About

Paul Thomas Annotated: In the Margins is an open access resource devoted to the filmography of Paul Thomas Anderson. Our project involves annotating, scene by scene, screenshots from each of his ten narrative films to date (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, One Battle After Another).

We aim to make PTA’s films more accessible to audiences including scholars, students, filmmakers, fans, and casual viewers. We provide commentary via annotations that address the many parts of these films: mise-en-scène, dialogue, camerawork, character, intertextuality, intratextuality, narrative, and other analytical and aesthetic elements. Each image includes alt-text, as well as metadata that allows readers to sort images through technical filters related to the visual aspects of each shot or thematic tags that facilitate connections among the films.

Our approach is rooted in the concept of margins. PTA’s protagonists—whether porn actors, a misanthropic oil magnate, or eccentrics who fall into each other’s romantic orbits—consistently reside outside various accepted societal boundaries. On another level, we view our annotations as marginalia akin to the notes left on the edges of a book, film script, or image. Individually, these commentaries provide users with key insights into the workings of the films; taken together, they contribute to broader readings.

We hope that this site’s innovative and community-oriented body of knowledge can generate novel methodologies for the analysis and appreciation of film. We envision Paul Thomas Annotated: In the Margins as a teaching tool for other instructors as well as an interlocutor for both PTA fans and those new to his films. Moving beyond the margins, perhaps this digital annotation project can become a portable model for other subjects and purposes.

Technical note: Our project website is built with CollectionBuilder. The images from the films are made available in International Image Interability Framework (IIIF) format through a static (level 0) implementation and are compatible with the Presentation API 3.0. Annotations are added to the IIIF manifests with liiive, and the images along with their annotations are displayed on the site in an embedded Glycerine Viewer. The collection metadata is available for download in CSV and JSON formats. For reference purposes, each image from the film has been assigned a unique ID based on its film of origin, represented as a four-letter code, and its timestamp, minus the colons. For example, the first image from Punch-Drunk Love has the timestamp 0:00:39, and its ID is PUNC-00039.

Project Team

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following individuals, groups, and institutions for their help and support as we build Paul Thomas Annotated: In the Margins.