The Mother of All Supercuts

October 16, 2014 6:19 AM

In Final Cut: Ladies and Gentleman (IMDb) Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi creates a feature length love story by editing together clips from some 500 different movies. This "recycled film" was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2012. (SLYT, NSFW: This would probably be rated NC17; sexy-time scene with at least one clip from Deep Throat.)
posted by dgaicun (13 comments total)

I was about write it up but then it came up in the IMDB trivia so I'm just going to shamelessly copy-paste one of the most interesting aspects of the movie: how they were able to release it with all the copyright issues.

So that it could be screened despite the copyright issues, the film has been declared to be educational material at the Hungarian University of Film and Theatre as well as at EöTVös Loránd University. For similar reasons the DVD and downloadable HD versions are available only as free attachments to scholar Balázs Varga's book about the film.

posted by KTamas at 8:16 AM on October 16, 2014

Not available in your country. Dammit Metafilter, not everybody on the internet is Hungarian!
posted by MartinWisse at 8:30 AM on October 16, 2014 [1 favorite]

Looks like a little nod to Christian Marclay's The Clock at around 41:00.
posted by ovvl at 8:48 AM on October 16, 2014

This is great! And it's totally educational.
posted by asterix at 9:31 AM on October 16, 2014

Good God, the credits alone must have taken forever to make.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 9:46 AM on October 16, 2014

watching this is a very surreal experience and you should see it if you can. there is a story and characters, but their representations are constantly changing. my brain kept switching back and forth between tracking the plot and matching against movies i'd seen. the feeling was similar to the first time i saw memento.
posted by bruceo at 10:11 AM on October 16, 2014

>Not available in your country. Dammit Metafilter, not everybody on the internet is Hungarian!

Well it's not even available in Hungary!
posted by bdz at 11:41 AM on October 16, 2014

I'm using the Hola extension for Chrome and set it to the USA to be able to see the video (get a similar note when played from Germany). Not in total, because who has the time, but I bookmarked it for later, because it looks fabulous!

I'm still waiting for The Clock to appear in total somewhere on the web. One should kickstart to buy a copy of the piece and just donate it to Archive.org. Anyone got a ballpark number on what one would have to pay for it?
posted by KMB at 12:35 PM on October 16, 2014

MetaFilter: Everybody on the Internet is Hungarian.
posted by Mister_A at 1:28 PM on October 16, 2014

The credits made me dizzy. We are in the shower when I left off... I shall watch the remainder at home.
posted by Mister_A at 1:30 PM on October 16, 2014

I'm in the US and getting a "video not available"

Every time I've ever seen this get posted pretty much anywhere, it almost instantly gets taken down. It's even been booted off various pirate sites. It's basically radioactive, which is sad because I missed it when It was in town.
posted by emptythought at 3:07 PM on October 16, 2014

If you can't make this available to mobiles, you aren't serious about your art.

Mobiles == Art
posted by clvrmnky at 5:48 PM on October 16, 2014

I'm about halfway through, and it is absolutely amazing. This is genuinely one of the best movies I've seen in ages. It's funny and clever, and although it sounds like it's just going to be a novelty, it ends up being a meditation on the universality of basic human emotions.

Thanks for posting this, dgaicun.
PS: I initially got a "Not In Your Country" message, but I was able to watch it by activating Hola extension in Chrome, set for the US, just like KMB. (I'm in the UK.)
posted by yankeefog at 3:43 AM on October 17, 2014