The Ultimate Oscar Tribute

Chuck Workman's masterpiece celebrates the movies

Above image: Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits (1961). Film Page / Home Page: Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).

Documentary filmmaker Chuck Workman just might be the godfather of the supercut. Before there was You Tube, Vimeo, Vine or any digital editing, he created Precious Images, a brilliant eight-minute film that features about 470 clips from movies, most of them a half-second long, spliced together to flow in thematic and visually matched ways. The overall effect is exhilarating, and covers the entire history of Hollywood across multiple of genres—romance, comedy, dance, westerns and noirs.

Originally commissioned by the Directors Guild for its 50th anniversary, Precious Images took almost three months for Workman to complete. “I had so many movies I wanted to include that the time constraint forced me to compress the film more and more,” he says. “The cutting got faster and faster, but I realized that the film was still working.”

Precious Images is one of the most decorated film shorts of all time: it’s the 1987 winner for Best Live Action Short at the Oscars; it was screened at the Cannes Film Festival; it’s won an award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; and in 2009 it was selected to be part of the prestigious National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Following this project, Chuck Workman went on to create twenty years worth of montages for the Academy Awards. “In the film community, everyone knows Chuck Workman,” says one film professor. “As an editor he’s kind of a god.” PROVOKR members can enjoy the full video of Workman’s masterpiece, Precious Images, above.

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