Precious Images

Precious Images (1986)

A cross-cut of nearly 100 years of American movies. We see the most precious film sequences that we all remember: From Citizen Kane to Star Wars, from Some Like It Hot to E.T. The incredible short cuts of roughly a second each push the audience into a kind of trance and take them on a journey into their individual memories of great films of the 20th century. The film won an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

Date of release
1986-12-31
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (26)
Runtime
8m
Genres
Documentary
Director
Chuck Workman

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film

Precious Images is a 1986 short film directed by Chuck Workman. It features approximately 470 half-second-long splices of movie moments through the history of American film. Some of the clips are organized by genre and set to appropriate music; musicals, for example, are accompanied by the title song from Singin' in the Rain. Films featured range chronologically from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to Rocky IV (1985), and range in subject from light comedies to dramas and horror films.

Production

Precious Images was commissioned by the Directors Guild for its 50th anniversary. Workman had previously produced two documentaries, The Director and the Image (1984) and The Director and the Actor (1984), for the Guild. Editing took about three months to complete.

Precious Images features half-second-long splices from approximately 470 American films. Chuck Workman described the film's editing structure as "a sprint. You take a breath and you go."

"Of course, I had so many movies I wanted to include that the time constraint forced me to compress the film more and more. The cutting got faster and faster, but I realized that the film was still working. And I was moving things around, and it was still working. I started finding these wonderful little combinations of shots, the kind of edits that I'd been doing for years in other things, but suddenly in this film I wasn't selling anything.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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