A paper given by Max Tohline at PCA/ACA National Conference (held virtually) on April 14, 2022
15 minutes

Abstract:

An oft-overlooked technique of cinematic temporality is the palindromic circuit: a moment when a section of film plays alternatingly forward and backward. This technique, also called “scrubbing” (after the practice of scratching a record back and forth), appears throughout cinema history: in the music video, the avant-garde, and even as a classical editing trick to extend the apparent duration of a shot. Scrubbing produces something like a temporal mirror. But by holding a section of time within a moment of palindromic oscillation, scrubbing also functions like a temporal microscope.

In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze introduces the notion of the crystal-image to theorize the smallest possible circuit of past and present, when time splits into actual and virtual. While Deleuze offers several metaphors for this minimum circuit of becoming, such as the mirror, he overlooks scrubbing as a literal embodiment of the crystal-image’s temporal fork. But if scrubbing “zooms in” on cinema’s minimum unit of duration, it also provides a basis to re-center still-outstanding questions of the articulations of the cinematic code on temporality.

In Eco’s and Pasolini’s schemes of filmic articulations, they mistook onscreen objects as the material signified by the film language. Though many codes piggyback onto the cinematic code, elements like text, speech, and even photography do not have any bearing on cinematic articulations. Cinema, as Deleuze showed, signifies duration. Thus, I propose that even though film constructs its records of time upon a photographic substrate, the question of cinematic articulations must be answered through what cinema adds to photography: namely time.

Through analyses of Bill Brand, Martin Arnold, and Michel Gondry, I will theorize a new framework of the articulations of the cinematic code, arguing the basic unit of filmic temporality is revealed in the minimum crystalline palindromic circuit of two frames.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/698879271

Seems Like Old Times: Staging, Control, and (Mis)memory in Annie Hall
A video essay by Max Tohline
2021/2
14 minutes

published in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration

Abstract:
The refrain that viewers can (or should) ‘separate the art from the artist’ relies on the assumption that a problematic artist does not leave traces of their transgressions in their work. But the techniques of manipulation that a potential criminal might leverage to gain control over others significantly overlap filmmaking techniques designed to shape audience perception, such as framing and editing. This essay proposes to “de-edit” or “re-spatialize” some moments from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) to bring attention to the modes of gaze, address, and manipulation exerted by the director throughout the film. This method resituates the film from its popular image as the scattered chronicle of an underdog neurotic to a more critical portrait of a narcissist deploying the reflective apparatuses of memory and cinema for a project of distortion and, ultimately, self-deception.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/480424534

A video essay by Max Tohline
2021
131 minutes
Published at Open Screens Journal

“If making video essays were an olympic discipline, this one by media scholar Max Tohline would no doubt take the gold. And the silver. And the bronze.” — FilmScalpel

Three years in the making, this feature-length pop-academic investigation of the SUPERCUT asks where supercuts came from, how they hold our attention, and why they became so popular when they did. Tracing back the genetic lines of experimental film, fan remix, documentary, news, and more, this video essay uncovers the roots of the supercut well before YouTube: back in the 1920s and beyond. These multiple interlocking genealogies reveal that the supercut isn't just a new form of compilation editing; rather, it's a new way of thinking expressed by a mode of editing. In fact, the supercut is only a small part of a much larger story about a culture that traded one paradigm of knowledge and power, that of the archive, for a new one: the database.

Awarded Outstanding Excellence in Research at the Documentaries Without Borders Film Festival, May 2021.
Official Selection of REDMOON, 2021.

Listed 4 times (plus an honorable mention) on Sight & Sound’s poll of the Best Video Essays of 2021. Full list here.

Research statement and all citations at Open Screens Journal

Full transcript here

Rate on IMDb

Press: Film Threat review, Criterion Daily, Kottke, FilmScalpel

A paper given by Max Tohline at the PCA/ACA Annual Conference (held virtually) on 4 June, 2021
17 minutes

Abstract:

Before the establishment of the principles of classical narrativity, early cinema bombarded its audiences with all manner of trick effects without regard for narrative logic. One of the effects that flourished during this period was reverse motion, or running the film backwards. By about 1910, however, the nascent techniques that comprise continuity editing had largely exiled reverse motion from the mainstream, except as a special effect masquerading as forward time or rationalized as a diegetic mistake. As Mary Ann Doane argues in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, the classical Hollywood style that marginalized reverse motion did so in order to “restabilize” time as something teleological after 19th-Century discoveries in thermodynamics eroded science’s former presumptions of determinism. But now, a century later, reverse motion has re-emerged in post-classical cinema, not only as a spectacle in music video, but also as a technique of narrativity.

In this paper, I intend to sketch a taxonomy of the re-narrativization of reverse motion, arguing that in each instance the reintroduction of reverse motion into contemporary narrative attempts to deal with the aspects of Modern temporality suppressed in classical narrativity. Since time is irreversible, films like Come and See (1985), 11/9/01 (2002), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) use reverse motion to wish away a past trauma. Since time is also non-teleological (causes are not readable in their effects), in reverse-time commercials and comedy sketches reverse motion imagines a way to time backwards and offer perfect access to the past. Finally, since time is stochastic rather than deterministic, other works, in particular an episode of Showtime’s drama Billions, employ reverse motion to investigate the multiple paths that time might have taken to arrive at the present.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/558962736

a video essay by Max Tohline
2021
4 minutes

This project was inspired by the very fine collection of video essays on The Conversation (F. F. Coppola, 1974) produced by students of Johannes Binotto [here]. After I expressed my jealousy over not being a student in his course, Johannes graciously invited me to make an essay myself [here]. In the spirit of the other essays, it's without voice-over (tough for me), and I tried to keep it to 2:30. But it went to 4. Oh, well.

