“I’ve noticed that when peo­ple remem­ber Lawrence of Ara­bia, they don’t talk about the details of the plot,” writes Roger Ebert in his “Great Movies” col­umn on the 1962 David Lean epic. “They get a cer­tain look in their eye, as if they are remem­ber­ing the whole expe­ri­ence, and have nev­er quite been able to put it into words.” Redun­dant though it may sound to speak of a “film of images,” Lawrence of Ara­bia may well mer­it that descrip­tion more than any oth­er motion pic­ture. Its vast images of an even vaster desert, as well as of the tit­u­lar larg­er-than-life Eng­lish­man who turns that desert into the stage of his very exis­tence, were shot on 70-mil­lime­ter film, twice the size of the movies most of us grew up with. To expe­ri­ence them any­where but in a the­ater would be an act of cin­e­mat­ic sac­ri­lege.

The small screen ren­ders illeg­i­ble many of Lawrence of Ara­bia’s most’s mem­o­rable shots: Omar Sharif rid­ing up in the dis­tance through the shim­mer­ing heat, for exam­ple. Oth­ers are such tech­ni­cal and aes­thet­ic achieve­ments that their appre­ci­a­tion demands full-size view­ing: take the assem­bly of two images that comes out of a search for “great­est cut in film his­to­ry.”

It invari­ably comes out along­side the bone and the satel­lite from Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Lawrence of Ara­bia’s famous cut more than makes up in sheer sub­lim­i­ty what it lacks in com­par­a­tive his­tor­i­cal sweep. It occurs ear­ly in the film, just after the young British army lieu­tenant Lawrence has received word of his impend­ing trans­fer from Cairo to the Arab Bureau. He lights a cig­ar for Mr. Dry­den, the diplo­mat who arranged the trans­fer, blows it out, and sud­den­ly the sun ris­es over the Ara­bi­an desert.

“If you don’t get this cut, if you think it’s cheesy or showy or over the top, and if some­thing inside you doesn’t flare up and burn at the spec­ta­cle that Lean has con­jured, then you might as well give up the movies,” writes The New York­er’s Antho­ny Lane in his remem­brance of the direc­tor. But Lean did­n’t con­jure it alone: the work of the cut was done by edi­tor Anne V. Coates, who died just last year. “The script had actu­al­ly called for a dis­solve, in which one scene slow­ly fades into anoth­er,” the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Travis M. Andrews writes in a piece on her edit­ing career in gen­er­al and this edit in par­tic­u­lar. “Today, that can be done quick­ly with edit­ing soft­ware. At the time, though, film­mak­ers and edi­tors had to cre­ate the effect by hand, order­ing extra neg­a­tives of the film, which was then often dou­ble exposed and over­laid with each oth­er.”

“We marked a dis­solve, but when we watched the footage in the the­ater, we saw it as a direct cut,” Coates told Justin Chang in Film­Craft: Edit­ing. “David and I both thought, ‘Wow, that’s real­ly inter­est­ing.’ So we decid­ed to nib­ble at it, tak­ing a few frames off here and there.” Ulti­mate­ly, Coates only had to remove two frames to sat­is­fy the per­fec­tion­ist direc­tor. “If I had been work­ing dig­i­tal­ly, I would nev­er have seen those two shots cut togeth­er like that,” she added, throw­ing light on the hid­den advan­tages of old­er edit­ing tech­nol­o­gy, not in terms of price or speed but how it made its users think and see. (Famed edi­tor Wal­ter Murch has writ­ten along the same lines about the ideas gen­er­at­ed by hav­ing to man­u­al­ly roll through many shots to find the right one among them, rather than dig­i­tal­ly jump­ing straight to it.)

