I found the first and final frames* of Kill Bill startling, and who could forget the haunting images from The Searchers.
Click here for a list of all the films explored in the video. I would love to know whether the filmmakers had the movies framed in just this way from the very beginning, in their head, perhaps, with the final image alluding to, commenting on, the opening.
I would love to see juxtaposed the first and final frames of, say, Touch of Evil, Lawrence of Arabia, and Clockwork Orange—or anything from Ingmar Bergman.
Patton begins with his walking onto that stage, American flag as the backdrop, addressing the audience, while the last shot is him walking into the sunset, dog on a leash, windmill in view, no?
*Really, they’re shots, of course, not frames. The traditional film frame rate is 24 per second, so a final frame would be 1/24 of a second long. There have always been “high” frame rates—25 and 26 frames per second—but they were rare, at least in the States. Now digital frame rates for commercial films go as high as 48 — which is the rate The Hobbit was shot at.
ANTHONY SACRAMONE 