A Supercut of Supercuts and A New Form of Cine-Scholarship: An Interview with Max Tohline (Web Exclusive)
by Scott MacDonald

I stumbled into my fascination with Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts (2021) entirely by accident. I’d been doing some research on the recent emergence of the video essay as a new direction in serious cinema scholarship and frequently encountered the word “supercut.” Wondering what the standard definition of the term was—it seemed to be used in a variety of ways—I found this definition on Wikipedia: “A supercut is a genre of video editing consisting of a montage of short clips with the same theme. The theme may be an action, a scene, a word or phrase.” Scrolling a bit, I happened to see the title A Supercut of Supercuts and decided to have a look at what turned out to be a 131-minute epic video essay on the supercut phenomenon—basically a metasupercut in which are embedded many dozens of supercuts in the way that an individual supercut is made up of a series of clips from the online archive of cinema history. I was enthralled—this seemed to me a remarkable work of cine-scholarship. I wondered how it could have taken me three years to find out about it! 

In his preface to A Supercut, Tohline argues that “supercuts embody a new mass approach to visual history” and explains that his central concern is the rise of “database thinking”— before providing an outline of the three chapters to follow, along with his own definition of “supercut”—“A briskly cut video list of appropriated moving images sharing some specific matching characteristics and offered as a representative cross-section of that characteristic.”

The first chapter of A Supercut of Supercuts, “Aesthetics” (22.5 minutes), focuses on the distinction between narrative continuity (syntagmatic structures), where editing provides the visual and sonic clues that allow us to follow a narrative; and paradigmatic structures, sequences of images in which visual/sonic/conceptual elements of the selected images provide a recognizable, nonnarrative continuity. This second kind of continuity, Tohline explains, tends to be focused either on pleasure or on analysis.

In “Histories” (51 minutes), Tohline’s focus is twofold. First, he debunks the common assumption that one or another moving-image artist—Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Dana Birnbaum, Carl Reiner, Candy Fong (an early maker of “fanvids”—fan videos), or Christian Marclay—is the founder of the supercut. It becomes clear that supercut history is multifaceted, more complex than simply the result of a few pioneering individuals. Tohline also demonstrates that many of these filmmakers’ films, though referenced as supercuts, are not precisely that, though, like supercuts, they rely on compilation editing. 

Second, Tohline argues that the supercut is not a contribution of one or another particular strand of cinema history—avant-garde film, video art, commercial cinema, fan video—by providing an expansive exploration of cinema history and prehistory, as well as surveying more modern aspects of cultural production—photo-collages, gallery installations—that have predicted and helped to create the modern context within which the supercut, one particular form of compilation film among others, has evolved. 

In “Databases” (50 minutes), Tohline explores the interplay between technology and ideology within the evolution of the modern supercut’s “database logic.” Basically, he sees the supercut as a crucial instance of the gradual replacement of a culture-wide “archival impulse” by a “database impulse.” He argues that the digitalization of traditional cinema, along with the recording and storing of data from many day-to-day aspects of contemporary life, has resulted in a transformation in how we understand and use audiovisual media, as well as more generally, in how we see the world and how we are restructuring our lives to cope with this ongoing transformation. 

Tohline has worked in a variety of ways in recent years, following the completion of his (written) PhD dissertation at Ohio University on the history of reverse motion in cinema. His Website includes Re-Reading Time: The Emergence of Reverse Motion as a Narrative Technique in Post-Classical Cinema, a seventeen-minute video essay on the subject. But A Supercut of Supercuts is, by far, his most expansive and accomplished scholarly contribution. In early 2024, we discussed A Supercut of Supercuts in a series of extensive email exchanges.—Scott MacDonald

Cineaste: You’ve made video essays of various kinds, some of them more or less typical. Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Stairs [2017] seems roughly similar to Kogonada’s Eyes of Hitchcock [2014]—but nothing that could predict A Supercut of Supercuts. It’s a masterwork that required, I assume, considerable effort over several years. 

Max Tohline: I’ve long been suspicious of books in film studies that look at one film per chapter and propose that a single close reading is somehow broadly applicable. That just didn’t feel like enough data to me and I couldn’t understand why more people hadn’t modeled their work on Maureen Turim’s study of flashbacks [Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, Routledge, 1989] or Will Wright’s study of the Western [Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western, University of California, 1977], both of which started with huge corpuses—seemingly the biggest they could assemble—and looked for patterns.