This video essay is a condensation of many thoughts I've had on The Conversation over the years, especially including a paper I gave at PCA/ACA in 2019 [here]. The first seeds of this idea came about a decade ago when I realized that halfway into the scene of Harry in the confessional, the acoustic properties of his voice suddenly change. Working from the hypothesis that we might be hearing his thoughts instead of his voice, I crafted a new interpretation of the film that puts Harry's Catholic faith at the center of the film.

Coppola himself remarked that the confessional is a form of surveillance (indeed, for Harry, everything involves surveillance; surveillance is his primary mode of subjectivity). But the scene must have also been deeply personal for both Coppola and Hackman, as Coppola's son plays the boy who crosses himself and Hackman's brother plays the priest who is barely seen through the grating. By including this semitransparent barrier, a visual motif associated with surveillance, the film seems to encourage us to find links between Christianity and the rest of the film's themes. Returning to the Bible with this in mind, it's not hard to imagine how Harry might read it: God, who hides himself [Psalm 13:1, Psalm 69:17, Psalm 89:46, etc], who often appears in a cloud [Exodus 24:15-16, Lamentations 3:44, Luke 9:34-35], but who can perceive hidden things [Matthew 6:6, Jeremiah 23:24]. Perhaps Harry, knowing that he's being heard, declines to confess his most significant sins.

Christianity acknowledges the remoteness and apparent hiddenness of God throughout scripture, but assures the faithful that at the end of time they will see not "a poor reflection, as in a mirror," but "face to face" with God. They will know fully, even as they are fully known. Such a message ought to be of great comfort to a bugger, but, as I interpret the film, only insofar as Harry remains confident that God exists. As I see it, the whole film can be read through the confessional scene. Up until then, Harry lived in a world where he surveilled other people. Where he was on the powerful side of the one-way glass. And whenever he visited the confessional, he was reminded that God was on the powerful side of a kind of cosmic one-way glass; that God was surveilling him. So he dared not speak his thoughts aloud. But in the second half of the film, the snoop gets robbed, the bugger gets bugged, and he can't find the microphone. But it's not the disempowerment that destroys Harry. He's used to God watching. What destroys him is that he can't find the bug. And as he finally gives in and tears into his Madonna, his epistemological crises spills over into a spiritual crisis. If he can't prove that they're listening... then how can he prove that God's listening?

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/523275680

My thanks to Johannes Binotto for graciously listing this as one of the Best Video Essays of 2021 in the Sight and Sound poll.

a video essay by Max Tohline
2017
6 seconds

Click here to view.

From an alternate universe where all video essays have to be Vines. Made shortly after Vine shut down.

a supercut / gallery video loop by Max Tohline
2017
3 minutes, continuous loop

A compilation of staircase shots from 39 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, 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 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 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).

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/239872105

A video essay by Max Tohline
2015
20 minutes

In January 2014, Kathryn Schulz published an article in Vulture called "The Five Best Punctuation Marks in Literature."

It got me thinking about what the five best "punctuation marks" in film might look like. I wanted to assemble a video essay with a rapidfire list of nominees of great moments of editing-as-punctuation in film. But as I started putting it together, the project grew into a twofold piece: an analysis of and response to Schulz's article as well as an attempt to spur new insights about editing by examining it through the metaphor of punctuation. I hope it will be an inspiration to anyone else who loves film on a formal level and believes, as Bazin did, that the language of cinema isn't done being invented yet.

List of editors on Vimeo. List of films here.

Listed three times as one of the best video essays of 2015 by leading critic/curators in Fandor's poll. Archive link here.

Reported in S&T news and The Rolla Daily News; reposted by IndieWire, NoFilmSchool, Kottke, FilmmakerIQ, and others.

Further thanks to Héctor Aguilar Rivas for the Spanish subtitles, to Pablo Ferreira for the Portuguese subtitles, and to Münif Çankaya for this Turkish dub.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/138829554

A video essay by Max Tohline
2014
2 minutes

The more films Wes Anderson directs, the more tightly structured and precise each aspect of his style becomes. He's long favored neat centering and symmetry in his compositions (as shown in kogonada's Staff Pick supercut). Recently on rewatching The Grand Budapest Hotel, I noticed that there's a kind of symmetrical logic to Pilling's Oscar-nommed editing as well. In this little video, I've tried to render that "symmetrical" patterning in the editing visible by breaking the shots out of their temporal sequence and giving them a spatial sequence as well. Enjoy! (Also listen up for the way Desplat's music aligns to and emphasizes certain edit points.)

Reposted by FilmmakerIQ, The Film Stage, 20 Questions Film, CHUD, and others.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/116449288

A video essay by Max Tohline
2013
14 minutes

A shot-by-shot investigation of the three-way standoff at the climax of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), revealing mathematical patterns, images of thought, and pure musical rhythm.

Dedicated to the editors, Eugenio Alabiso and Nino Baragli.

Reposted by NoFilmSchool, FilmmakerIQ, Cinephilia and Beyond, Rope of Silicon, Filmmaker Magazine, Cinetropolis, Motion Arts Pro Daily, and others.

Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/86125935