Video – Page 31 – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: A Video Essay on Setpieces Throughout Film History

Screenwriter John August describes a setpiece as "a scene or sequence
with escalated stakes and production values, as appropriate to the
genre… Done right, set-pieces are moments you remember weeks after
seeing a movie." Proper setpieces should serve as spikes within the
plotline. In contemporary cinema, a setpiece can range from an edgy gag
in a romantic comedy, to a multi-million dollar CGI-infused battle
scene in an action film. Regardless, a setpiece always seems to be
"that scene" when discussing movies. Here is a look at some of the
biggest, priciest, and most recognizable setpieces in cinema.

List of Films (in order of appearance):

There Will be Blood

The Dark Knight Rises

Die Hard

Django Unchained

Inception

The Matrix

Swordfish

Apocalypse Now

North by Northwest

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Spider-Man 2

Kill Bill Vol. 1

Magnolia

The Dark Knight

The Lone Ranger

Guardians of the Galaxy

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Titanic

The Wolf of Wall Street

Flight

Children of Men

The Matrix Reloaded

Mission Impossible

Scarface (1983)

E.T.

Jurassic Park

Jaws

King Kong (2005)

Man of Steel

The Avengers

Inglourious Basterds

Gangs of New York

World War Z

True Lies

Batman Begins

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Stand by Me

Super 8

Godzilla (2014)

Star Wars

Twister

The Perfect Storm

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

300

The Shining

Psycho (1960)

Taxi Driver

The Shawshank Redemption

Gravity

Music: "Mind Heist" by Zack Hemsey

Jacob Swinney is an industrious film editor and filmmaker, as well as a recent graduate of Salisbury University.

VIDEO ESSAY: Anita Ekberg: Artist and Model

Even as a 16-year-old, it was impossible not to fall in love with Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.
Her childlike glee when howling with the coyotes could melt the coldest
of hearts, and her physical curves made Marilyn Monroe, the clear
inspiration for her American starlet Sylvia, look like a stick figure.
As I tried to explain to my mom at age 16, "The word ‘voluptuous’ was
created for this woman!" (Now, at age 25, I still imagine gaining 15
pounds so I too can dress up in a black strapless dress and dance to
"Ready Teddy" one day on Halloween.) In Fellini‘s world view about the
shallowness of the 60s jet set, you still want to believe that Sylvia’s
joie de vivre will pull herself, and Marcello, out of the sadness of the
celebrity culture into which they find themselves sinking.

In
a modern context, we might cynically categorize Sylvia as a "Manic
Pixie Dream Girl," the childlike foil whose purpose to the script is to
be emotionally available to a vacant man and give him a reason for
living, but even the term’s coiner, Nathan Rabin, would be against that,
for Fellini’s greatest gift to Ekberg’s career was to contextualize
her–and, yes, her curves as well–into the emotional territory of his
scripts, instead of merely making her a sex object or plot device, as many of her
American films did before Fellini granted her cinematic immortality. He
celebrates her body in La Dolce Vita and Boccaccio 70, where
Ekberg plays a billboard come to life, but in both films, her sexual
prowess is used to expose the insecurity of man while capitalizing on
Ekberg’s trademark wit and comedic timing. On screen, she was the dream
you never wanted to stop chasing, even though you knew she’d never give
you her full attention. But she gave hope in an otherwise depraved
world, who knew that la dolce vita boils down to this simple line: "I like lots of things, but there are three things I love most: Love, love, and love."

Serena Bramble is a film editor whose
montage skills are an end result of accumulated years of movie-watching
and loving. Serena is a graduate from the Teledramatic Arts and
Technology department at Cal State Monterey Bay. In addition to editing,
she also writes on her blog Brief Encounters of the Cinematic Kind.

