serial engagement.