As I see it, a thorough search through the archive doesn’t just deepen the foundations of one’s analysis; typically, it demystifies the entire relationship between history, ideology, and art, forcing you to discard the kind of overwrought assumptions that arise from sticking too close to the canon or too close to one’s comfort zone of interests—in other words, to an incomplete picture of how creativity works. 

A Supercut of Supercuts took about three years to make. But it’s not the first time I attempted to examine one technique across all of film history. My PhD dissertation was a traditional written project on the history and aesthetics of reverse motion in cinema. Like the supercut project, it approaches film history cross-sectionally, attempting to embrace every application of its chosen formal technique, from the avant-garde to music-video spectacle to special effects and so on.

At one point I pitched the idea of delivering at least some part of my reverse motion dissertation as a video, but there was no institutional support for that. No one had really done it yet. A decade later, that approach would get traction in some institutions, but there wasn’t really a model or an appetite then. Still, I managed to smuggle a ten-minute highlight reel of reverse motion, sorted by topic, into my defense. So already the supercut had a bit of a foothold in my work. 

Cineaste: Chloé Galibert-Laîné was able to do a combined dissertation: a long textual essay and two video essays: Watching The Pain of Others [2019] and Forensickness [2020]. I expect this will soon become if not a standard approach to PhD theses, at least less unusual.

Cineaste: Re-Reading Time: The Emergence of Reverse Motion as a Narrative Technique in Post-Classical Cinema seems a transition between your early work and A Supercut of Supercuts, which feels not only more expansive but also more patient. 

Tohline: I would’ve had my dissertation done a lot sooner than 2015, but I was also busy teaching and writing obsessively on Tumblr. One of the posts, from late 2013, asks “Why Not a Supercut of Supercuts?”. Which is to say that long before I’d ever finalized anything on the reverse motion project, I was already getting started on what came next. I work—or, in some respects, fail to work—in the same way now. At the moment, I have at least a dozen projects running concurrently.

Cineaste: I accessed the link and looked at the Tumblr piece, Movies in movies: A montage [posted on December 7, 2013], which is superdense and fun, and a valuable guide to supercutting—but I can’t find your name on that project. The final credits say “edited by Clara Darko and Brutzel Pretzel”—pen names? Also, the Tumblr piece is accompanied by an essay with links to many supercut creators and early predecessors; it seems a rough draft for A Supercut of Supercuts. 

Tohline: My name isn’t on Movies in movies: A montage because—unfortunately!—it’s not my work. Clara Darko and Brutzel Pretzel are two of the best supercutters of the YouTube era. Darko’s Running in Movies [2013]—on YouTube at youtu.be/GC5RPpHMOEU—which is an expansion of a Brutzel Pretzel supercut from 2009, might be the most invigorating and rhythmically propulsive supercut I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d made it.

One of the best things about Tumblr is its hybridity. The platform doesn’t by default encourage its users to create new things, but instead to collect, curate, and above all comment on existing work. You share things that you like so that other people can see them, too. But along the way, you also contribute commentary, explanations, asides, hashtags—to the point that Tumblr’s most viral posts read like an endless receipt tape of different users each adding their own jokes or examples, upping the ante, or continuing a debate. In the case of my post, “Why Not a Supercut of Supercuts?” I reposted Movies in movies: A montage as a way of introducing the topic of the supercut with a lively contemporary example. What comes after that, a list of what a first draft history of the supercut might include, was my own. And in that respect, you’re right: it was the earliest rough draft of A Supercut of Supercuts.

To be honest, I’m not sure what first got me interested in supercuts. At the time, and still today, the moment I identify a “trend” in movies or art, my first impulse is to collect examples and turn them into a post. The trend could involve anything, from rotating sets [posted 2015], to artworks that are piles [posted 2016], to the use of the word “That” in movie titles [posted 2017]. I always told myself that these Tumblr posts could be first drafts of something else—that is, ways of dumping my first thoughts on something to make room for new thoughts. I could always come back later if the itch kept itching.

And sometimes I did come back. The reason I wrote a post on the supercut at all was that a few of the examples that immediately sprang to my mind seemed to be missing from all the popular lists of examples of the form. For instance, everyone who attempted a little pop history of the supercut online circa 2013 mentioned Christian Marclay, but they all left out Giuseppe Tornatore, whose Cinema Paradiso [1988] included a much earlier supercut-style montage. I couldn’t figure out why. 