Watch: “I sing a song about bananas…”

There’s more than one way to do a video essay. Many of the video essays we run here are forms of film criticism. However, these pieces can also be instructional. But about bananas? Yes. This piece, the newest offering from the narrative geniuses at Delve, tells the story of why bananas are so cheap, and how we happen to eat them in such large quantities. The tale has something to do with a company called United Fruit (Heard of them? If you eat bananas, you have), but also something to do with the U.S government. There’s conspiracy, there’s bloodshed, there’s capitalism… and there’s a small, innocuous-seeming yellow fruit from Nicaragua. This piece teaches us something about the relationship between the Americas, the Red Scare, and the sad way in which business is sometimes conducted, in a snappily edited and highly entertaining fashion.

Watch: LEBOWSKI DRIVE, A Mix of The Coen Brothers’ THE BIG LEBOWSKI and David Lynch’s MULHOLLAND DR.

Watch: LEBOWSKI DRIVE, A Mix of THE BIG LEBOWSKI and MULHOLLAND DR.

There are few American directors whose work has not been touched, in one way or another, by the work of David Lynch, and the team of Joel and Ethan Coen is no exception. The surreal touches. The ersatz humor. The pristine cinematography. The recurring dream sequences. And the plots. Vimeo users Jae et Gail have construed a similarity between the Coens’ mixed-up-identity drama The Big Lebowski and Lynch’s famously warped tale of two identities which are swirled together and spat out, Mulholland Dr.–and they have made a small and at times decidedly NSFW film out of it. Is it a video essay? Sure. Is it a collage? Sure. A mash-up? That too. A supercut? Maybe. Its own entity? Definitely.

Watch: Motion in the Films of Tony Scott: A Video Appreciation

Say what you will about the films of Tony Scott–and you will say plenty, because his films are often divisive–one thing unifies them, and in fact links them to the rest of cinema history: their movement. When Eadward Muybridge brought the world his zoopraxiscope films back in the 19th century, the miraculous thing about them was that they were moving, and animated, little figures of the imagination come to life, even if they weren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. Scott has preserved the quality the earliest filmmakers found so magical. In every single shot Tom Kramer shows us in this terrific video homage, as he runs through the director’s images and themes–gunshots, explosions, dramatic, head-on looks at faces, death, danger, moral precariousness–is relentless, breakneck movement. Whether it’s the spinning planes of Top Gun (one of his more divisive films), the car speeding towards the lovers of True Romance, who have paused for a private moment, or the world that spins around Denzel Washington’s Creasy in Man on Fire, progress through space, even if it’s not necessarily linear progress, is essential. Even in the most still shots, as we see here, there is motion: it could be a flicker of activity in the background of an unmoving figure, or it could be, simply, a heat shimmer, casting everything into and out of focus, simultaneously. In Tony Scott’s films, the motion in the frame parallels the motion in characters’ lives, amplifying it, glorifying it, making it more, at times, than the movie screen can contain.

Watch: Terrence Malick’s Visual Motifs: A Video Homage

For better or for ill, Terrence Malick is a poet’s filmmaker. It could be argued that to make a film requires that one force a compromise between the desire to tell a story and the need to immerse viewers in the experience they are having, to access their minds on a level that’s not quite describable, the way poems, and also music operate. There’s no "and what happened next" in the way a poem operates–or if there is, it’s a far cry from the same element in a well-told story. Malick is exemplary and distinctive in allowing both impulses to flourish, perhaps more the latter than the former. Malick has never been one to be overly concerned about plot construction. As this excellent and touching tribute by Rachel Glassman shows, great effort here goes into visual meditation: on fields of grain, on the ocean, on the play of light around human figures in a landscape as wide as the souls of the characters inhabiting it. Regardless of what story a film might be telling–whether it’s the story of Texas farmers in Days of Heaven, or desperate criminals in Badlands, or World War II travails in The Thin Red Line, or the story of John Smith in The New World–in Malick’s hands, the work always looks inwards by looking outwards. By showing us the physical world with such precision and also grandness, he also shows us the world within ourselves.

