#formal patterns

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Close-ups of coins in Twin Peaks: the Return (Lynch/Frost, 2017)

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A lesson in framing (in both senses of the word)

from Small Axe: Mangrove (Steve McQueen, 2020)

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All of the 360-degree Yuxie-eye-view shots in Ramin Bahrani's Fahrenheit 451 (2018).

It's fascinating to see the spherical-panoramic aesthetic of Google-Street-View cameras finally introduced into mainstream cinema as the index of surveillance-state despotism.

P.S.: Every time we look at a 2-D projection (map) of the earth, the landmasses are just as distorted as the objects in these images.

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Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Stairs a video by Max Tohline

A supercut / video essay conceived as a single-channel gallery video installation, to play on a continuous loop (2 loops play above). A compilation of staircase shots from 39 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock (list below), with music by Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony, Mvt. 5, Red Cape Tango.

In the first shot of Alfred Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), a line of women stream down a spiral staircase backstage at a theater. In the last shot of Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot (1976), Barbara Harris sits down on a staircase, looks into the camera, and winks. In the fifty years and over fifty films between these bookends, Hitchcock made the staircase a recurring motif in his complex grammar of suspense -- a device by which potential energy could be, metaphorically and literally, loaded into narrative, a zone of unsteady or vertiginous passage from one space to another, always on the verge of becoming a site of violence. Nearly every Hitchcock film includes stairs somewhere -- with the exceptions of a few films in which the setting precluded it (Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948), for instance) or in which the genre did not call for it (in his only outright comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), they use elevators to get everywhere).

Even though I acknowledge that there are already plenty of Hitchcock supercuts out there (viz) and that further auteur-fetishization is probably the last thing we need, I threw this one together anyway because I thought it up with a friend nearly 10 years ago and wanted to see the idea through. From now on I execute every idea I get immediately, so that better editors like Steven Benedict (here) don't beat me to the punch again. Shout-out to Jacob Schmidt, whose Stairs to Suspense cuts together scenes of staircases from 18 Hitchcock films, and to Room 237, whose 39 Staircases in Cinema also punningly rips off the title of Hitchcock's 1935 classic, but which collects staircase scenes mainly from other filmmakers.

Sifting through those other variations of this idea, it strikes me that the Hitchcock supercut is probably a genre unto itself by now.  In the fullness of time, it may become possible, with the help of higher dimensions, to make a supercut of Hitchcock supercuts.  So maybe I made this one just to help make that possible. Until then, we turn and turn in the widening gyre...

Films featured, in order of appearance:

Frenzy (1972) The Trouble with Harry (1955) Rear Window (1954) North by Northwest (1959) Bon Voyage (1944) Number Seventeen (1932) Easy Virtue (1928) The Lady Vanishes (1938) Marnie (1964) Young and Innocent [The Girl was Young] (1937) Sabotage (1936) To Catch a Thief (1955) The Birds (1963) Rebecca (1940) Under Capricorn (1949) Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Saboteur (1942) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Family Plot (1976) The 39 Steps (1935) The Paradine Case (1947) The Wrong Man (1956) I Confess (1953) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) Topaz (1969) Foreign Correspondent (1940) Blackmail (1929) Jamaica Inn (1938) Stage Fright (1950) Strangers on a Train (1951) Spellbound (1945) Rich and Strange [East of Shanghai] (1932) The Pleasure Garden (1926) Torn Curtain (1966) Vertigo (1958) The Lodger (1927) Suspicion (1941) Notorious (1946) Psycho (1960)

Apologies for leaving out the escalator in Downhill (1927) and "the fifth step" in Dial M for Murder (1954).

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The Secret in Their Eyes (dir. Juan José Campanella, 2009)

See that rose on the desk, cheated slightly so that it’ll land on top of each character’s heart? That means they’re going to fall in love.

I used to get mad at mise-en-scene winks like this, but I can’t knock visual storytelling in an era when so many directors have renounced it.

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Shots of all five sisters -- Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur, and, of course, Lale -- in Mustang (dir. Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

Not enough directors realize the power of coupling a narrative development to a formal device, especially a deceptively simple one. For the first half of Mustang, Ergüven repeatedly groups all five sisters within the same frame, emphasizing their unity, strength, and support for one another in a series of straightforward compositions. At the end of the last shot shown above, as the image very slowly fades to black at the film’s halfway mark, we find out that this was the last time they were all together. And just like that, this visual leitmotif of all five sisters, shoulder to shoulder in solidarity from one edge of the frame to the other, never reappears. It’s devastating.

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Blank boxes, empty warehouses, and color field limbo: the return of Edison’s Black Maria to popular music videos

Each of the above videos has over a billion views on YouTube. Featuring: Drake's Hotline Bling Calvin Harris ft. Rihanna's This Is What You Came For Adele's Rolling in the Deep Justin Bieber's Sorry Joey Montana's Picky J. Balvin's Ay Vamos Psy's Gentleman Meghan Trainor's All About That Bass Taylor Swift's Shake it Off

Not pictured: the nearly-empty rooms in Ed Sheeran's Thinking Out Loud, OneRepublic's Counting Stars, Shakira's Chantaje, Alan Walker's Faded, Sia's Chandelier, Ariana Grande's Side to Side, etc. Related: someone ought to track the disappearance of the musical instrument in the music video.

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Characters speaking to loved ones’ graves in John Ford films

Featuring: Judge Priest (1934), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), How the West Was Won (1962), and My Darling Clementine (1946).

Not counting the moment in The Last Hurrah (Ford, 1958) where Skeffington begins his day with a moment of silence in front of a painting depicting his late wife, and not counting the moment in Brooklyn (John Crowley, 2015), a film of several Ford references, in which Eilis speaks to the grave of her sister Rose upon returning to Ireland.