Eliza Janssen provides a shortlist of film history’s finest short-but-sweet moments: intentional or unintentional shots that make us react, whether we notice them or not.
High-definition playback and a nicely smackable pause button has made Easter egg hunting easier than ever in the streaming age: a timely click can prove that yep, C3P0 and R2D2 make a cameo in Indiana Jones’ hieroglyphs, or that Sharon Stone should indeed be very pissed off with Paul Verhoeven.
But nothing compares to the first moment these millisecond-long tricks and treats first glanced across your eyeballs. It’s such a thrill to see something on screen that simply shouldn’t be there, and to look at your fellow cinemagoer in shock: is it just me, or…did Bilbo just lose his shit over some jewellery and briefly go Gollum-mode?
I’m here with a list of my six or so favourite blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments from cinema, to say nope, it wasn’t just you. Hover over the pause button and enjoy.
The George Miller Eye-Pop
Here’s a cartoonish little gag that Aussie director George Miller has used a few times, in his segment for Twilight Zone: The Movie but most significantly in 1979’s original Mad Max. To encourage us viewers to feel like our eyes are being yanked out of our heads by the climactic carnage, Miller literally splices in two shots of the villain Toecutter’s eyeballs protruding from their sockets, right before he’s smeared below the wheels of a truck.
You can hover between minute 1:05 and 1:06 in this clip above to see how Looney Tunes it looks, but, swept up in the pace of the scene, the gnarly subliminal edit just works as an accent to the chaotic, hysterical logic of the action. It’s even more subtle in Fury Road, but still slaps there too.
Adam Sandler gets hypnotised by the rock
Just to keep the eye theme going here, the Safdie brothers also dared to ocularly toy with their characters and us in Uncut Gems, albeit with effects that look more like a Snapchat filter than Mad Max’s gummy practical magic. Sandler’s conniving hustler Howard is so happy with his delivery of the titular rare black opal that his eyes, almost unnoticeably, shrink down to about half their size.
It feels like an impulsively added post-production gag, but it works: it’s funny, unsettling, and sets up that this rock is a black hole, vacuuming up what little scruples Howard has left.
Conspiracy theories I choose to believe
Okay, so I frustrated everyone watching Uncut Gems with me by throwing off the tense momentum of the movie to play and replay that scene. But I’m not the only one obsessed with picking out these seemingly meaningful lil cinematic nuggets!! Film freaks over the years have become convinced that there’s a ghost visible in the background of Three Men and a Baby (actually just a cut-out of Ted Danson), that a “munchkin” committed suicide on the set of The Wizard of Oz, or that the late Elvis Presley is alive and well and taking on extra work in classic Christmas kino. It must be noted that all this harebrained evidence comes from films that conspiracists would have seen in grainy celluloid or VHS transfers.
Directors with an impish taste for this sort of thing are often willing to feed into the tin-foil-hat theorizing: Mel Gibson in particular can’t help himself.
Pterodactyls in Citizen Kane
Here’s one that I really love, because it ties together two of early Hollywood cinema’s greatest tales of man’s towering, corrupted ego. In Welles’ masterpiece, we see large black birds soaring in the background of an unromantic picnic scene, as Charles Foster Kane’s marriage falls apart.
But are they birds, or animated pterodactyls, borrowed from King Kong sequel Son of Kong and re-matted into Kane’s mansion? There’s no definitive proof on whether those are actually second-hand dinosaurs, but both Kane and Kong 2 were produced by RKO Pictures, so it’s easy (and very satisfying!!) to imagine the under-funded Welles team lazily grabbing that footage and saying she’ll be right.
Scary subliminal shots
Horror is the genre where half-noticed shots thrive in our subconscious the best, relying on canny editing and a less-is-more approach that makes half-imagined nightmares like The Exorcist‘s Captain Howdy so unforgettable. For a more drawn-out moment, I loved the recurring creepiness of a librarian hovering in the periphery of one Loser Club member in It: her placid, possessed presence generating more terror than many of the series’ more noisy, repetitive, CGI-driven scares. It’s all very old-school, distracting the front of your brain with obvious spookiness while a deeper, uncanny horror steals your wallet in the background.
And many a horror fan has tried to wring as much gore and dread as possible out of the glimpses of destroyed spaceship crews we see in Sunshine and Event Horizon. They’re torturously quick, but these moments would lose their impact if we were left to bask in their nastiness for even a tenth of a second longer.
Bad extras
Nobody’s paying attention to German No. 12 in the background of their favourite war movie…at least not the first time you watch it. But when you revisit a movie you really love and probably know a bit too well, your eyes might wander, and come across some non-union, half-assed, craft-services-table-scouring gold.
There’s the lad sweeping nothing but air in Quantum of Solace, some schlubs idly smiling while they should be screaming or somber in Dunkirk and Jaws…Although I do feel some pity for the poor child actor in North by Northwest who must’ve been rattled after so many takes of Eva Marie Saint’s gun going off, plugging up their ears to ruin the Master of Suspense’s suspense for us viewers.
Then we have 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, which could also earn a spot in the scary category above for the snippet of a chicken being beheaded in the film’s infamously traumatising tunnel scene. The movie almost has two beheadings, because in the opening “The Candy Man” sequence, the songful lolly-peddler visibly whacks one unlucky kid in the face as he gallivants around the store. It’s at 1:54.
I feel bad for laughing at the unintentional slapstick, but at the same time I really want to shake that kid’s hand: she got out of the movie bruised but in one piece, unlike some other bratty characters we could mention.