After I’d made that first post, I walked away, assuming that I had satisfied my own interest or irritation, at least enough to get the itch to stop. Then a few years later, I stumbled across Agnès Varda’s You Have Beautiful Stairs, You Know [1986]. “Aha!” I thought. “So, it was Agnès Varda who invented the supercut! Now I’m done.” Shortly thereafter, somebody reminded me about The Atomic Café [1982]. And after that, I couldn’t put the project down.

At that early “re-ignition” stage, I imagined that the final video would run perhaps forty-five minutes. Conceptually, I was stuck at the level of that Tumblr post, assuming that popular histories of the supercut had simply omitted some important examples and I would fill in the gaps. But that’s the hazard of extrapolating from incomplete data. You assume that the waypoints you are aware of form a more-or-less neat line of development, and that any new landmarks you discover will also lie on that line. But when you research omnivorously, you cannot help but collide head-on with the fact that what you assumed was a line is not a line at all. History forms some other shape entirely, and it points in other directions, and you realize that entirely different forces have set it in motion.

Every bit of writing on the supercut up to that point, my own included, had introduced all sorts of incorrect assumptions based on our various incomplete understandings about how ideas travel through and manifest within a culture. Every time I thought I’d found the beginning, I’d find something earlier. Or every time I assumed that the supercut predominantly arose from one zone or another of moving image history, examples would erupt from somewhere else—from That’s Entertainment [1974] to sports documentaries to Duck Soup [1933] to Walther Ruttmann, and beyond. Thankfully, I had help; other people in various disciplines had assembled collections to suit other projects that ended up being useful to this one. But no one had threaded all these collections together. 

The subtitle of A Supercut of Supercuts reads, “Aesthetics, Histories, Databases.” But at first, if there had been a subtitle at all, it would have just been “History.” I didn’t have any sense that many tributaries of creativity fed into the supercut. I also didn’t consider that the development of the supercut could not be understood as a phenomenon without considering its aesthetics, which is to say, how the form springs from, feeds, and fosters certain kinds of desire. And perhaps this is most embarrassing of all: I didn’t even remotely imagine that the supercut sits within a network of broader cultural phenomena that fall under the umbrella of a database episteme.

This is all to say that I came to realize that the project had expanded far beyond a formal technique. It was about the relationship between humans and the archive (or database) of media created by the cultures around us. It was about the actions of search and retrieval and within which contexts and to what ends we apply those operations to what we’ve made. 

On a more concrete level, part of the fun involved scanning through YouTube, Ubuweb, Kanopy, and other places to retrieve more examples. At one point, I had to obtain and translate “censor cards” for Oskar Kalbus’s lost film Rund um die Liebe [1929] to determine what sort of clips Kalbus included in the film. Censor cards are detailed records of the scene-by-scene content of a film that were written by whatever office previewed films before they were passed for general release; my thanks to Michael Cowan for pointing me toward the German Federal Archive, which preserved them. Even with all that, I still left out major examples. After publishing A Supercut of Supercuts, I happened to watch Harun Farocki’s A Day in the Life of a Consumer [1993]—and kicked myself. 

I spent over two years on research and maybe six months on outlining, writing, assembling visual materials, and editing. One of the hardest parts of the project was figuring out how to structure it so that I could include everything. If I sought to claim that this technique wasn’t the reserve of a small number of inspired people, but instead that it bubbled up all over because it represents a new cultural mode of knowledge, I felt I had to “prove” that by putting so much on screen that it couldn’t all be seen at once.

Cineaste: I’m curious about how you came to have such a broad sense of film history. Since you got your MA in 2009 from Ohio University, I wonder if you studied with Ruth Bradley, who for many years championed a very wide spectrum of cinema, editing the journal Wide Angle and curating and hosting the Athens Film Festival. I was fascinated that, at least in some cases, Ruth organized her avant-garde cinema course alphabetically—Anger, Baillie, Brakhage, Broughton, Conner…

Tohline: She organized it the same way when I was her student in 2008! Ruth Bradley was one of the most important influences on how I turned out as a scholar. The Athens Film Festival was one of the best things about Ohio University, and not just because she brought James Benning, Deborah Stratman, and Barbara Hammer to town while I was there. 

I was born in 1983 to a conservative family in a conservative place—a suburb of Cincinnati. In our house, the media diet was closely controlled, which means that aside from animated Disney classics and PBS, I didn’t see very much, even through high school. When I was five or six years old, my parents taped a bowdlerized copy of The Blues Brothers off TV, and I probably wore it out rewatching all the car crashes in frame-by-frame slow motion. The interest there was purely physics, but the temporality of VHS playback gave me a way to explore it.