Watch: The Inherent Vice in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Films: A Video Essay

Throughout
his career, Paul Thomas Anderson has focused on human vulnerability. Films from
Punch Drunk Love to Magnolia to The Master to Inherent Vice to There Will Be Blood portray love as equal parts tender and strange. The
protagonists of Anderson’s films struggle with a range of
vices, from drug and sexual addiction, to anxiety and depression, to megalomania,
to gambling, to rage, to straight-up greed.

Anderson
uses vice as a way to explore different dimensions of human sadness. Each hero
is promised some kinds of greatness—Barry Egan wants to achieve success by collecting
frequent flyer miles from pudding box tops in Punch Drunk Love. Dirk Diggler hopes to keep up his fame and
recognition by virtue of his enormous package in Boogie Nights. Troubled Freddie Quell hopes to find both freedom
and family when he meets his mentor, the cult leader Lancaster Dodd, in The Master.

I was
first introduced to the world of P.T., as I affectionately called him, when I
watched Boogie Nights in a dingy
college dorm room, my sophomore year. There was a painting of an ocean on the
wall and a bottle of melatonin on the dresser, a tiny hand-me-down television
we borrowed from a friend that still played VHS tapes. At the time I spent full
days writing poems and songs and learning to be an artist and a writer. I was
smart, but I often didn’t live up to my potential and I wasn’t a particularly
good student. I have many good memories, but I have a lot of sad ones too. I
struggled throughout college with an eating disorder, I often had a strained
relationship with my parents, I rushed headfirst into a relationship that
taught me everything there is to appreciate about young love, and everything
there is to be wary of too.

In my
last year of college I’d walk past the elementary school at about noon every
day, on my way home from getting out of morning classes, and I’d see a sea of
children playing just over the horizon. My painful memories from college seem
blurry and imprecise, but images like these remain clear. At the time I didn’t
know it, but moments like these were slowly carving out my heart into the shape
it was meant to be.

Perhaps
P.T. Anderson strikes such an emotional cord in me because I discovered him at
a time when I was first learning to push back against cynicism. The truth may burn in a P.T. Anderson film, but even when it
does, we learn not to regret the scar. The
worlds that he explores are darkly sensual, hardboiled and masculine, but
softness and light always seem to linger somewhere in the periphery: sunlight
arching over an oil rig, a harmonium found next to a warehouse. We focus on tear-filled
faces throughout Magnolia, but the
final shot was still a close-up of a crying woman’s smile.–Arielle Bernstein

Arielle Bernstein is
a writer living in Washington, DC. She teaches writing at American
University and also freelances. Her work has been published in The
Millions, The Rumpus, St. Petersburg Review and The Ilanot Review. She
has been listed four times as a finalist in Glimmer Train short story
contests. She is currently writing her first book.

Nelson Carvajal is an independent digital filmmaker, writer and
content creator based out of Chicago, Illinois. His digital short films
usually contain appropriated content and have screened at such venues as
the London Underground Film Festival. Carvajal runs a blog called FREE CINEMA NOW which
boasts the tagline: "Liberating Independent Film And Video From A
Prehistoric Value System." You can follow Nelson on Twitter here.

Watch: L.A.I.: Spike Jonze’s HER Meets Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER: A Video Essay

This video amalgamation of Spike Jonze’s Her and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner by Drew Morton has a sad, sweet quality about it, as if Morton were depicting two parts of the same film. Indeed, the movies show two sides of the same city, which in this case is futuristic Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a ripe creative playground for filmmakers, and they tend to exercise their recess privileges with great abandon. Jonze imagines the daytime city as a place built for both human convenience and soul-crushing anonymity; Scott imagines the nighttime city as a James-Joyce-meets-Buck-Rogers-meets-Raymond-Chandler stew, in which anything might happen, on the one hand, but the results might be depressingly predictable on the other. Similarly, blending the films this way makes one think that Joaquin Phoenix’s Twombly and Harrison Ford’s Deckard could be two halves of the same person–one vulnerable and open, the other jaded and wary. Both actors stepped out of their habitual roles for these films; Phoenix broke from his normal scenery decimation to play someone who was approachable, almost boring, and Ford played a character scarred by seeing the worst of life for too long, on his way to acquire still more scars, fresh from playing Indiana Jones. Morton skillfully allows the two films to bleed into each other, as when the music from Blade Runner becomes the music for Her–or does it?–and thus shows how two visions, separated by several decades, might possibly speak to each other, sending universal messages about loss and loneliness that echo and expand with repeated viewings, and with consideration.

