Film clips that take on a different meaning

July 31, 2010 8:00 PM

Is there a word within film circles to describe the cassandric effect of a shot carrying greater weight than the director originally intended due to events that occurred after the release of the movie?

I was watching Wall Street the other day and the last shot of the film is quite arresting because it is almost at the exact same angle that the now infamous video of the second plane hitting the WTC tower took place.

Now, without going into the politics of capitalism and jihad in general, the shot definitely (in my mind at least) carries a different weight than Oliver Stone originally intended and frankly left me with quite a chill while the credits rolled.

This is a topic that I think will gain more and more traction as the visual memory in our consciousness grows as more and more films are added to the catalogue.

So, is there a term used for this type of event? I'm not just making reference to the World Trade Center. It could be any shot in cinema which takes on a different effect (but relevant to the story) because of events that take place after the filming. I used the word "cassandric" in the initial question but it's not really cassandra, because the director couldn't possibly make these predictions (although the film "arguably" could).

Thanks for listening.

posted by fantasticninety to Grab Bag (14 answers total)

I don't think there's a word for it, but "cassandric" is awesome.
posted by musofire at 8:27 PM on July 31, 2010 [8 favorites]

This simply sounds like a version of serendipity.

I like "cassandric," but to really make that word work, nobody should believe you. ;-)
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 8:33 PM on July 31, 2010

The inevitable TV Tropes link: Harsher in Hindsight. Though since this trope is for shots/scenes/lines that are already meant to have particular independent impact, it's not a perfect analogue. Neither is its opposite number, Funny Aneurysm Moment, which refers to a joke that stops being funny after a tragedy.

This is not really an answer, but the fact that nobody's come forward on TV Tropes with a better/more "official" term than either of these rather clumsy coinages makes me wonder if there is one.
posted by thesmallmachine at 8:46 PM on July 31, 2010 [2 favorites]

Your description makes me think of the similar phenomena in vocabulary: Retronyms. We now say "analog watch", "snail mail", "landline phones" to distinguish them from the new technical versions, even though the old things existed for years without needing the adjectives.

So, yeah, your movie idea is not the exact same, but it's still a thing that existed at one time on its own, then something else happened later which caused the old thing to be reconsidered in a new light.

So if you were going to coin a new word for the phenomenon, I think I would use the prefix "retro" and join it with something like retro-foreshadowing or retro-significance.

I'm just shooting out ideas to see if it helps someone else think of something better.
posted by CathyG at 9:51 PM on July 31, 2010 [3 favorites]

Retroracular?
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:58 PM on July 31, 2010

Retroracular?

Fess up - how many people read that with a Scooby Doo voice??
posted by CathyG at 7:14 AM on August 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

Parviscient? (Found it by looking up prescient, means the same thing but with less knowledge. If I was creating the word, I would spell it paraviscient.)

There is a word that is sort of a negative of fortuitousness, but I can't recall it right now. Fortuitous implies something that happens that is better or more fortunate than expected, or deserved or was prepared for. If fortuitous is positive and serendipity is neutral, this word is the same thing but with a negative result. Damn my cloudy brain!

I enjoy watching old reruns of Kojak, and find this effect you speak of all the time. One of the themes of the show is about the drudgery of the "pure", how the bad world shits on good people all the time, and what makes them good is how they react to it. And the theme of Kojak (and the rest of the police force) as Sisyphean heroes, constantly trying to stem the tide of bad versus good. And then there is a framing shot of the gleaming new WTC buildings, promising a brighter tomorrow. Kick in the gut, every time.
posted by gjc at 7:23 AM on August 1, 2010

Best answer: Retroshadowing. A new word needs to be invented for this new style of thought.

Credit should go to CathyG - I just combined two of her thoughts.
posted by chrisinseoul at 7:30 AM on August 1, 2010 [3 favorites]

This type of event will, now and forever, be "freelance arts administrator" to me...
posted by Leon at 7:47 AM on August 1, 2010

Response by poster: Of all the suggestions, "retroshadowing" sounds most likely as something that would roll off the tongue and could gain traction as a word.

Thank you for all of the great answers here. For anyone interested, Leon's joke only makes sense if you had seen a comment before it was erased (the guy had put his answer here instead of in another column).
posted by fantasticninety at 8:59 AM on August 1, 2010

Response by poster: gjc, you're not looking for the word "forebode" are you?
posted by fantasticninety at 9:01 AM on August 1, 2010

"Post-shadowing" would sound better to me...my two cents.

Cool word ideas all around though.
posted by dubitable at 9:30 AM on August 1, 2010 [1 favorite]

And, see, I like the idea of keeping the "fore" prefix on -shadowing, but putting another prefix (retro or post) in front of that. So it would indicate that that we in the present are looking back into the past where the original foreward-facing-foreshadowing took place to look at a time in the interim between the past and the present. I think my favorite is "post-foreshadowing".
posted by CathyG at 12:27 PM on August 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Cathy's idea is good, and I could see a commentator say "it was a kind of post–foreshadow if you will".
posted by fantasticninety at 8:45 PM on August 5, 2010