I had Return of the Jedi running while I was cleaning the basement over the weekend, and I noticed something interesting. at one point, while Jabba the Hutt is getting some of his living-frog sushi from its bowl, the camera pans up from Salacious Crumb to Jabba and I noticed that the smoke billowing behind Jabba was going backwards in an impossible manner. The bubbles in the frog Cup were going down, as well. Clearly, that clip was printed going backwards.
it could be because (as someone suggested to me) it was difficult to actually catch the damned frog (or frog puppet – I forget which is used at that moment) in that clumsy hand, and it was easier to simply film it backwards, showing the thing being released, and either not noticing or caring that the smoke and bubbles gave the move away.
It reminded me that in the second Bond film, From Russia with Love, the scene of Rosa Klebb and the Siamese Fighting Fish is, according to the documentary on the DVD, reversed for some reason.
these are different from cases where the reversed film serves a purpose, either humorous (as in the Bookstore sequence in Top Secret!) or eerie (as in the final Dream sequence in Carrie, or the many backwards-speaking sequences in Twin Peaks)
Any other cases? In particular, any other cases you weren’t supposed to notice?
Also, in A New Hope, you know when the Tusken Raider knocks down Luke and stands over him pumping his arms? That is just a shot of him raising his arms rewound and played back a few times.
I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be noticed but the second last scene in* Carrie * is apparently printed in reverse. I presume so the audience will subconsciously pick up on a ‘something’s not quite right, here’ way.
When Dorothy’s house falls and lands on the camera after the big twister in The Wizard of Oz, that’s just a shot from the ceiling of a model house dropping to a sky-painted floor and then played backwards.
A lot of effects scenes were shot in reverse (as in the Wizard of Oz, noted above), for obvious reasons. The Parting of the Red Sea in the silent version of The Ten Commandments is pretty obviously simply film run backwards. The ran portions of the film of falling water backwards for the effects sequence showing the same thing in the 1956 remake. And the “Creation” scene in the 1910 “Edison” Frankenstein is very obviously simply running the destruction of a model backwards (The smoke, as in Return of the Jedi, goes the wrong way).
Are there any others? Especially ones in which it wasn’t a cheap way to do a special effect?
Uh huh. I don’t think there’s actually a single backwards-running scene in that flick, though.
In Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) a vampire returns to her coffin - a reversal of footage of her leaving the coffin. This film celebrated the fact that it used old film techniques to create its effects.
I’ve often wondered about the scene from The Big Lebowski, when the Dude passes out, hard on a glass-top, coffee table.
The shot is filmed from below. I always figured the brothers Coen must have had Jeff Bridges lie as if passed out on the table top, had someone yank him up off of the glass and then run the shot backwards. Don’t know for sure but that’s what it’s always looked like to me.
There’s a scene in Shane where Jack Palance’s character mounts his horse - which was just a shot of him dismounting (from earlier in the same scene), run backwards.
Apparently, Palance had a lot of trouble getting on and off his horse, so the one dismount that went well, was also used for mounting when he had to get back on his horse.
Another possibility occurred to me – in a film of Akira Kurasawa’s –Ikiru, I think – the film starts with a train pulling into a station and when it stops you can see a woman through the train window, perfectly framed. That would be tough to arrange, unless they filmed the train pulling out of the station, then ran it backwards.
In The Blob, there’s a scene Steve McQueen is backing up his car really fast, and the exhaust goes backward. That’s because he was really driving forward.
In the Chaplin short Behind the Screen, an overhand axe swing narrowly misses Chaplin, accomplished by filming it backward.
Some Nicholas Cage movie had a dream sequence where he’s an EMT that was filmed backward to give it that ‘not quite right’ feeling.
In The Pride Of The Yankees, Gary Cooper was filmed wearing a uniform with the number sewn on backwards, batted righty, and ran to third instead of first. Then they reversed the print - all because Cooper was a righty and Lou Gehrig was a lefty.
That seems likely, especially since he lands with a dead stop. I also read somewhere (possibly in I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski) that the bag-toss scene at the wooden bridge was indeed filmed in reverse, so the Coen brothers are familiar with the technique.
Actually, Memento begins with the Poloroid being shaken so that the image on it gradually disappears (and I believe right after, we see the gun jump back into his hand and the cartridge jump up and re-enter the gun when the shot is backwards-fired).
I see this quite a bit with car stunts. Cars driving “backwards” but no reverse lights on.
I do remember one shot in particular in Planes, Trains and Autommobiles towards the end where there’s a quick shot of the El, and you can see someone walking backwards on the platform.
I still remember one like that from It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Right near the end, when the characters are being thrown off the fire ladder and landing in various near-catastrophic ways, one of them (Spencer Tracy, I think) crashes through the window of a pet shop. There’s a big dog repeatedly licking his face, but it’s just a very short shot run backwards and forwards a few times.
I wonder if that’s just a measure of the growing sophistication of filmmaking techniques. It’s blatantly obvious to anyone watching it now; did audiences in the '60s really fall for it?