https://www.maxtohline.com/video-essays daily 1.0 2026-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625011133775-XRVML2FE9LTEMBYWS3CC/image-asset.jpg Video Essays https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625012746648-T8465QQLN9NHUGJD6Z3H/image-asset.jpeg Video Essays - Re-Reading Time: The Emergence of Reverse Motion as a Narrative Technique in Post-Classical Cinema A paper given by Max Tohline at the PCA/ACA Annual Conference (held virtually) on 4 June, 2021 17 minutes Abstract: Before the establishment of the principles of classical narrativity, early cinema bombarded its audiences with all manner of trick effects without regard for narrative logic. One of the effects that flourished during this period was reverse motion, or running the film backwards. By about 1910, however, the nascent techniques that comprise continuity editing had largely exiled reverse motion from the mainstream, except as a special effect masquerading as forward time or rationalized as a diegetic mistake. As Mary Ann Doane argues in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, the classical Hollywood style that marginalized reverse motion did so in order to “restabilize” time as something teleological after 19th-Century discoveries in thermodynamics eroded science’s former presumptions of determinism. But now, a century later, reverse motion has re-emerged in post-classical cinema, not only as a spectacle in music video, but also as a technique of narrativity. In this paper, I intend to sketch a taxonomy of the re-narrativization of reverse motion, arguing that in each instance the reintroduction of reverse motion into contemporary narrative attempts to deal with the aspects of Modern temporality suppressed in classical narrativity. Since time is irreversible, films like Come and See (1985), 11/9/01 (2002), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) use reverse motion to wish away a past trauma. Since time is also non-teleological (causes are not readable in their effects), in reverse-time commercials and comedy sketches reverse motion imagines a way to time backwards and offer perfect access to the past. Finally, since time is stochastic rather than deterministic, other works, in particular an episode of Showtime’s drama Billions, employ reverse motion to investigate the multiple paths that time might have taken to arrive at the present. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/558962736 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625057569244-H7R4GHKFGYJQ2DYP94EY/vlcsnap-2021-06-29-19h29m02s544.png Video Essays https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624990706855-NL0W5VK0NRW6AIL19Z7D/image-asset.jpeg Video Essays - Symmetry in Wes Anderson's Editing A video essay by Max Tohline 2014 2 minutes The more films Wes Anderson directs, the more tightly structured and precise each aspect of his style becomes. He's long favored neat centering and symmetry in his compositions (as shown in kogonada's Staff Pick supercut). Recently on rewatching The Grand Budapest Hotel, I noticed that there's a kind of symmetrical logic to Pilling's Oscar-nommed editing as well. In this little video, I've tried to render that "symmetrical" patterning in the editing visible by breaking the shots out of their temporal sequence and giving them a spatial sequence as well. Enjoy! (Also listen up for the way Desplat's music aligns to and emphasizes certain edit points.) Reposted by FilmmakerIQ, The Film Stage, 20 Questions Film, CHUD, and others. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/116449288 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625059362088-OYGR9D8EEUH6LGP0TWAS/image-asset.png Video Essays - The Art of Editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly A video essay by Max Tohline 2013 14 minutes A shot-by-shot investigation of the three-way standoff at the climax of Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), revealing mathematical patterns, images of thought, and pure musical rhythm. Dedicated to the editors, Eugenio Alabiso and Nino Baragli. Reposted by NoFilmSchool, FilmmakerIQ, Cinephilia and Beyond, Rope of Silicon, Filmmaker Magazine, Cinetropolis, Motion Arts Pro Daily, and others. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/86125935 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625230963326-ZBW8DJXKG1GUVARMC3CV/image-asset.png Video Essays - Editing as Punctuation in Film A video essay by Max Tohline 2015 20 minutes In January 2014, Kathryn Schulz published an article in Vulture called "The Five Best Punctuation Marks in Literature." It got me thinking about what the five best "punctuation marks" in film might look like. I wanted to assemble a video essay with a rapidfire list of nominees of great moments of editing-as-punctuation in film. But as I started putting it together, the project grew into a twofold piece: an analysis of and response to Schulz's article as well as an attempt to spur new insights about editing by examining it through the metaphor of punctuation. I hope it will be an inspiration to anyone else who loves film on a formal level and believes, as Bazin did, that the language of cinema isn't done being invented yet. List of editors on Vimeo. List of films here. Listed three times as one of the best video essays of 2015 by leading critic/curators in Fandor's poll. Archive link here. Reported in S&T news and The Rolla Daily News; reposted by IndieWire, NoFilmSchool, Kottke, FilmmakerIQ, and others. Further thanks to Héctor Aguilar Rivas for the Spanish subtitles, to Pablo Ferreira for the Portuguese subtitles, and to Münif Çankaya for this Turkish dub. