The Cut That Changed Everything: Supercuts
Before the supercut was a style, it was survival
Hi everyone,
We’re hard at work on a new feature (more on that next week). But this week, we’re talking about the edit that didn’t just remix the rules, it remixed everything.
Last month, we explored jump cuts (divisive, I know). Now, we’re looking at the supercut: the postmodern lovechild of montage, meme, and media studies. Born from archival docs and raised on YouTube, the supercut lets anyone—with no camera and too much time—make a film out of every film ever made.
What started as fan obsession evolved into an art form, a critique, a celebration, sometimes all in one timeline.
– Shamir
Let’s rewind.
Not to the 1920s, though we’ll get there. Let’s start with your algorithm. You click on a video, any video. Maybe it’s all of Nicolas Cage screaming. Maybe it’s every time someone in a Marvel movie says “We’ve got company.” Maybe it’s a love letter to LA using nothing but movies shot in LA.
Whatever it is, what I’ve described is what is called a supercut.
You’ve no doubt seen hundreds of them.
The Archive Strikes Back
Before the supercut was a style, it was survival. Found footage. Newsreels. Training videos. Propaganda films chopped and repurposed by documentarians who couldn’t afford to shoot, so they stitched together truth from leftovers.
The edit wasn’t just a post, it was production. That instinct never died. It just went digital.
Now, with a search bar and a YouTube-to-MP4 converter, the archive is infinite. No need for a camera. Just curiosity, obsession and the ability to see a pattern where others saw noise.
The modern supercut is an heir to the archival documentary but one raised on autoplay and Reddit threads. It doesn’t capture reality because it doesn’t need to.
It reassembles it. Frame by frame. Footnote by footnote. Until the meaning is new again.
“I’ve Seen This One Before”
A Brief Montage on Montages
Let’s zoom back for a second.
In 1925, Sergei Eisenstein gave us the montage. Juxtapose a bowl of soup and a man’s face - you’ve got hunger. Juxtapose a baby carriage and soldiers - you’ve got revolution. The meaning is in the edit.
By the ’80s, montage was preparation. It was Rocky running steps. It was makeovers and glow-ups. A song, a flurry of images, and boom, progress. It was an editors shorthand for telling the audience “Our hero’s getting ready but we’re not sticking around.”
Montage condensed time. The supercut bends it.
CTRL+F Cinema
Editing by Algorithm
Supercuts only became possible when two things happened:
There was an infinite amount of footage available.
You could search for it.
YouTube did the first part. QuoDB and auto-captioning did the second.
Now, if you want every instance of the word “freedom” in film history, you don’t need to hire a researcher. Or if you want to make a video essay about how often characters look into mirrors, you don’t need to head down to Blockbuster and buy every Bluray in sight.
You just need a browser, a dash of internet savvy (and a lot of free time).
A supercut editor is part sleuth, part poet, part hoarder. They cut from history, from Hollywood, from home videos and H.264s. It’s editing, by obsession. Archival impulse as art.
Postmodernism in the Timeline
Evan Puschak AKA The Nerdwriter
The supercut is more than collage. It’s a thesis statement, which is why it is a form of editing that has been widely adopted by many a video essayist.
In fact, the video essay genre simply could not exist with supercut. It’s easy way to create compelling visual arguments that align with or without voice.
Watch a hundred clips of different people saying the same phrase, and suddenly the phrase has weight. Or absurdity. Or menace. Meaning builds. It stacks.
A supercut is critique disguised as content. It's the essay without the essayist. The editor fades into the background, and lets the footage speak.
Sometimes literally.
DIY Auteurism
The Director Is You
You no longer need to be a filmmaker to be a filmmaker. No camera. No crew. Just clips and an angle. Vision and a timeline.
This is how we get films like “Los Angeles Plays Itself” , a feature-length documentary made entirely of other films depicting how the city of Los Angeles has been presented in Cinema. It’s part film history, part love letter, part meta-rant.
Or Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting which is essentially a YouTube Supercut channel that teaches and analyzes film on such a molecular level his 7 year hiatus left cinephiles grieving like their favourite professor had died.
This is where meme culture meets art school.
CTRL+C Cinema: The Supercut Auteur Hall of Fame
Let’s give flowers while we can.
Kogonada—the filmmaker who started by making hypnotic cuts of Ozu’s pillow shots and Kubrick’s symmetry before making his own critically acclaimed films (Columbus, After Yang).
Tony Zhou—the professor we all wish we had. “Every Frame a Painting” didn’t just explain editing, it felt like editing itself.
And the final boss of the supercut?
Adam Curtis.
BBC’s philosophical DJ. The B-roll Bandit. His films (The Century of the Self, HyperNormalisation) are epic tone poems built from newsreels, PSA, propaganda and pop music. Working for the BBC, he has access to an archive no one else can rival.
The BBC archive is one of the largest broadcast collections in the world. Over 15 million assets, spanning more than 100 years of history, digitized and deep-indexed.
You want a Thatcher speech from '79? Or a grainy report from the Falklands War? A camera test from a BBC engineer in the '60s just filming pigeons in slow motion? It's in there.
The Elephant in the Edit Bay
Let’s address the subject no one likes to talk about: copyright.
The supercut lives in a legal gray zone of fair use. It samples, repurposes and reframes and essentially does borrow from other artists.
The law says you can use copyrighted material without permission if it’s transformative. If you’re not just showing, but saying something new. Critique, commentary, education: the holy trinity of fair use. And most supercuts? They check every single one of those boxes.
But still, you’re stitching together the intellectual property of a dozen studios, half the internet, and a dash of public domain seasoning, and uploading it to a platform with content ID bots that don’t speak nuance.
As long as you're not monetizing and you’re making something with purpose, intent, and a point, you're probably safe. Probably.
The supercut changed everything because it was made from everything. In the right hands, it feels like cinema.
Extra’s
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