Coates had also “con­vinced her boss to check out a cou­ple of these new-fan­gled nou­velle vague films, ‘Chabrol and that sort of thing,’ ” writes The Guardian’s Andrew Collins. “Rather than be affront­ed by their sub­ver­sive jump cuts, Lean was enam­ored, and embraced the French style.” And so it’s in part thanks to the rule-break­ing of the nou­velle vague — which, with Jean-Luc Godard­’s Breath­less released less than two years before, was cer­tain­ly nou­velle — and in part to the lim­i­ta­tions of the edit­ing process in the ear­ly 1960s that we owe this unim­prov­able exam­ple of what, in tech­ni­cal lan­guage, is known as a “match cut” — or more specif­i­cal­ly a “graph­ic match,” in which a con­nec­tion between the visu­al ele­ments of two shots masks the dis­con­ti­nu­ity between them. So is 2001’s sin­gle-frame jump over mil­lions of years of evo­lu­tion, of course. But Lawrence of Ara­bia’s immor­tal match cut is the only one that uses an actu­al match.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

A Mes­mer­iz­ing Super­cut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Lawrence of Ara­bia Remem­bered with Rare Footage

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

“It’s not what a movie is about,” Roger Ebert famous­ly wrote, “it’s how it is about it.” Sub­ject mat­ter, we might say, sep­a­rates the weak film­mak­ers from the strong: those who require a strik­ing “high con­cept” (killer doll, body switch, Snakes on a Plane) fall into the for­mer group, while those who can make a film about absolute­ly any­thing fall into the lat­ter. It’s safe to say that not every­one is moved by the scene in Amer­i­can Beau­ty where the cam­corder-tot­ing teenag­er wax­es poet­ic about his footage of a plas­tic bag in the wind. But what would sim­i­lar mate­r­i­al look like in the hands of a more assured direc­tor?

For an exam­ple, have a look at Plas­tic Bag, the eigh­teen-minute short above. Every cinephile with an inter­est in Amer­i­can film knows the name of Plas­tic Bag’s direc­tor, Ramin Bahrani. Over the past decade and a half he has emerged as the mak­er of unusu­al­ly pow­er­ful and real­is­tic glimpses of life in his home­land, focus­ing on char­ac­ters like a Pak­istani immi­grant run­ning a New York bagel cart, an orphan work­ing at a chop shop, and a Sene­galese cab dri­ver in North Car­oli­na.

In its own way, the pro­tag­o­nist and title char­ac­ter of Plas­tic Bag is also at once an out­sider to Amer­i­can life and a fig­ure insep­a­ra­ble from it — and voiced by an insid­er-out­sider of anoth­er kind, the Ger­man film­mak­er Wern­er Her­zog. (Their col­lab­o­ra­tion has con­tin­ued: you may remem­ber Her­zog’s appear­ance in a Bahrani-direct­ed episode of Mor­gan Spur­lock­’s series We the Econ­o­my about a lemon­ade stand.)

Begin­ning his jour­ney at a gro­cery-store check­out counter, he spends his first few hap­py days at the home of his pur­chas­er. But not long after this idyll of ser­vice — car­ry­ing ten­nis balls, being filled with ice to numb a sprain — comes to its inevitable end, he finds him­self deposit­ed into a land­fill. But the wind comes to his res­cue, car­ry­ing him across a series of sub­ur­ban, post-indus­tri­al, and final­ly rur­al land­scapes as he looks des­per­ate­ly for his own­er.

Ulti­mate­ly the bag makes it into places sel­dom seen by human eyes, with a com­bi­na­tion of grav­i­tas and won­der imbued by both Her­zog’s dic­tion and the music of Sig­ur Rós’ Kjar­tan Sveins­son. Watched today, Plas­tic Bag feels more ele­giac than it did when it debuted a decade ago, since which time plas­tic-bag bans have con­tin­ued to spread unabat­ed across the world. How long before not just the hero of Bahrani’s film, but all his poly­eth­yl­ene kind fade from exis­tence — for­got­ten, if not quite decom­posed?

Plas­tic Bag has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog, Mor­gan Spur­lock & Oth­er Stars Explain Eco­nom­ic The­o­ry in 20 Short Films

Wern­er Her­zog Nar­rates Poké­mon Go: Imag­ines It as a Mur­der­ous Metaphor for the Bat­tle to Sur­vive

Wern­er Her­zog Reads From Cor­mac McCarthy’s All the Pret­ty Hors­es

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Watch Wern­er Herzog’s Very First Film, Her­ak­les, Made When He Was Only 19-Years-Old (1962)

Start Your Day with Wern­er Her­zog Inspi­ra­tional Posters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.