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/138829554 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624976093089-E7GN6DCG643RTNNURH28/image-asset.jpeg Video Essays - The Conversation is the Confessional a video essay by Max Tohline 2021 4 minutes This project was inspired by the very fine collection of video essays on The Conversation (F. F. Coppola, 1974) produced by students of Johannes Binotto [here]. After I expressed my jealousy over not being a student in his course, Johannes graciously invited me to make an essay myself [here]. In the spirit of the other essays, it's without voice-over (tough for me), and I tried to keep it to 2:30. But it went to 4. Oh, well. This video essay is a condensation of many thoughts I've had on The Conversation over the years, especially including a paper I gave at PCA/ACA in 2019 [here]. The first seeds of this idea came about a decade ago when I realized that halfway into the scene of Harry in the confessional, the acoustic properties of his voice suddenly change. Working from the hypothesis that we might be hearing his thoughts instead of his voice, I crafted a new interpretation of the film that puts Harry's Catholic faith at the center of the film. Coppola himself remarked that the confessional is a form of surveillance (indeed, for Harry, everything involves surveillance; surveillance is his primary mode of subjectivity). But the scene must have also been deeply personal for both Coppola and Hackman, as Coppola's son plays the boy who crosses himself and Hackman's brother plays the priest who is barely seen through the grating. By including this semitransparent barrier, a visual motif associated with surveillance, the film seems to encourage us to find links between Christianity and the rest of the film's themes. Returning to the Bible with this in mind, it's not hard to imagine how Harry might read it: God, who hides himself [Psalm 13:1, Psalm 69:17, Psalm 89:46, etc], who often appears in a cloud [Exodus 24:15-16, Lamentations 3:44, Luke 9:34-35], but who can perceive hidden things [Matthew 6:6, Jeremiah 23:24]. Perhaps Harry, knowing that he's being heard, declines to confess his most significant sins. Christianity acknowledges the remoteness and apparent hiddenness of God throughout scripture, but assures the faithful that at the end of time they will see not "a poor reflection, as in a mirror," but "face to face" with God. They will know fully, even as they are fully known. Such a message ought to be of great comfort to a bugger, but, as I interpret the film, only insofar as Harry remains confident that God exists. As I see it, the whole film can be read through the confessional scene. Up until then, Harry lived in a world where he surveilled other people. Where he was on the powerful side of the one-way glass. And whenever he visited the confessional, he was reminded that God was on the powerful side of a kind of cosmic one-way glass; that God was surveilling him. So he dared not speak his thoughts aloud. But in the second half of the film, the snoop gets robbed, the bugger gets bugged, and he can't find the microphone. But it's not the disempowerment that destroys Harry. He's used to God watching. What destroys him is that he can't find the bug. And as he finally gives in and tears into his Madonna, his epistemological crises spills over into a spiritual crisis. If he can't prove that they're listening... then how can he prove that God's listening? Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/523275680 My thanks to Johannes Binotto for graciously listing this as one of the Best Video Essays of 2021 in the Sight and Sound poll. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1644448958591-6U5K1YQCNNDZV8NYTSQ8/image-asset.png Video Essays Seems Like Old Times: Staging, Control, and (Mis)memory in Annie Hall A video essay by Max Tohline 2021/2 14 minutes published in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration Abstract: The refrain that viewers can (or should) ‘separate the art from the artist’ relies on the assumption that a problematic artist does not leave traces of their transgressions in their work. But the techniques of manipulation that a potential criminal might leverage to gain control over others significantly overlap filmmaking techniques designed to shape audience perception, such as framing and editing. This essay proposes to “de-edit” or “re-spatialize” some moments from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) to bring attention to the modes of gaze, address, and manipulation exerted by the director throughout the film. This method resituates the film from its popular image as the scattered chronicle of an underdog neurotic to a more critical portrait of a narcissist deploying the reflective apparatuses of memory and cinema for a project of distortion and, ultimately, self-deception. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/480424534 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1650027714569-SXIGZCFELUDI4E2OP4CV/image-asset.png Video Essays - The Palindrome, The Crystal Image, and Articulations of the Cinematic Code A paper given by Max Tohline at PCA/ACA National Conference (held virtually) on April 14, 2022 15 minutes Abstract: An oft-overlooked technique of cinematic temporality is the palindromic circuit: a moment when a section of film plays alternatingly forward and backward. This technique, also called “scrubbing” (after the practice of scratching a record back and forth), appears throughout cinema history: in the music video, the avant-garde, and even as a classical editing trick to extend the apparent duration of a shot. Scrubbing produces something like a temporal mirror. But by holding a section of time within a moment of palindromic oscillation, scrubbing also functions like a temporal microscope. In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze introduces the notion of the crystal-image to theorize the smallest possible circuit of past and present, when time splits into actual and virtual. While Deleuze offers several metaphors for this minimum circuit of becoming, such as the mirror, he overlooks scrubbing as a literal embodiment of the crystal-image’s temporal fork. But if scrubbing “zooms in” on cinema’s minimum unit of duration, it also provides a basis to re-center still-outstanding questions of the articulations of the cinematic code on temporality. In Eco’s and Pasolini’s schemes of filmic articulations, they mistook onscreen objects as the material signified by the film language. Though many codes piggyback onto the cinematic code, elements like text, speech, and even photography do not have any bearing on cinematic articulations. Cinema, as Deleuze showed, signifies duration. Thus, I propose that even though film constructs its records of time upon a photographic substrate, the question of cinematic articulations must be answered through what cinema adds to photography: namely time. Through analyses of Bill Brand, Martin Arnold, and Michel Gondry, I will theorize a new framework of the articulations of the cinematic code, arguing the basic unit of filmic temporality is revealed in the minimum crystalline palindromic circuit of two frames. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/698879271 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1769131146161-AY9ZQ2GT50YP2Q4PU4M1/image-asset.png Video Essays - Instructions for Travel through Fictional Time I'm sorry the sound is bad I'm sending this from the future. A speculative sorta-video-essay by Max Tohline, 2025. Music: Zvevdara - Still Life at Sunrise / Fab - The End Of Christmas Silence II / myk - End of The Line / Stellardrone - Comet Halley Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgdnoxVvoBU https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1769131693841-PKI1DL2OU5S816Y0B43X/image-asset.png Video Essays - How Much Time is there in Time? | Night is Short, Walk on Girl A video essay by Max Tohline, for the Essay Library's romantic comedy essay collection, When Essay Met Library, 2023. 6 minutes Watch the FULL COLLAB, with essays about the impossible logistics of Maid in Manhattan, the existential nightmare of Bringing Up Baby, and how YOU can become the next student in William Shakespeare’s 8-week video lecture series The Course of True Love, and so many more, here: When Essay Met Library: A Rom-Com Collaboration Films: Night is Short, Walk on Girl (Masaaki Yuasa, 2017) / The Kid Brother (Ted Wilde, J.A. Howe, 1927) / Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995) / Rocco and his Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960) / Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) / Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) / Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948) / Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012) Music: Herzog - My Bed is My Boat / Palancar - Terra Nivium / Psychadelik Pedestrian - Coral Reef / Palancar - Bortle One Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBSHFgZmC9U https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1769132200584-ZETEVGXZBV0D778IDOV2/image-asset.png Video Essays - Planing Plane A work of deformative or algorithmic criticism exploring how removing one frame at a time from each shot in a mass-market film alters continuity, legibility, narrativity, and more. At first it's perhaps less than you think, and then it's far more. Eventually the folks at Cinemetrics pick up the phone and Tarkovsky arrives. 21 minutes Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/1139288070 https://www.maxtohline.com/video-postcards daily 0.75 2022-01-19 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625060104573-6GYE6444OEAM8K4LMJI1/image-asset.png Video Postcards - 3: Better Homes through Editing A video postcard by Max Tohline 2021 8 minutes A rumination on how to build and rebuild virtual worlds (in this case, virtual houses) with editing. Over on Twitter, film scholar and video essayist Ian Garwood put out an invitation for other video essayists to quote or remix his essay/supercut Mr Grant's Dream House into something new. Here's my response to that invitation. Along the way, I also mention my own essay/supercut Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Stairs. You'll enjoy this video more if you watch both Garwood's video and mine first (follow the links above). Full citations in the YouTube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48VYQBrDnck https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625060250148-0P3FKQVPCBHUUWLB90TK/image-asset.png Video Postcards - Drone Swarms (Video Postcard 02) A video postcard by Max Tohline 2020 19 minutes This video postcard is addressed to Michael Baird, monster/folklore expert, sculptor, art professor, and colleague. His channel is here. This video is about SWARMS in film, and it touches on a lot of topics -- how VFX artists visualize swarms of non-human machines (drones, robots), why swarms don't really show up in folklore monster tales, patterns in how swarms are used in popular film, and what our relationship with those swarms says about who we are. Content advisory: swarms of bugs and other creepy things, racism, some violence. Full list of citations in YouTube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRaj2jZJekg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625060545020-A1CLRGUI2ZH94KLSQ8W2/image-asset.png Video Postcards - 1: About Time A video postcard by Max Tohline 2020 9 minutes The first in a series of epistolary video essays. This one is addressed to Keaton Wooden: screenwriter, director, playwright, artist, my brother-in-law, and one of my favorite people to talk to. The subject is time: film time, cultural metaphors of time, the absurdity of measuring time with space, mechanisms of time in movies (from Orson Welles's The Stranger to The Great Mouse Detective), our changing notions of time in an age of computers and streaming, and how to make the most of the time we have even when we can't be certain of anything. Full citations in YouTube description: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa4inAYS7fo