Three Hundred Films, Seven Minutes, One Year Gone

A year at the movies compresses surprisingly well. Gen Ip cut 300 films from 2013 into a single seven-minute supercut, and the result is both an inventory and something harder to name—a texture, the specific feeling a year has when it’s over and starting to recede. Not ranked, not argued about, just placed end to end until the blockbusters and the quiet films nobody saw become neighbors, occupying the same few frames.

2013 was a split kind of year. Spring Breakers divided people cleanly—Harmony Korine had either made something genuinely strange about American desire, or he’d made a movie with girls in bikinis and guns, and the argument about which became more interesting than either answer. Star Trek Into Darkness arrived and quietly became, in retrospect, the template for everything franchise cinema would do wrong for the next decade. Despicable Me 2 made a billion dollars, because children don’t care what any of us think.

The supercut is its own genre now, and this is a good one. It doesn’t editorialize. It puts everything in sequence and trusts that juxtaposition does the work—thirty seconds of superhero carnage, then a quiet face from a film you’ve never heard of, then something else entirely. For a moment the distance between those two things feels like a real critical statement. That was the year. Both of those things at once, and everything in between.