The Silver Screen Remix

Film is my artistic medium of choice. I devote countless hours to watching hundreds upon hundreds of films, from foreign and obscure art flicks such as Gummo and Irreversible to blockbusters like The Dark Knight. My aspiration is to be a film director. So as we read about principles of remix, it makes me ponder the remix in cinematic terms. How is the remix principle used in film? It is common for directors to homage shots from other films in their own. The most obvious example is Quentin Tarantino, whose films are essentially cinematic collages of a variety of previous films and TV shows. But film remixes are also done on a much smaller scale. YouTube is populated with recut trailers, in which existing footage is cut into a parodic preview. I myself once took dozens of Simpsons clips and set them to the trailer audio from Martin Scorsese's The Departed. One of the most popular and well-made recut trailers on the web is a cut of Stanley Kubrick's atmospheric horror film The Shining made to look like a heartwarming family film.