I should mention that when I was young, my dad had a habit of turning on the television any time he entered a room. When I was ten or twelve, I was helping him truck a houseful of my grandma’s possessions across the country—my grandfather, for whom I was named, had just passed away. We’d been on the road all day, I was hungry, and he’d promised that we’d eat dinner at Ryan’s (a buffet chain that I loved at that age), but first he needed to take a shower. We walked into the motel room, and of course he flipped on the room’s TV, and after channel-surfing for a moment, he landed on a PBS screening of 12 Angry Men [1957]. The film had just started, so he offered, “This is a great movie, Max. Watch it while I clean up, and then we’ll go eat.” So, I did. 

Fifteen or so minutes later, he reappeared. “Ready to go?” I looked up at him and replied, “I’m not going anywhere until this movie’s over.” I was completely captivated. I’d never seen a movie that asked the viewer to think. I didn’t know that films could ask viewers to think, and I wouldn’t have believed that the act of thinking could be so engrossing or rewarding. If I’m an overthinker now—and I think that I am—it’s traceable to that day.

A few years later, it dawned on me that I was missing out on a wider world of art and culture, and I wanted to correct that. Rather than try to catch up on the new releases that my friends were sneaking into, I turned to Turner Classic Movies—and saw the premiere of Rick Schmidlin’s four-hour reconstruction of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed [1924], with that fantastic score from Robert Israel. I had read about the nine-hour runtime of the original cut in an introductory film history book a few months earlier and became fascinated by what kind of story anyone could want to tell that would merit such a length. So, it was total luck that my learning about the film coincided with the release of the restoration. I watched that tape over and over.

Cineaste: Did you formally study film as a college student?

Tohline: Not at first. My interest in film hadn’t been cultivated as much as other passions in my life. Since at least middle school, my simultaneous love of all things math and science had pointed me toward engineering as a career path.

I mention this because even in my earliest video essays on film topics, this “left-brain” approach shines through, in the classificatory impulse in Editing as Punctuation as Film [2015] or the (albeit superficial) deployment of the mathematical concept of permutations to The Art of Editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [2013]. But by 2004, after only a couple years of introductory engineering classes at the University of Missouri-Rolla—a haven for nerds of many stripes, but mostly science and engineering—I realized that I couldn’t spend a lifetime on an engineering trajectory. And thanks to UMR’s one and only film professor, a charismatic and singular mentor, Jim Bogan, I picked up another scent. In the short version of the story, I changed majors and left UMR with a degree in English and a minor in Math—why not?—then went back to my home state to pursue graduate degrees in film at Ohio University.

Not knowing at all what grad school was going to be like, I was worried that I’d get laughed out of school if anyone found out how little I’d seen growing up. So, I made it a point to watch as much of the “canon” as fast as I could. That first year, I probably watched two feature films per day, in addition to my coursework and everything else. I didn’t have any idea yet that learning the canon was not the point of film school, or that most of the original contributions to film theory then and now have little or nothing to do with studying the so-called canon. What I also didn’t realize is that sticking too closely to the narrowness of the canon (as a proxy for moving image history more generally) also causes a viewer to get completely wrongheaded ideas about the real mechanisms of history and media’s relationship with them.

And this, thankfully, is where Ruth Bradley entered the story. In the two years of my MA program, I got to take only two courses with her, but each added a huge branch to my scholarship. As a longtime film festival programmer, she was the truest omnivore of the scholars at OU, and nearly everything she screened seemed drawn from nooks of film history I hadn’t known existed. 

I remember having absolutely no idea what to do with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam [1989] or Jill Godmilow’s What Farocki Taught [1998], but I’m glad they gradually pushed me to stop being combative toward the unfamiliar and ask better questions of myself. More importantly, I never would have had any interest in experimental or avant-garde work without Ruth Bradley’s class. By that point, her courses had become an excuse for her to get the school to pay the rental prices for pristine prints from Canyon Cinema and other places, so that she could watch the films again. The alphabetical approach forced us to make our own connections rather than just accept the Sitney account [P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film, Oxford University Press, 1974; revised edition, 2002)] or something else like it. That was ideal for me.

