Hey, you got supercut in my movies! No, you got movies in my supercut! After the jump I’ve got the trailer for Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, a feature-length film cut together using short clips from more than 450 other films, “the world’s first feature-length film snipped entirely from other movies.” It’s playing August 12th at Cinefamily as part of the Everything Is Festival (we’re big fans of Cinefamily and EverythingIsTerrible around these parts).
A giddy found-footage shot heard ‘round the world! For years, we’ve been waiting for an intrepid soul to craft an entirely narrative feature comprised of images and sounds from other feature films — and Final Cut – Ladies And Gentlemen, the culmination of three years’ worth of editing by visionary Hungarian director György Pàlfi (Taxidermia), is nothing short of astonishing. With the totality of the moviegoing experience as its subject, Final Cut juggles clips from over 450 of the greatest films of all time, and bends deep reserves of movie tricks, tropes and triumphs into a single flowing arc. Iconic characters are raised through childhood, fall in love, go to war, marry — and as we jump from Marilyn Monroe to Jackie Chan, from Ozu to Lynch, from the Twenties to the Millenium and back again, we bask in the unity of our shared mythos.
That creaking sound you hear is a thousand art history majors simultaneously becoming tumescent as they settle on a thesis topic.
Clearly, this was inevitable. It’s interesting (read: boring) that he chose to create a love story. A guy in my high school video productions class actually made something like this, albeit not quite as long, which was just 20 or 30 minutes of nothing but all the most violent and gory movie scenes he could find, spliced together with no real narrative or particular organizing principle. Another popular video subject for that guy was the gun he’d modified to go full auto, which he’d film himself using to shoot up keg shells, junked cars, and pretty much anything he could find; often at point blank range. I think he’s a congressman now.