20 Most Underrated Supercuts of All Time
(from this Twitter thread)
20. Running in Movies (Clara Darko, 2013)
This one’s so underrated that I didn’t even find a spot for it in my project, but the matches on action and the music are utterly propulsive. One I rewatch regularly.
19. Artist (Tracey Moffatt & Gary Hillberg, 1999)
A superlative blend of the best of the form: uncovering a trope, weaving an implicit story, making a reflexive point about the medium, and matching action into a compelling flow of images (note the date!)
18. Concussion Protocol (Josh Begley, 2018)
This circled the Internet, but still feels under-appreciated as a work of poetry— wherein the desires inherent in the supercut and in reverse motion (to amass vs. to undo) productively collide with each other
17. Men’s diving montage in Olympia, Part II (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938)
Not unknown, but under-recognized as a forerunner of supercut editing logic. A breakthrough in turning a repetitive list into something new: a fantasy of endless motion, even flight.
16. Fingering and Footing (Catherine Ross, 2005)
The desire to desire, thwarted by game-show consumerism, is inverted, wrung out, and undercut. A very funny film.
15. Wouldn’t It Be Nice? (Laura Shapiro, 2002)
There are plenty of fanvids, but this is a favorite. Like Rock Hudson’s Home Movies & The Celluloid Closet, it unearths so much, the music expresses the wish of fandom so well, & the editing rises to meet it.
14. Relatively Romantic: 1000 Kisses (Klaus vom Bruch, 1984)
Before the supercut had been defined, artists working with appropriated images seemed to combine them more freely. I can’t think of any stranger amalgam of the proto-supercut with other forms.
13. “The Greatest” (bironic, 2018)
The Internet is so deep nowadays that it can’t help but bury its best stuff sometimes. This is one of the unsung masterpieces of fan culture— dynamic, uplifting, encyclopedic— hell, even The Fits is in there.
12. 56 Ways of Saying I Don’t Remember (Alan Berliner, 2013)
Database aesthetics permeate Berliner’s career (Family Album, Intimate Stranger, Wide Awake), but I’ve never been more moved by a list of clips than in this heartbreaking short about Alzheimer’s.
11. Equal+Opposite (Rahne Alexander, 2008)
One of the more damning cross-sections of representation ever cut through the archive— the audio/video mismatches somehow thematizing the dread of difference— made years before trans rights hit the popular radar.
10. 100 Movies Dance Scenes Mashup (What’s the Mashup, 2015)
There are tons of dancing montages that have actors dance DURING the music, but this one makes the actors dance TO the music. It’s in a class by itself.
9. Police Mortality (Anti-Banality Union, 2013)
As the feature length supercut goes, this is both the best and the most underrated. Polemically subverting systems of power with their own images is an old tactic, & this upholds the tradition blisteringly.
8. algorithmic search for love (Julian Palacz, 2010)
Though anticipated in the work of Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, Palacz gets the credit (in my book) for definitively linking the supercut with the search engine. Yet barely anyone knows about this project.
7. Hide (Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, 2006)
Supercut meets structural film meets conceptual art in which advertising images subjected to celluloid decasia comment on our investment in surfaces. Deep in every way.
https://cinematrices.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/hide-matthias-muller-christoph-girardet-2006/
6. KISS KISS KISS (Tadanori Yokoo, 1964)
A gem from right in the middle of the pop art era that’s still charming— and it anticipated projects like Fast Film decades before their time.
5. I Am Not (Natalie Bookchin, 2009)
Bookchin’s searing compilations of video blogs hold up astonishingly well (see also My Meds and Laid Off). They articulate anxieties and pains so precisely that I have nothing to add. Just a perfect use of the medium.
4. 200 Mouths to Feed (Claude Closky, 1994)
Everybody mentions Home Stories and Telephones, but this compilation is criminally unknown. A direct investigation of the reinforcement of cathexis in consumer culture.
3. The bomb montage in The Atomic Café (Loader, Rafferty, 1982) (starts at about 1:15:30)
Far more than just a tour de force, it’s a summation and extension of the film’s archival forensics. The montage announces: this was a discourse; this was ideology.
2. Melody of the World (Walter Ruttmann, 1928)
Barely watched anymore, arguably better than Ruttmann’s film-school staple Berlin, and SHOCKINGLY contemporary in its pacing and its breadth.
1. Final montage from Bamboozled (Spike Lee, 2000)
As final montages go, this stands with Cinema Paradiso and Come and See in terms of emotional force, but when it comes to damning evidence nothing else comes close. With Blanchard’s score, it’s shattering.
This list was compiled by Max Tohline, whose feature-length study of the supercut, A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases is now streaming at Open Screens.
Want even more great supercuts and forerunners of supercuts? Try these:
Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix (Jennifer Proctor, 2017) [here]
A Day in the Life of a Consumer (Harun Farocki, 1993)
MGM carrying on the legacy of That’s Entertainment with Tik-Toks like this one.
Women, Intimacy, and Sexual Violence in Hitchcock Films (Emma Hampsten, 2018) [here]
Deficit of Less (Ben Grosser, 2021) [here]
The Star Turns Twitter account (Duncan Robson, 2019-ongoing) [here]