The final scene of Damien Chazelle’s new film Babylon has taken the internet by storm for its YouTube-like use of a film clip montage that takes viewers from the earliest days of cinema right up to today, or at least, 2009. Some have mocked the montage for its internet-influenced feeling and dismissed the whole scene as a filmmaking-lite, nostalgia-based gimmick. Showcasing crowd-pleasing movies like Jurassic Park and The Matrix certainly can have the effect of making you point at the screen and say “I know that!”, especially amid cinema’s current infestation of legacy sequels. But Chazelle is a craftier filmmaker than he is getting credit for. In addition to supporting the emotional catharsis of the ending and putting a bow on its showcase of Hollywood as a messed-up place out of which springs magic, the history the montage covers is very specific. Rather than just playing a few of the hits or even his personal taste, Chazelle chose very specific films and shots that pushed the technology of cinema for their time.
The Parallels Between 'Babylon' and 'Singin' in the Rain'
The montage begins after Manny (Diego Calva) enters a movie theater playing Singin’ in the Rain. Like that film, the story of Babylon up to now is intensely occupied with perhaps the biggest innovation in cinema: sound pictures. As Manny watches scenes from Singin’ in the Rain, he reminisces. We flashback to an earlier scene, contrasting them with the film as Manny watches it. At this point, he will never get to participate in Hollywood again, his dreams crushed by the talkies. Because of the talkies, Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) could no longer make money as a movie star since her voice didn’t suit her sensual persona. This drove Nellie to seek out moneylenders and when she could no longer pay her debts, Manny put out his neck for her only for him to be chased out of town.
Some of this is reflected in Singin’ in the Rain. Nellie’s inability to adapt to the talking picture is very similar to Lina Lamont’s arc in that film. Chazelle has placed several other similar sequences in his movie as well, like Jack Conrad’s (Brad Pitt) inability to adjust to acting with sound being just like Don Lockwood’s (Gene Kelly) initial problems, down to the exact misguided reading of the line “I love you! I love you! I love you!” which turns a scene from sincere romance to comedy. The titular song itself also appears earlier in Babylon when Manny is producing it as a musical number. This is historically accurate because, like all the songs in the film, “Singin’ in the Rain” wasn’t original to its era but rather mined from older Hollywood musicals.
Defeated by the sadness that the magic is all over, Manny collapses his head into his hands. The camera cranes down from his balcony seat to the crowds below as they watch the famous “Singing in the Rain” scene, where protagonist Don Lockwood has finally turned his luck around and sings a song about his delight. The audience is clearly infatuated. Suddenly, the scene picks up, along with the upbeat trumpeting score. The film begins to interlace clips from earlier in the film about movie magic. Now inside Manny’s head, he realizes the immortality of movies. We hear Manny’s own voice from earlier in the film explaining to Nellie why he wants to be in the picture business. “I just want to be a part of something bigger. Something important. Something that lasts, something that means something,” he declares over shots of a camera being set up and film stock being loaded as if readying us for what comes next.
What Films Are in 'Babylon's End Montage?
The montage proper then begins with The Horse in Motion, which Nope fans will easily recognize for its place at the forefront of film history. Showing a man riding a galloping horse, this 1878 sequence of twelve images taken back-to-back by photographer Eadweard Muybridge is generally considered the first ever moving picture and spawned the art of chronophotography. If you’ve ever watched a nature documentary showing a flower blooming in seconds, or the stars moving swiftly like a hollow orb around the Earth then you’ve seen some examples of this technique. The Horse in Motion is appropriately placed at the beginning of the montage. Every movie you’ve seen utilizes the technological principle this demonstrated; when you take pictures fast enough and play them at a certain speed, it looks like they’re moving. To drive the point home, Babylon next shows Cat Trotting, Changing to a Gallop, part of Muybridge’s 1887 series of photographs “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements,” and the first ever cat video.
The third shot is a shortened version of the Lumière brothers' 1895 film L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, more commonly known in English as Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. The French filmmaking brothers are often considered the premiere filmmakers; their projection technology made film into a social art and a type of entertainment that could be experienced by large crowds. La Ciotat isn’t their first film but has become famous for the urban legend that during its first showing the audience panicked, afraid the train would fly right out of the screen and hit them. Again, Chazelle chooses a movie that changed the technology of cinema, and here started choosing movies that democratized its value as well.
We continue with two more novelty shorts. There’s Annie Oakley, an Edison (yes, that Edison) Manufacturing Company picture from 1894 showcasing the shooting skills of the real Oakley. Birth of the Pearl comes next, an erotic 1903 short from underappreciated filmmaker F. S. Armitage, who created many new tricks for movies such as running film backward for the illusion of object movement defying gravity. These were movies as they used to be; storyless gimmicks and exhibitions of things people wanted to see at the time: a celebrity with a gun and a near-naked woman. We haven’t come that far.
Chazelle Chooses Movies That Furthered Cinema History
Cinema’s history, and thus this montage, takes a turn with Georges Méliès’ 1902 short Le Voyage Dans La Lune, or A Trip to the Moon. The famous shot in the montage depicts the moon with a rocket landing on it as a face being hit with something in its eye. In this and many of his other works, Méliès pushed special effects to their limits, particularly using substitution splices where a filmmaker will cut a shot, take something out of or add something into the frame, and then continue the shot, giving the impression that the something has appeared or disappeared. The film’s emphasis on story and special effects rather than reality made it incredibly popular, and it often takes the name of the first-ever science fiction movie.
