And so the Every 10 Minutes feature returns, and let’s hope it never leaves my side again, because something about this one showed me this exercise is now very important…
We all love film for so many reasons, and one of them is the obvious visual element. I wanted, like these individuals, to highlight this idea but at the same time without completely taking and repurposing it.
Then I started to question what if the same progression we witness over the film’s complete runtime was able to be condensed into only a few images, but rather than being selective of those images make it completely structured? What would we notice now that we may not have while watching the film? And this idea is born.
The idea is this, take a film and take a snapshot every ten minutes (as close as possible with my feeble shakey hands on VLC) and play with the narrative and focus of the film. This week I want to look at the film from 1992 film The Last of the Mohicans.
Looking at the images below I find it intensely interesting that other than a off centre shot late on we don’t see Daniel Day Lewis, the lead and apparent last mohican by the end of the tale, at all. We’re presented with the story of Magua (Wes Studi) and his seeking for revenge against the white man who destroyed his family and left him with nothing but hate in his heart — as he puts it so clearly in his few moments of dialogue.
This might actually help make it clear what it was I disliked so much about this movie. It claims to be about the last of the mohicans but according to the below it isn’t. When I watched it a month of so I felt almost nothing towards Lewis’ character. Yes we see him lose his family and have to “survive” this war and the English are dicks (see the Scottish referendum), but none of that really hit me too hard. Including the fact that he falls for this English lady so quickly after all of his family have been murdered in front of him. It felt like cinematic action film grandstanding while at the same time trying to wear the disguise of being important historical cinema. At least The Patriot knew what it was right? Here it’s just lying to us.
However, looking at these images and the focus being on Magua vs. The English sounds the right story. Both are in the wrong and are doing it for their own equally ‘valid’ superficial and emotion filled reasons. Anyone out there want to try and re-edit this film so that Lewis becomes an unimportant side character for me?
