A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases PRACTICE RESEARCH MAX TOHLINE ABSTRACT CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: Max Tohline The genealogies of the supercut, which extend well past YouTube compilations, back Independent scholar, US to the 1920s and beyond, reveal it not as an aesthetic that trickled from avant-garde
[email protected] experimentation into mass entertainment, but rather the material expression of a newly-ascendant mode of knowledge and power: the database episteme. KEYWORDS: editing; supercut; compilation; montage; archive; database TO CITE THIS ARTICLE: Tohline, M. 2021. A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases. Open Screens, 4(1): 8, pp. 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/os.45 Tohline Open Screens DOI: 10.16995/os.45 2 Full Transcript: https://www.academia.edu/45172369/Tohline_A_Supercut_of_Supercuts_full_transcript. Tohline Open Screens DOI: 10.16995/os.45 3 RESEARCH STATEMENT strong patterning in supercuts focuses viewer attention toward that which repeats, stoking uncritical desire for This first inklings of this video essay came in the form that repetition, regardless of the content of the images. of a one-off blog post I wrote seven years ago (Tohline While critical analysis is certainly possible within the 2013) in response to Miklos Kiss’s work on the “narrative” form, the supercut, broadly speaking, naturally gravitates supercut (Kiss 2013). My thoughts then comprised little toward desire instead of analysis. more than a list; an attempt to add a few works to Armed with this conclusion, part two sets out to the prehistory of the supercut that I felt Kiss and other discover the various roots of the supercut with this supercut researchers or popularizers, like Tom McCormack desire-centered-ness, and other pragmatics, as a guide.