A supercut is a tightly-edited montage of short video clips organized around a theme, often a recurring word, phrase, or trope from film or TV. It used to be everywhere online around 2007/8, and we also have a ton of examples coming from the artworld (think about the award winning Christian Marclay’s 2010 installation The Clock). The term was coined by Andy Baio in a blog post on Waxy.org, with the help of Ryan Gantz. The name stuck. Since then, supercuts have appeared in countless places. Bayo just resurrected his old repository and you can browse it here.
And if you want a deep dive into the history and the aesthetics of this genre of montage, you can watch Max Tohline
’s 2021 videoessay “A Supercut of Supercuts: Aesthetics, Histories, Databases“, an amazing video that traces back the genetic lines of experimental film, fan remix, documentary, news, and more, uncovering the roots of the supercut well before YouTube. “These multiple interlocking genealogies reveal that the supercut isn’t just a new form of compilation editing; rather, it’s a new way of thinking expressed by a mode of editing. In fact, the supercut is only a small part of a much larger story about a culture that traded one paradigm of knowledge and power, that of the archive, for a new one: the database“.
My favourites? The video collecting all the “dude” pronounced by Hurley in Lost and the monumental Palin’s Breath.
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