The next handful of shots showcases Méliès influence directly through their fantastical stories. There’s Ali Baba et les quarante voleurs (in English, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves) from 1902 which used a painted-on color technique and a famous shot from 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, which along with its innovation of the direct-to-camera technique is usually thought of as the first western. The fantasy short Little Nemo (1911) introduces animation to the montage as it once helped introduce it to history, then D.W. Griffith enters the fray with his 1915 epic Intolerance, the first feature-length film here and like every movie in the montage, a huge part of film history in ways numerous enough to deserve its own article. The shot in Babylon is actually of Intolerance’s Babylon location. Charlie Chaplin, who surely needs no introduction, flexes in the montage in his film The Champion, reminding us of old silent stars. Then we see a shot from the 1915 French serial Les Vampires, a huge influence on experimental film that leads right up to French New Wave. The Cecil B. Demille epic Joan the Woman (1916), the 1925 partially animated film La Voix du Rossignol (The Nightingale’s Voice), and Le Ballet Mécanique (1924) further Méliès mixture of populace film with experimental techniques that push the borders of how to use a camera to tell a story.
A very quick shot of The Jazz Singer follows suit, the 1927 film that introduced audiences to sound in moving pictures and, as shown in both Babylon and Singin’ in the Rain, changed filmmaking forever. A quick shot of jazz musician Duke Ellington in 1929’s Black and Tan follows, an example of the kind of jazz-based musical showcases audiences scrambled for after sounds invention which Sidney Palmer (Javon Adepo) participated in earlier in Babylon. A quick shot gives us a look at Noah’s ark from The Hollywood Revue of 1929, the film containing the song “Singin’ in the Rain” that Manny was earlier helping to produce. The next shot from Piccadilly (1929) will be the last on the border between silent pictures and talkies, and between the colorless and the colorful.
'Babylon's Montage Honors the Colorful Talkies
Although it was not the first color film by a long shot, the next famous shot from The Wizard of Oz introduced much of the public as well as the Babylon audience to true color as we now see it. Again, look at how this mixture of democratization of film and technology is blended. To assure us this wasn’t just an American man’s game, we see the Russian epic Ivan the Terrible Part II (1944), the Mary Ellen Bute-directed experimental animated short Tarantella (1940), the romance film Love Letter (1953) from Japan’s second ever career female filmmaker Kinuyo Tanaka, and drama epic Pather Panchali (1955) from influential Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy. Next, a shot from 1953’s Duck Amuck establishing the metanarrative about Daffy Duck being erased is a perfect call to attention of Chuck Jones and other cartoonists that pushed the limits of animation. Two high-speed shots follow; one from This is Cinerama (1952) brought new aspect ratios to the screen and one from Ben-Hur (1959) reminds us how game-changing the stunts of that film were.
Chazelle then stops being so stuck on sequential release dates to showcase more experimental movies. He goes all the way back to 1929 for two nonsequential shots of a famous eye-cutting special effect from Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou sandwiching two shots, the first from the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho and the second from Hans Richter's 1947 movie Dreams That Money Can Buy. The sandwiching places both films' suggestive gore on the same level as Buñuel’s explicit effects. More experimental movies from all eras follow. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) is followed by two French films: the epic La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and the drama Vivre sa vie (1962). Lucía is next, a tri-narrative drama about three Cuban women across history named Lucía. There is a shot of oranges from the experimental kaleidoscope lensed short N.Y., N.Y. (1957) which clearly had a huge impact on Chazelle's style, followed by footage from Borom Sarret (1963) which is widely considered the first film made by a black African man. The editing quickens as Chazelle doubles back on himself, returning to Le Ballet Mécanique and another from Meshes of the Afternoon before The Black Vampire (1953) is followed by another double back to Les Vampires, the contrasts showcasing how similar the shots are; cinema influences itself. Now the imagery goes psychedelic; we see shots from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Jean-Luc Goddard’s Week-End (1967), the abstract Matrix 1 (1971), and a jolting shot from the digitally crafted short Sunstone (1979) to establish films that push the boundaries of what cinema can do before we head back to typical Hollywood fare.
The Montage's Final Clips Pay Homage to Practical Effects and Computer-Generated Imagery
The film gives us its first of two Steven Spielberg showcases of practical effects when it shows divine power coming from the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). But of course, most audiences probably best remember five movies near the end of the sequence: Tron (1982), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Jurassic Park, The Matrix, and Avatar (2009) all revolutionized how to we use computer generated imagery in movies, and the individual shots in particular for T2 and Jurassic Park showcase standout feats of special effects wizardry. Avatar also stands out as the only movie in this montage that was not shot on film, including Babylon itself. This will be notable in a moment; first there’s a shot from Ingmar Bergman’s 1965 film Persona of a child touching a film screen, poignantly casting myth, marvel, and mystique over all of cinema’s history. Then there is a sequence set within the dyes used on physical film stock, interspersed with shots of movies within Babylon, scenes from Babylon itself, colors filling the screen, an old school film start countdown, and footage from Singin’ in the Rain.
Many critics and online appreciators miss the point of this montage. As you can see, this isn’t just “the canon” of greatest or even most historically significant movies as Chazelle sees it, but rather a montage of shots and films that changed how we make movies, just as The Jazz Singer did for the characters of Babylon. After a movie that is so much about how the ongoing progress of technology makes a monkey of Hollywood while producing magic for cinemagoers, Chazelle ends his movie planting the idea of an endless frontier stretched in front of its characters right up to and past our current moment in which cinema is an ever-evolving form on both an artistic and technical level. As Manny learns, listening to Gene Kelly’s voice, crying and smiling in his theater seat, the movies will live on, and as all the filmmakers from Eadweard Muybridge to James Cameron know, it was just fun to have once been there as part of the magic.