78/52

The documentary is about a single scene: the shower sequence in a horror film of 1960. The numbers in the title are the setups and the cuts made for it. The scene runs forty five seconds and was shot over seven days. The film covers how it was prepared, why it was cut so many times, how the sound was made, and what happened when it was released. Alexandre O. Philippe directs. The documentary is shot in black and white. Directors, editors, sound designers and critics speak to camera; all of them watch the same scene again and again and talk about it. The technical details shown are concrete: the knife never touching the body in any frame, the blood being chocolate syrup, the sound made by cutting a melon, and the use of the strings. Its second subject is what the scene changed in cinema. Killing the main character in the middle of a film had not been done, and it set the pattern of the horror cinema that followed. The documentary is notable for being a full length film about one scene, and that form was argued over. Some of the commentators load the scene with more meaning than it will bear and the film keeps no distance from that. Who it is for: anyone interested in film technique and the history of horror. Who it is not for: the subject is very narrow, it repeats, and the scene is given away entirely to anyone who has not seen the film.