As I watched each film, I got to discover my own questions, my own impulses, my own corridors of research desire. I still recall the delight at first sight of Harry Smith’s Numbers series [c. 1939–60], Bruce Baillie’s All My Life [1966], Marie Menken’s Go! Go! Go! [1964] (a perfect way to grow beyond Koyaanisqatsi [1983]), Deborah Stratman’s chilling In Order Not to Be Here [2002], and most of all, J. J. Murphy’s Print Generation [1974].

Cineaste: Murphy’s film has always been important to me—really, my favorite structural film. Alas, the demise of 16mm projectors—I’d never imagined the projectors would grow old and die—has kept that film out of my courses these past few years. Somehow a digital version of Print Generation, if there were one, would seem inappropriate.

Tohline: As a video essayist, it helps to be resourceful tracking down digital versions of films from which to extract fair-use clips. So, I can confirm that there is an unauthorized digital version of Print Generation out there if you know where to look; but, you’re right, it’s not the same at all. Print Generation was created by and is in some basic sense “about” a photochemical duping process—light imprints on film imperfectly cast onto more film, over and over. The digital encoding and copying process removes the film from that lineage and weakens its metaphysical impact. The film is no longer “live,” in several senses of the word.

This raises a few of the unfortunate drawbacks of video essayism: for starters, the problem of access to certain films—when will someone finally distribute Bruce Conner in any form but that Eighties-era VHS tape that a few lucky libraries still have?—but moreover the problem that when the digital regime engulfs and ingests the analog, something of the presence of the light is lost. 

I’m most interested in structural questions about film—questions about how time is represented and manipulated, questions about the deployment of certain techniques across time and across disciplines, questions about how form can be philosophical. To circle back to Ruth Bradley, it’s possible that none of these questions would ever have risen to the surface for me without the clarification process of her screenings.

Cineaste: A Supercut of Supercuts is remarkably wide-ranging, a research epic. But it’s also full of subtleties easily overlooked because of its reach. To give a tiny instance from Part 1: when you’re explaining that words derive their meaning from context, you focus on “green”—as a color (with “orange,” “yellow,” “blue,” “purple”), as a slang word for “money” (“dough,” “moolah,” “cheddar,” “scratch”), then as a metaphor for being young and inexperienced, then within the context of golf, and within the context of political parties. The sixth and seventh contexts are, at first, a bit puzzling. In the sixth, we read “Green,” “Gay,” “Sledge,” “Redding” and “Franklin”; it takes a moment to realize that these are all surnames of popular African American singers during the Fifties and Sixties—Al Green, Marvin Gay, Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, and Aretha Franklin. 

In the seventh and final context we read “Green,” “Screen,” “Scene,” “Mean,” and “Tohline.” At first, the sequence seems to be about cinema, though “Mean” doesn’t seem to fit. I finally deduced that you’ve probably struggled with the pronunciation of your surname; indeed, until I came across this set of “green” contexts, I’d assumed the pronunciation was “tow line”—not “te leen.” 

A final, more general question about your conclusion in A Supercut that the archival impulse is being replaced by the database impulse. You seem to see the database as a more complete and accessible record than the archive, but while the database is becoming much larger than the archive, it only seems more complete: the database will never know about much of what's in the archive. Indeed, aren't archives becoming more important, the more the database expands and provides an increasingly false sense of completion and accessibility? As you suggest, the database sees everything as equally important, but isn’t the abrogation of responsible evaluation a refusal to see, to understand, the full complexity of history?

Tohline: First, I just have to offer my thanks to you for watching that “Green” moment so closely. Over the years of making A Supercut of Supercuts, I slid in all sorts of details or inside jokes like that in the hopes that someone would find and enjoy them. You’re the first person so far to mention that they stopped to solve that little puzzle.

Moreover, your questions about the way I presented my archive-database dichotomy prove that maybe I should’ve paid as much attention as you did. Returning to the archive/database section in A Supercut of Supercuts, I agree that I allowed a serious contradiction to slip through. On one hand, I claimed that “the value of a database has everything to do with how much data is in it…like a concordance.” But a moment later, I said, “the contents of a database are valued to the extent that they can be algorithmically instrumentalized to create profit models or means of social control.” I stand by that second statement, but I wonder now how I could’ve been so naive as to believe that the first statement followed from it. It’s as if I were watching another Saturn V liftoff in 1971 and predicted, “at this rate we’ll all live on the moon in a few decades!”— extrapolating unreasonable conclusions because I failed to recognize that the Apollo program was an extension of the Cold War. Once the Cold War ended, funding disappeared.