https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1639180854029-BIU4MZB7F7QU4NC0BHNX/image-asset.jpeg Video Postcards 4: The Game You Don’t Have to Play a video postcard by Max Tohline 2021 8 minutes A postcard I wrote and sent in a single day in December 2021, when I heard that fellow video essayist Sam was working on a project that involved some ideas about games where you do nothing. I'd toyed with some possibly overlapping ideas for a while but never had any idea what to do with them, so they ended up here. Full credits and such over on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAeaBhdFiD4 My thanks to FilmScalpel for including this in their collection of essays on video games. https://www.maxtohline.com/experimental-video daily 0.75 2021-08-03 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624986229139-5SKLDTLQT1ZBXQBVUFW3/image-asset.jpeg Experimental Videos - The Sharply Interrupted Sky 7 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624978092704-7WEXGCW2JGGIB2MXS591/image-asset.jpeg Experimental Videos - Ray Shows by Max Tohline 2019 7 minutes A collection of my favorite light of the past ten years. To be played loud. Music: the finale of Anton Bruckner's 4th Symphony Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/339447457/4d68fa2950 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624978191781-8DAOEVT7X3SNBV0Z810E/image-asset.jpeg Experimental Videos - I Let the Camera Paint for Me by Max Tohline 2019 2 minutes for Dylan, who brought every color into the world. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/339448265/50097b4f6f https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625072579286-F8LE89AKGNAVAP8OYNZX/image-asset.png Experimental Videos - Auto-H.S.S. by Max Tohline 1 February, 2019 7 minutes A little experimental film that I made on the spur of the moment one night in about two hours. Contains a hidden mini-supercut partway through, just because. A rumination on what is beautiful in the age of the spectacle. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/314974827 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624985886936-5AL64VQIVHCFF6YFXZLE/image-asset.jpeg Experimental Videos - 80th and Eden by Max Tohline 2016 3 minutes a rocket ride to 3500 feet and back Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/184005770 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624978509265-C5SC6GWEXBS71MTLUSN6/image-asset.jpeg Experimental Videos - 2653 by Max Tohline 2015 2 minutes An algorithmic film (score given at the end). To be played loud. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/122322782 See also Felipe Rivera’s application of the same image-sorting algorithm to another object: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbL77jK5PLk https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625073013614-HUJKPCF2116KEZ0QTLCX/image-asset.png Experimental Videos - Left Turn Grid by Max Tohline 2013 endless loop A loop of loops. An ambient digital motion painting. An unbroken line which only turns left, marking out a square grid. A series of disconnected oversized pixels simulating an unbroken line. A way of interrogating space in Euclidean terms (a grid), topological terms (a single line looping through itself), and algorithmic terms (I mark out the grids according to an discovered set of rules). A mixture of multiple disciplines of mathematics into a simple visual design. A rational therapeutic doodle digitized into rote mechanistic ritual. A postmodern labyrinth of mystery and contemplation, pure and straightforward, yet still requiring discovery. A follow-up to these studies. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624978688129-LD11MPU0N27PWA84AV3L/image-asset.jpeg Experimental Videos - The Mission of Art is to Reverse the Flow of Entropy by Max Tohline 2011 17 minutes Official selection of the Athens International Film and Video Festival, 2012. Editing and audio mix by Cody Vandenburg. To be played in a darkened room at the loudest volume possible. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/86043133 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1628005607808-MIE0UUFH2U4QPOS0J5RE/image-asset.png Experimental Videos - ICFADT by Max Tohline 2011 3 minutes explicit content A very personal, very painful event led me led me to make this found-footage structural film. Now that it’s been a decade, I don’t mind more people seeing it. As I remember, the found footage allowed me to hide behind the abstraction of borrowed iconography, and the austere structure offered me the illusion of control or containment. A friend who saw it suggested I use a bit of Harmony Korine for the soundtrack, so I added it. Here’s the score for the image track: https://www.maxtohline.com/art daily 0.75 2026-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624985097707-DUNI0O0ZTZRRG0S3DSHE/PIC_0161.JPG Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624979690750-B3PIU6LA1T6MEARMY8M6/IMG_E8959b.JPG Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624981070274-XFK6OCEOJUIA42EJ80CK/Kasparov+vs.+Deep+Blue%2C+1996%2C+Game+1%2C+Kasparov+Resigns%2C+painted+8+Jan+2019.jpg Conceptual Art - Kasparov vs. Deep Blue, 1996, Game 1, Kasparov Resigns https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624980204844-8J8FMMB9HH55CYP3UZ7M/image-asset.jpeg Conceptual Art - Half-Life Max Tohline 2017 algorithm, lottery tickets, tape, adhesive as installed: 45x66 in What’s the half-life of money spent on lottery tickets? To find out, I devised a simple algorithmic project. Procedure Step 1. Purchase lottery tickets and hang them on a wall. (For this project, I purchased 50 tickets for the June 12, 2017 drawing of the Missouri Lottery’s Lucky for Life game: five each from ten different gas stations, supermarkets, and liquor stores in Rolla, MO. By buying from ten different stores, I ensured color and design variation in the paper they were printed on, adding some slight visual interest.) Step 