FINAL CUT: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THE SUPERCUT AS FALSE MOVEMENT-IMAGE
FINAL CUT: LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. THE SUPERCUT AS FALSE MOVEMENT-IMAGE

Summary/Abstract: György Pálfi's 2012 montage film "Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen" is assembled from over 450 films from the history of cinema, edited into one seemingly continuous love story. Pálfi's film falls into the category of what is often called a "mashup" or a "supercut". Drawing on Deleuze's concept of the movement-image, this paper argues that such an illusion of narrative continuity constructs false movement-images, i.e. false sensorimotor linkages between images, through which "Final Cut" ironically deconstructs the cinematic clichés it reassembles. The notion of "out-of-field" thus becomes subjective: the trans-filmic spatial representation is intertextually linked to the viewer's memory and personal experience. Such a postcinematic montage formulates an epistemological critique, revealing clichés both as a form of cultural compression and as a unit of normative belonging. Viewers are thus invited not only to witness the history of cinema unfold in a syntagmatic supercut, but to reflect on a broader phenomenon of cinematographic representation. As all the actors and all the stories of the constitutive films are condensed into one actor and one story, Pálfi's supercut can be seen as a formal precursor of the statistical image.

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