Our good friends Kurt Norton and Paul Mariano who produced These Amazing Shadows (which airs on Independent Lens on Dec. 29) have posted a really cool video on their blog about the great art of the movie montage.
And that’s apropos, since Vanity Fair described These Amazing Shadows as “film montages to end all montages.”
It so happens that one of the films inducted into the National Film Registry in 2009 was Precious Images by Chuck Workman. The 8-minute experimental film features approximately 470 half-second-long splices of movie moments (and sounds) through the history of American film. And what a variety, indeed: Casablanca, Blazing Saddles, Reds, All the President’s Men, Rambo, Ben-Hur … how many can you name? (The video starts with a Spanish-language advertisement, our apologies …)
Precious Images won an Oscar, and remains the standard by which all montages are measured in the film-editing universe.
Thanks to Kevin Yost, the Lucasfilm editor who appears in These Amazing Shadows and who sent Kurt and Paul the video, and to the editor of Shadows, Doug Blush, whose work to montage the montages is about as meta as film editing can get.
Of course, this is pretty meta, too ..
So on the topic of fabulous film montages, what is your all-time favorite film montage? The gruesome Goodfellas execution montage? Ghostbusters‘s television news montage? The classic Rocky training montage?
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
