Persuasive Falls

The video collage, The Discussion about the Reasons of The Falls, contains and mashups a series of recognisable film footages from The Fall, Sherlock, Sherlock Holms, to The Avengers, Titanic and many others. The producers of this remix video, Tippo and Maria, selected and edited the pieces of characters falling from the high in those films for the purpose of discussing the use of the fall in movies. The video starts with five falling scenes: the little girl falls from the stairs, the hero (played by Lee Pace) falls into the pool, man in white suit falls from the wall, the green dressed warrior cuts the rope and falls, and the hero falls again in the movie called The Fall which reinforces the title and the aim of this video. From both the content and the written description of the video, the producers divided the falling scenes into three subcategories: Fall for Fun, Fall in Love, and Fall into Danger. These subcategories are related to the content of the film plots as the causes the characters’ behaviours. At the end of the video, the

producers draw the conclusion for using the falling scenes as “For No Good Reasons”; however, in the written description below the video, Tippo admitted that she “did not come up with a very good solution” for why the falling scenes have been so widely used in different genres of films.
Nevertheless, the one aspect that Tippo has done particularly well for adding the amusement and fluency to the video is her took the characters’ dialogues out of the original context and altered them as the narrator to express her point. For instance, Tippo has used the lines from Sherlock the first episode in the third season as the introduction to her point of Fall for Fun: “Bit mean springing it on you like that. I know. Could have given you a heart attack, probably still will. But in my defence, it was very funny.” In the original episode, those lines are said by Sherlock when he returned from his fake death and shows up at John’s proposal dinner as a part of his explanation of such surprise. However, when the lines been edited and used in the video, it becomes as if Sherlock is talking to the audience and explaining the cunning effect of having the main character been dead for years and leaving all the fans wondering and grieving before the coming of the third season.
The potential/intention of the producers is to discuss the reasons why do so many movies want to have the scenes of falling.

From what the video has achieved, however, one could argue that the video is more about categorising the purpose of the falls by the content of the plots, rather than revealing the purpose of having the falling scenes as a cinematic narrative technique. The motivation of this video just reminds me one theory in Linda William’s article, Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, in which she argues that any impacting actions or behaviors bear the purpose of manipulating the audience’s body at a sensational level which recalls the tactile memory of the audiences themselves in order to create the sense of immersion. Technically, this is my reading of why do films often tend to have all types of falling scenes because they create intension and arise curiosity about whether or not the character is still

alive.
In terms of how appropriation functions in this video, it matches up with Eli Horwatt’s concept of a trailer mashup remixing video. According to Horwatt, “trailer remixes do not necessarily have a serious agenda,” yet could aim at “[mocking] the entire marketing apparatus of films.” (7)After all, this video collectively and explicitly shows how many falling scenes have been used in various genres of films, and one could argue that the producers are critiquing the use of the fall becomes another cliché in the cinematic narrative language. If so, the conclusion that Toddy draws could mean differently and even comprehensively that the use of falling scene is “for no good reasons” but merely an eye-catching cliché. Not only the using “amalgamation of multiple source materials” proves this video to be a mashup trailers remix video, more significantly, it “[composes] a montage from disparate films, which are given continuity through creative scene selection and editing.” (9) while watching this video, the audiences are supposed to recognise the scenes from different films which possibly recalls the memories of how the audiences felt at the first time they have watched the scenes in movies. Whereas, taking the falling scenes out of the original context and mashup so many of them together in a series could either make the audiences realises more explicitly of the power of such scene; or make them feel less sensitive for the overuse of the falling scenario.