Supercut: Joel Burges

Initially, I used various levels of opacity to create a much more sentimental supercut about masculine movement and gay desire. I also excerpted a song from “Call Me by Your Name” that emphasized sentimentality (see embodied supercut #1). But then I decided I wanted to do something more formal than felt, restricting myself to the parameters established for the prompt as rigorously as possible. This led to an experiment in using editing to embody movement, to give corporeal form to what seems like pure content: men moving through space in the world of a film or series, especially spaces—or passages—of gay desire. The aural, sonic, and musical shifts from clip to clip, moreover, offered more than the excerpted song originally had. They better evoked the resonances and dissonances of passages through gay desire, of cruising as a mobile form of eros. More personally, this supercut is about what it means to pass from one position as a gay man to another, to move towards a different horizon—a vanishing point distinct from the place where you began.

embodied supercut #2