2. After the drawing, cash in any that win. Step 3. Return to Step 1 until no tickets win and the project ends. Research Conceptual artists have made stochastic works involving money before (cf. Les Levine’s work, as recorded here in Lucy Lippard’s 6 Years), but I haven’t encountered one where the lottery is the mechanic and the rate of loss is the specific object of study. According to the Missouri Lottery’s website, the chances of winning any prize on Lucky for Life is 1 in 7.8. If one were to purchase an unlimited number of tickets, such that one could expect to win all the possible prizes at statistically-expected rates, the expected value of the $2 ticket would be $1.15. Since Lucky for Life drawings happen twice weekly, the half-life of money dumped into an unlimited number of tickets would be 4.375 days (assuming instantaneous lump-sum payouts immediately “re-invested”). But if you were to buy a small number of tickets (like I did), such that it would only be reasonable to anticipate winning some combination of the three lowest-value prizes (their odds of winning are given as 1/15, 1/32, and 1/50), the expected value of a $2 ticket drops to just 44 cents. That corresponds to a half-life of 1.614 days, which is the half-life expected for this project. Results Of the 50 tickets purchased, 6 won a prize. Of the 9 tickets purchased with that prize money, only 1 won a prize, which furnished money to buy 2 more tickets, both of which lost. 50 tickets became 9 tickets in half a week, then 9 tickets became 2 tickets in another half-week. That works out to an average half life of 1.521 days, or a little less than the hypothetical half-life suggested by the odds given on the Missouri Lottery’s website. Discussion In hindsight, I think I did this project to disgust myself with how quickly I could piss away a hundred bucks playing the lottery. But in the back of my mind, I harbored this irrational hope that buying 50 tickets at once actually made it likely that I might win a big prize. I fantasized about having to abandon the project halfway through because I hit the jackpot. Of course that didn’t happen; of course I wasted the money. But the fantasy is powerful and hard to shake, despite having a math minor and even after doing this project. Whenever I stop for gas, I still want to drop a few bucks on lotto tickets, even though I know what an irrational, wasteful decision that is. Call it the flip side of the law of large numbers: if a large enough sample size of randomly-behaving operators (molecules of a gas, radioactive atoms, or lottery tickets, take your pick) behaves perfectly predictably in the aggregate, then it’s reasonable to expect that a small sample size will behave unpredictably. That doesn’t mean it’s likely to win (it’s not), but for some reason it makes it easier for us to believe… that it might? It’s like the mother who (irrationally) thinks her child might be president or a star athlete someday but (rationally) looks at all their classmates and knows none of them will make it. I think that most of us understand at least some aspect of the law of large numbers, we just have trouble placing ourselves within it. What’s more, celebrity culture inundates us with survivorship bias. By flooding us with images of the wealthy and successful, media lead us to overestimate our own chances of success. We even see it in the natural world. For billions of years, death has sifted unfit organisms and species so well that now the biosphere teems with incredibly well-evolved creatures. On the one hand, the plenitude of life may trick us into thinking that life is easy, or inevitable. On the other hand, the apparent design of it all may beguile us into assuming the presence of a creator. We only see the living, none of the innumerable dead, and we draw misguided conclusions. Half-Life inverts that selection bias by showing only the dead. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624980655590-ZB1HFY95Q6ZE6NIZ011G/2.01+Max+Tohline%2C+Sur+Names+series+%5BJesse%2C+LeBron%2C+or+Etta%5D%2C+2018-9%2C+text+on+consumer+light+box%2C+12x9x2+in.jpg Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624983580001-ONIHSIMGO90U42YBVXUB/20170123_103528.jpg Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624984035996-I7STF9DBX1PLSJW9WKDC/a+2048+12+expd.png Conceptual Art - 12a https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624984588330-U4H1FO7KWMOYO3BBD99B/tumblr_o45oo9PG431r1u36qo3_1280.jpg Conceptual Art Visit any antique mall and you’ll find thousands of old cans, bottles, glasses, mugs, and other containers. But despite the fact that these solid vessels all once held some sort of liquid, now they are nearly all empty and dry. It got me thinking about the cultural associations of permanence and transience which we ascribe to solids and liquids, respectively. So I looked for as many cans and bottles as I could find which still had some liquid in them and were, as such, in a sense still “alive” to their purpose as containers, not yet voided carcasses, and I gathered them here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624984469604-ICFXB7DWT79QM3SKGUU8/x0527151709a.jpg Conceptual Art [Title Withheld] is a kind of a dreamcatcher fashioned out of K’Nex and populated with Scrabble tiles. It takes my love of words and my love of design back to their genetic roots and proposes a playful but complex synthesis of the two. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624984693560-YMK5XDM0B7G0FJHZJEFB/Max+Tohline%2C+Self-Portrait+in+Unfinished+Crosswords+%2827+Down%2C+Reinhold%29%2C+2015-ongoing.jpg Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624984937231-L1IFUR69TL9OXUTF6Y13/Max+Tohline%2C+Screenshot+from+an+Experimental+Film+1%2C+2015.png Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624985340683-JD6TGZLYFR6O48CJLSXC/Max+Tohline%2C+Art+is+What+is+On+the+Wall%2C+2010%2C+card+stock+and+ink%2C+stolen+from+the+National+Gallery+of+Art%2C+3.5x5+in+8x10+frame.jpg Conceptual Art In July 2010, I was visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, when I discovered this card in place of a painting in one of the galleries. As I leaned in to read it, I realized that my face and posture probably looked no different from anyone else admiring an artwork, except that I was no longer looking at something which was intended to be regarded as an artwork. Tickled by this, I decided that as a joke I should turn this card into an artwork. So I plucked it off the wall while no one was looking, tucked it into a museum map, smuggled it out, and later framed and titled it. Voilà!– an artwork. Art is What is On the Wall comments on the fact that in the post-Brillo-Box era, it’s impossible to tell (based on any set of purely aesthetic criteria) what is or is not an artwork. Anything could be promoted to the status of art simply by being placed inside an institution – the museum or gallery – which confers the status of “art” onto the objects therein. BUT, here, on the wall where art was meant to be hanging, in the very spot reserved for a 15-Century French painting, was an object which is NOT art. But why isn’t it art? Aesthetics? Intent? Context? Deixis? At the time, I taught introductory art classes, and my students often had trouble nailing down a definition of art which encompassed everything that we call art these days. In frustration, sometimes a student would just tautologically define art as “anything that has been called art.” Which is another way of saying, “if it’s on the wall of the art museum, it’s art.” But here was an object on the wall of an art museum (like those water fountains and exit signs in Andrea Fraser’s Museum Highlights) which was NOT art. Perhaps just to make a joke, or perhaps to force the resolution of an apparent paradox, I felt the need to turn this card into an artwork. So here it is. Art is What is On the Wall. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624985433148-NUR4Y6QGZVIDTTMQUX6H/Max+Tohline%2C+Converging+to+One%2C+2007.jpg Conceptual Art https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625058299282-HCCP8Y5RGOHXI0ZJS2UF/image-asset.png Conceptual Art - Alfred Hitchcock's 39 Stairs gallery video loop by Max Tohline 2017 3 minutes, continuous loop A compilation of staircase shots from 39 films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with music by Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony, Mvt. 5, Red Cape Tango. Featured in the Kunsthall KAdE’s 2026 special exhibit “Stairway to…?” https://www.kunsthalkade.nl/en/exhibitions/stairway-to/ In the first shot of Alfred Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden (1925), a line of women stream down a spiral staircase backstage at a theater. In the last shot of Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot (1976), Barbara Harris sits down on a staircase, looks into the camera, and winks. In the fifty years and over fifty films between these bookends, Hitchcock made the staircase a recurring motif in his complex grammar of suspense -- a device by which potential energy could be, metaphorically and literally, loaded into narrative, a zone of unsteady or vertiginous passage from one space to another, always on the verge of becoming a site of violence. Nearly every Hitchcock film includes stairs somewhere -- with the exceptions of a few films in which the setting precluded it (Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948), for instance) or in which the genre did not call for it (in his only outright comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), they use elevators to get everywhere). Even though I acknowledge that there are already plenty of Hitchcock supercuts out there and that further auteur-fetishization is probably the last thing we need, I threw this one together anyway because I thought it up with a friend nearly 10 years ago and wanted to see the idea through. From now on I execute every idea I get immediately, so that better editors like Steven Benedict don't beat me to the punch again. Shout-out to Jacob Schmidt, whose Stairs to Suspense cuts together scenes of staircases from 18 Hitchcock films, and to Room 237, whose 39 Staircases in Cinema also punningly rips off the title of Hitchcock's 1935 classic, but which collects staircase scenes mainly from other filmmakers. Sifting through those other variations of this idea, it strikes me that the Hitchcock supercut is probably a genre unto itself by now. In the fullness of time, it may become possible, with the help of higher dimensions, to make a supercut of Hitchcock supercuts. So maybe I made this one just to help make that possible. Until then, we turn and turn in the widening gyre... Films featured, in order of appearance: Frenzy (1972) The Trouble with Harry (1955) Rear Window (1954) North by Northwest (1959) Bon Voyage (1944) Number Seventeen (1932) Easy Virtue (1928) The Lady Vanishes (1938) Marnie (1964) Young and Innocent [The Girl was Young] (1937) Sabotage (1936) To Catch a Thief (1955) The Birds (1963) Rebecca (1940) Under Capricorn (1949) Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Saboteur (1942) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Family Plot (1976) The 39 Steps (1935) The Paradine Case (1947) The Wrong Man (1956) I Confess (1953) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) Topaz (1969) Foreign Correspondent (1940) Blackmail (1929) Jamaica Inn (1938) Stage Fright (1950) Strangers on a Train (1951) Spellbound (1945) Rich and Strange [East of Shanghai] (1932) The Pleasure Garden (1926) Torn Curtain (1966) Vertigo (1958) The Lodger (1927) Suspicion (1941) Notorious (1946) Psycho (1960) Apologies for leaving out the escalator in Downhill (1927) and "the fifth step" in Dial M for Murder (1954). Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/239872105 https://www.maxtohline.com/other-videos daily 0.75 2026-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625066127220-K9C50OD313NCHI6J3T6J/image-asset.jpeg Other Videos - MegaFavNumbers: 10,112,359, 550,561,797, 752,808,988, 764,044,943, 820,224,719 a video by Max Tohline 2020 9 minutes In 2020, James Grime and some other Math YouTubers put out the call for anyone who wished to upload a video celebrating their favorite number greater than one million. I couldn't resist participating with my choice: 10,112,359, 550,561,797, 752,808,988, 764,044,943, 820,224,719 Links mentioned in the video: My sequences in the OEIS Neil Sloane's lecture that mentions one of my sequences Robert Dougherty-Bliss's brilliant response to that sequence That algorithmic experimental film, and another one My article in Bright Lights Film Journal that discusses how mass ideology might be analyzed via trends in the history of the IMDb Top 250 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYwFna4XJjo https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625067089701-TW1P6P4ERVUU6MR2CIXP/image-asset.png Other Videos - Shall We Gather at the River in 8 Films by John Ford a supercut by Max Tohline 2017, rev. 2020 4 minutes It's well-known that director John Ford loved the hymn "Shall We Gather at the River," but for some reason I couldn't find a compilation online of all his films that use it. So I put this together. This video contains a clip from every other John Ford film (that I know of) that features Shall We Gather at the River. If you find another, please let me know. Featuring: Tobacco Road (1941) My Darling Clementine (1946) When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950) Wagon Master (1950) 7 Women (1966) Stagecoach (1939) The Searchers (1956) another clip from Tobacco Road (1941) for good measure 3 Godfathers (1948) Note: Shall We Gather at the River shows up twice in The Searchers (I've only included it once) and what seems like a dozen more times in Tobacco Road. Twice felt like enough. Thanks again to commenter Kristijan Golubović for pointing out the instance in When Willie Comes Marching Home. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNsli_oy6zc https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625068065151-V04ZZQP8CKF83IC73IU2/image-asset.png Other Videos - Radetzky March Supercut a supercut by Max Tohline 2015 4 minutes Selections from 5 Decades of the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concerts. Every year, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra gives a New Year's concert, and every year they close with Johann Strauss Sr.'s Radetzky March, and every year the conductor conducts the audience in clapping along with it. Here's a compilation of 21 performances from around Youtube. (I wonder what Bakhtin would say about the chronotope of the same piece in the same concert hall, performed year after year, collaged together like this?) YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewgUHC2cOdU https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625068232029-2BROCTM2K8Q8BIVZ8YA1/image-asset.png Other Videos - 6 Hammers from Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6 a compilation by Max Tohline 2014 1 minute A quick split-screen comparison of 6 different hammers used by major orchestras in the performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6 "Tragic." Featuring Michael Tilson Thomas & WDR Symphony Orchestra, Claudio Abbado & Lucerne Festival Orchestra, Bernard Haitink & Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Bernstein & Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Paavo Järvi & Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Hee-Chuhn Choi & Korean Symphony Orchestra. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QLqwaQjYjI https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625068713491-63SNYVMU6YYJLHOHSXW0/image-asset.jpeg Other Videos - 1 + 1 = 1 or 1 + 1 = 3 a long-form supercut by Max Tohline 2014 32 minutes For the occasion of her April 2014 wedding, my sister asked me to put together a supercut of wedding and relationship clips from movies to play on a loop in a room adjacent to the reception for people (like me) who might like a break from the hubbub. As soon as I started putting clips together, the project began to balloon well beyond what she wanted, taking a bizarre and at times curiously hybrid form. Though I ended up cutting it down for her actual wedding reception, I've chosen to upload my "director's cut" here to Vimeo. At times funny, at times touching, and at times encyclopedic, there's plenty here to enjoy and to reflect upon. I hope you'll watch it all. The title refers at once to an ancient concept of marriage ("the two shall become one," thus 1 + 1 = 1) and a somewhat less ancient concept of film montage (that the cut will create a meaning beyond the meaning of the two shots by themselves, thus 1 + 1 = 3). Thanks to Penny Lane for making The Voyagers (here), to György Pálfi for making Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, and to Tim Dirks for his useful best-of lists at filmsite.org. Titles listed at the end of the video. Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/92108543 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1626021924327-DCAZP0K5ORQMC3KPZW6X/image-asset.jpeg Other Videos - The Essay Library Anthology, Vol. 2: TIME a video by 17 creators 2021 19 minutes The Essay Library discord server invited creators to contribute micro-essays (1 minute apiece), which they collected into this anthology. Mine is the second in the list and starts at 1:11, but you should just hit play and watch them all. Playlist link (with individual video links): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf8nkNAU9qB4dVJ2Oy5t-R27dMbH1A_93 Just my video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcKyDXIqCuY Full compilation link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Meiwn6-NApk Sources for my contribution: The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1923) Bazin, Andre. "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," 1945 At Land (Maya Deren, 1944) Big Little Lies S1 E3: Living the Dream (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2017) Kino-Eye (Dziga Vertov, 1924) The Cameraman (Buster Keaton, 1928) La Cartomancienne (The Fortune Teller) (Jerome Hill, 1932) Olympia, Part II: Fest Der Schonheit (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938) The Testament of Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1960) Sargent, Epes. W. "Comedy Relief." in Movie Makers Magazine, Volume IV, February 1929, p. 124 S.A. Girl Divers (British Pathé, 1943), youtu.be/1n28188vc1U The Reflecting Pool (Bill Viola, 1977) music video for Danny Wilson's The Second Summer of Love (1989) Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (Simon West, 2001) music video for Beyoncé's Hold Up (Jonas Åkerlund, 2016) Resident Evil: Retribution (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2012) Shriners Hospitals for Children: Love to the Rescue - Tori (Leo Burnett (agency), 2013) Samsung Galaxy S9 Official TVC Remix Your Everyday (Samsung, 2018), youtu.be/z6gedDEBKxU Time (Garrett Bradley, 2020) (probably the only film that could possibly live up to that name) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1628562719178-NH3D80TS2NIWU3I0AMQF/image-asset.png Other Videos - TV Dictionary - Cosmos a video by Max Tohline 2021 5 minutes An effort to encapsulate Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980) in one word. Part of Ariel Avissar's TV Dictionary series, here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/8660446 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1642856992313-B3U986WTVY5B4I26704I/image-asset.jpeg Other Videos - The Strange Beauty of Absurdle's Algorithm A short gaming essay on a weird but marvelously elegant pattern I found while messing around with Absurdle, a 'knockoff' of Wordle that changes its answer as you play to avoid whatever letters you've guessed. Try it here: https://qntm.org/files/wordle/index.html Gaming, when done right, ought to be a form of essayism: an attempt to tinker with inputs and strategies until you find out how it works, and how to make it do stuff that its creators never intended. YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6_1uyjGE-o https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1669396030565-0P9F0MJXPVVB8YHIT4C1/image-asset.png Other Videos - Essay Library Anthology 4: Video Essay Title Bot We Asked A Bot to Name 18 Video Essays The Essay Library Anthology Vol. 4 [A Micro-Essay Compilation] This video is a collection of 60-second video essays created by members of the Essay Library discord community (linked below!). For this collaboration, we each chose a title generated by the Video Essay Title Bot (on Twitter @videoessaytitle) and went wherever it told us to go. Strap in and visit the randomized vistas of insanity and illumination that the Bot sent us to! YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXJ1juaozPc https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1769133089676-UUL4LF5HNZ60TFBSZ79Z/image-asset.jpeg Other Videos - Onscreen a Dream, Offscreen a Waste (Essay Library Seasons Collab) A piece on the technological destruction of seasons, time, and space. Image-making is ideologically and historically inextricable from (and indeed should be understood as an extension of) the ravages of all the other machines of the anthropocene. 2024 1 Minute Made as part of The Essay Library's Seasons collab, which is here: Compilation: 27 Video Essays About Seasons Playlist version: The Essay Library Anthology Vol. 8: Seasons Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI_93r47-aY https://www.maxtohline.com/pagecv daily 0.75 2026-01-23 https://www.maxtohline.com/about daily 0.75 2026-01-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1624991316310-W4N2P5BE9OCLK6NNFZZ3/10624712_794618357493_7505023583492684251_n.jpg About - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.maxtohline.com/supercuts-1 daily 0.75 2021-09-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625449863034-5W3HJTOQYK4LBQRP1OEZ/vlcsnap-2012-07-15-20h42m38s98.png Supercuts - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.maxtohline.com/found-footage daily 0.75 2021-07-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625587099691-QIIOGFCMV9LRHYR90XJX/Ew4R9IIW8AIt4ax.jpg Found Footage https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625587099427-Z7QBTM5PEIPRU8QHQOBH/Ew4R9IGWgA40ht0.jpg Found Footage https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1625587100693-IIZCZI8371NZTSZ8U2LV/Ew4R9IIWEAAvNNm.jpg Found Footage https://www.maxtohline.com/at-least-i daily 0.75 2021-07-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/1626003550281-E7N0YCIUC9CTAY6DYWPJ/IMG_8548.JPG At Least I - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.maxtohline.com/2021 daily 0.75 2021-11-24 https://www.maxtohline.com/surface-tension daily 0.75 2022-04-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/68728134-7700-4fb4-bd84-a180dcc9d784/vlcsnap-2019-05-12-12h15m03s042.jpg Surface Tension - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/4cb4bcce-a84f-40bc-9e6d-c79398940627/vlcsnap-2019-05-14-20h28m37s710.jpg Surface Tension - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/33a6bb0b-5447-42e5-9490-4ad33ec88acb/vlcsnap-2019-05-16-07h15m41s490.jpg Surface Tension - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/c8a3837e-360d-4e01-8d59-eb8c926c44ac/vlcsnap-2019-05-18-08h13m12s776.jpg Surface Tension - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.maxtohline.com/baftss-conference daily 0.75 2022-04-13 https://www.maxtohline.com/2022 daily 0.75 2022-11-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60da74a22a7d8e78215744c6/390fd20b-5587-4f1f-92ea-6fa369539fd7/Tsar+top+5+borzoi+thumbnail.png 2022 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.