Only the Staring from the Twilight Saga

You can now watch a 26-minute supercut of all the instances of staring in all the Twilight movies.

I recommend it.

Yes, the framing is a bit corny, as if it were a video game or an educational video made to inform you about how much staring there was. Less could have been more.

There are earlier video art projects that do similar things, and more of them. One of my favorite precursors is the brilliant Every Shot, Every Episode by Jennifer & Kevin McCoy. Housed in a suitcase, it is an interactive installation that allows access to 10,000 clips from Starsky & Hutch which have been categorized in 300 ways — every extreme closeup, every yellow Volkswagon, every affirmative response, and so on.

In fandom there seems to be less interest in exhausting every shot of a certain type, but I think each of the individual parts of 21 Vidlets about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a bit like this.

I liked the video because it raises questions about movies in general (is this amount of staring too much? What’s typical? Which directors have the most staring?) and about staring (how can it be different? What counts as staring?). And, of course, the movie or YouTube viewer’s activity, in the most stereotypical case, is nothing more than staring.

One Reply to “Only the Staring from the Twilight Saga”

  1. I especially liked the Buffy vidlets, because of the music. I never really heard “They Might Be Giants” (with the exception of Particle Man and Istambul), but I did play all the Apollo 18+20 IF games, so I did not know any of the songs but I recognized them all almost instantly, from the games I played. Wee-ird!

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