Looking around online with the scant help of an increasingly buggy or outright broken Google search, I’ve found writers suggesting that the U.S. National Archives have digitized somewhere between four and ten percent of their holdings, though the public has access to less. Elsewhere, I read an estimate that Google Books, which launched some two decades ago with a stated goal of digitizing all the world’s books, has digitized only about one percent of them. I have no way of knowing whether this estimate is too high or too low. 

But either way, it was never Google’s goal to digitize all the world’s books; their goal was to corner the market on full text search by producing a library good enough to muscle any competitors out of the way. And you don’t have to digitize anywhere near every book to give the impression of an overwhelmingly complete collection, especially if the person searching is only trying to answer a question rather than locate a particular book. The technology of the database ultimately serves a profit model, which means that when any digitizing project hits a point of diminishing returns, the promise of completeness can only survive in the form of a slogan.

I started using The Internet Archive around 2003. Before YouTube launched, my favorite place to watch videos online was the Prelinger Archives section. My entire MA thesis was made possible by his upload of several dozen ephemeral films that Jam Handy made for Chevrolet in the 1930s. But from the very beginning, I remember their warnings about a “digital dark age,” and I fear now that we might be living through a few additional overlapping dark ages. Digital records are not future proof, especially when it comes to the short shelf lives of hard drives or file storage formats. I’m able to view physical photo albums of ancestors who died before I was born, but if those albums had been photos on Facebook, I’d forever be unable to see them, since a dead person cannot accept a Friend request. 

And even when it comes to records on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Tumblr that I do nominally have access to, none of these sites was designed to support information retrieval—that is, their search capabilities are frankly abysmal. And that’s only a partial list. The point is: these sites don’t care if they’ve built a good archive or a good database. They care that they can leverage your information and your patterns of behavior to keep you scrolling long enough to see one more ad, one more ad, one more ad.

Maybe I’m the one with the poor memory, but I vaguely recall reading a short essay about twenty years ago—probably on the Internet Archive or a related site—that argued that in this age of digitization of information, most young people—by now, most middle-aged people, too—will inevitably adopt the false assumption that “if it hasn’t been digitized, it doesn’t exist.” The assumed obsolescence of the archive is another dark age. As you suggest, the database never meant to ingest the entirety of the archive. Or, even if it did, it never meant to do so in the service of any public interest. 

I just tried to search Google for a dozen variations of that idea—that if it’s not digital, it’s not knowledge—so that I could cite where I originally read it, and I got nothing back but junk. Proof, perhaps, that any hint of utopianism I once had was decidedly misplaced.

Cineaste: Sugar Water: Palindrome/Crystal Image/Articulations [2022], the most recent video essay listed on your Website, seems related to the earlier fascination with reverse motion, and it’s a tour-de-force braiding of written and cinematic thinking. I’m especially grateful to you for making me aware of Michel Gondry’s music video for the Cibo Matto song, “Sugar Water” (1996) and of Bill Brand’s “Moment” [1972], and for referencing an old favorite: Martin Arnold’s “Pièce Touchée” [1989]. Was the piece instigated by your enthusiasm for the Gondry video?

Tohline: It absolutely was. Gondry was probably the first “structural” filmmaker I ever loved—in that I fell for his algorithmic playfulness in videos like “Star Guitar” [for The Chemical Brothers, 2002], “Come into My World” [for Kylie Minogue, 2001] and “Sugar Water,” long before I’d ever heard of Hollis Frampton. What made “Sugar Water” different is that it kept coming back to me. It wasn’t just a novel structure—as in the case of Print Generation, the structure causes a kind of productive befuddlement that can spark whole networks of ideas. I wish that more music videos received mainstream scholarly attention. For instance, Bonobo’s “Kerala” [directed by Bison, 2016] and Russ Chimes’s “Midnight Club EP” [directed by Saman Keshavarz, 2010] feel like notable contributions to ongoing structural investigations into how editing can alter perception or deal with images of thought.

Scott MacDonald teaches film studies at Hamilton College where he programs the F.I.L.M, Series. He is also author of the forthcoming Comprehending Cinema: panoramic audiovisioning, an anthology of interviews and essays, his twentieth book on independent cinema.

A Supercut of Supercuts is available for viewing on Vimeo here.

Max Tohline’s website is here.

Read Scott MacDonald’s “Finding My Way to Max Tohline’s A Supercut of Supercuts here.

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol. XLIX, No. 3