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There Are Not Thirty-Six Ways of Showing a Man Getting On a Horse (Nicolás Zukerfeld, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-09-27 05:06:04 +0000 UTC
Well, like it or not, the "supercut" is now officially a film genre. This means we're going to be seeing a lot more of these found-footage slice-and-dice efforts devoted to all manner of themes -- internet images of Native peoples (Of the North), cinematic depictions of the heavens (★), and of course the granddaddy of them all, Christian Marclay's The Clock. These are works that suggest comprehensiveness, and in doing so overwhelm the viewer with the sheer imagination of endless hours of research. In the age of media production, this is a sort of objective guarantee of "value," the way we used to lionize Renaissance masters because "I could never do that."
...Thirty-Six Ways... is an unusual specimen, in that it operates like a video essay about Raoul Walsh but doesn't actually offer a great deal of analysis about his cinema or what makes him such a compelling director. The title comes from a half-remembered, possibly apocryphal quote by Walsh, implying that a great deal of filmmaking (especially in the studio-system days) is pretty task oriented. So Zukerfeld shows us lots of repeating gestures -- mounting up, opening and shutting doors, saying "good morning," etc. -- from Walsh's filmography to drive home the basic sameness of the maneuvers, although of course it's the differences that jump out at us. But the primary takeaway is "Walsh does [X] a lot."
The second half of the film is actually more intriguing. In it, Zukerfeld goes back through his notes, and tracks down various sources -- both printed and original interview subjects -- to try to confirm the veracity of the Walsh quote, and ascertain its origin. By linking these two projects together, ...Thirty-Six Ways... almost provides a glimpse of two separate but related facets of film history, especially as practiced by the "Madison School" (David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, Janet Staiger, et al). But this doesn't really change the fact that, in the end, Raoul Walsh feels like a kind of pretext for some other sort of project, and that perhaps we're seeing the limitations of the supercut as a communicative device.
