One of the many fads for cinephilic YouTubers, perhaps next in popularity after mashups and sweded remakes, is the condensed movie. Actually, thanks to a recent Empire contest, the art of sweding and the art of fitting features into a 60-second time frame is now also a mashed-up fad (though I guess sweding has always involved shortened versions). But while in this day and age any fanboy can do a shortened remake of his or her favorite movie or an abridged recut that breaks a film down to its bare essentials (i.e. its use of the f-word), condensing a film is not necessarily a low art.
Just look at the 76-minute video Academy by R. Luke DuBois, a conceptual artist who works with both audio and visual mediums. A couple of years ago, using a time-lapse process, DuBois crafted this compilation of sped-up versions of Best Picture Oscar winners, which he says “allows us to explore the temporal, formal, and aesthetic progression of the first seventy-five years of the Academy awards by taking each film and compressing, sound and picture, into a single minute.”
I’ll let you decide if there’s actually a difference between Academy and something like this. If you go by DuBois’ interests in Gestalt and his claim that “Repeat viewing of the entire piece allows the viewer not only to see cinematic history unfolding, but also to see formal tropes in cinematography, editing, and music direction exposed through the massive acceleration of temporal scale employed by the piece,” then it’s true that he’s got more academic credit. And as far as worthwhile viewing, I also think DuBois wins.
Of the seven Academy samples available on the web (compressed versions of Wings, Gone WIth the Wind, From Here to Eternity, West Side Story, The French Connection, Amadeus and Titanic), I’ve seen six of the films, and because each video includes the film in its entirety, I feel like I’ve gotten a refresher viewing of each of them. I only wish I could watch all movies that fast the first time — ingesting them fully, of course, not as a skimming. Maybe I’d be able to see more of the old films I get criticized each day for not having seen enough of.
Anyway, because I can’t embed any of the clips of Academy, I leave you with a completely different sort of condensed version of a film: a rap recreation of The Shawshank Redemption, which is a film that didn’t win Best Picture but maybe should have. And I must say that this video is every bit as brilliant as DuBois’ scholarly film-related endeavors. Enjoy.
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