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Watch: The Beginning and the End: Legendary Filmmakers’ First and Last Shots

by
in Filmmaker Videos
on Dec 4, 2018

From Troiscoleurs (Nicolas Longinotti) comes this sublime supercut based around a beautifully elegiac premise: what would be the effect of looking at the first shot of a director’s feature filmography alongside their last? What message is spoken, what story is told, either deliberately or by chance, by a split screen that crosses decades? While many of these filmmakers — who include Hitchcock, Renoir, Fassbinder and Ozu — may not have expected their final film to have been their last, some of these final shots contain more than an intimation of mortality. (The Tarkovsky first-last combination here is particularly striking.)

From the Longinotti:

What happens when we see the first and the last shot of a director’s filmography at the same time ?
The image that opened their first film and the one that closed their last one- 20, 30 or even 40 years later-, do they belong together? Do they have something in common?

In the spirit of the brilliant series “First and Final frames” from Jacob T. Swinney, we take a side-by-side look at the beginning and at the end of renown director’s careers.

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