Watch: What Is It, Kevin B. Lee Asks, That Makes a Video Essay Great?

This excellent video piece by Kevin B. Lee for Fandor should be of interest to anyone who reads this blog regularly. If you go to the home page for Press Play, you’ll see a quote by Roger Ebert at the (more or less) upper left corner: "The best video essay source on the Web." And, if you’ll notice, a healthy percentage of the content posted here is, well, of the video essay variety. Faces in the work of Jonathan Glazer. What are the links between Martin Scorsese and Elia Kazan? The sublime in Michael Mann’s films. How has the treatment of rape changed in film and television–or has it? What is composition? The experience is simple. You press the play symbol, as the blog’s title suggests, and then what rolls in front of you is either a set of film clips spliced together with a voiceover or a set of related film clips bound together only by a (usually) catchy soundtrack and a fairly broad theme. And, there’s some accompanying text, either a transcript of the video essay’s script, or some text by me or someone else, an interpretation of or rather a response to the video you’re watching. Lee is asking a simple question in this video essay, in an animated and dynamic fashion, alluding to many of the acknowledged masters of the form, such as Matt Zoller Seitz, Nelson Carvajal, and Tony Zhou: what makes one of these pieces better than the other? How do we distinguish a meaningful video essay from a not-so-meaningful one? What’s the value of these pieces? You could learn a tremendous amount by watching Lee’s video: about Lee’s own erudition in film history, about the purposes and forms these pieces may assume, and also about the ways in which we (you, me, the person reading over your shoulder) watch films, these days. We interrogate. We dissect. We connect. We sever. We compare. We measure. We evaluate. The message here isn’t apocalyptic, i.e. Movies are done for! Embrace the video essay! Hug your iPhone, because soon it will be all you have left! Instead, it’s speculative: there’s more than one way to watch films, think about them, or discuss them–in fact, a plethora of ways. And the video essay, be it a 2-minute supercut or a scholarly work with MLA-approvable attributions in the credits, is one of those forms. It’s an enjoyable one, a moveable lecture. Take it or leave it, but give it a chance to wash over you first.

Watch: A Video Essay on the Links Between Martin Scorsese and Elia Kazan in THE DEPARTED

Cole Smith’s recent video essay on the links between Martin Scorsese and Elia Kazan brings a few important things to light, with an unusual amount of command and fluidity. One of these is the turbulent story of Kazan himself; Smith includes footage of the 1999 Academy Awards, at which Kazan received a Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by Scorsese, and at which only some of the audience members clapped. Why was this? Well, it was because, as many know, Kazan worked with the House Un-American Affairs Committee to name many Hollywood professionals suspected of having Communist leanings; it’s been said that On the Waterfront was an apology of sorts for this misstep. Smith leapfrogs over this moment to look at the Kazan film itself, along with A Streetcar Named Desire, to show how important the assumption of different points of view is for telling a story in these works, as in the contrast between Blanche DuBois’s and Stanley Kowalski’s vantage points in Streetcar or Terry Malloy’s and Johnny Friendly’s vantage points in Waterfront. It’s an easy transition, then, to a discussion of The Departed, one of Scorsese’s most successful films of recent years, and an examination of the way in which playing off Costigan’s (Leonardo DiCaprio) point of view against Sullivan’s (Matt Damon) point of view heightens suspense, stretches it to an almost wire-thin degree. Indeed, Scorsese’s films are at their best when they are taking us inside someone, whether it’s Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Henry Hill in Goodfellas, Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island, or, more recently, Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street. Without that voyage into a character’s interior, there can be little empathy, and without empathy, the story can’t come to life inside viewers themselves.