The Thinking Machine #54

In their series The Thinking Machine, critics Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin create a new video essay for De Filmkrant every month.

Cinephilia has its severe extremes, and one of the toughest and bleakest of them is surely Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s intense In a Year of 13 Moons (1978). Gazing, one more time, at the sequence in which Erwin/Elvira (Volker Spengler) and pals dance merrily to a Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin musical number, ‘Face the Music’, naturally sparks a desire to look again at the original scene in You’re Never Too Young (1955). But what we can find on YouTube of this jolly old film contains a disturbing alteration… a change that expresses a strange “fear of the cut” in cinema.