Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
Matthias Stork, a German film scholar now based in Los Angeles, has created a most stimulating two-part video essay on a subject near and dear to my heart: "Chaos Cinema." At Press Play, it's given the sub-head "The decline and fall of action filmmaking," while an analysis at FILMdetail considers it from the angle of technology: "Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the Avid." Stork, who also narrates his essay, describes his premise this way:
Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking.... Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.
Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It's a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits. Directors who work in this mode aren't interested in spatial clarity. It doesn't matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what's happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones. [...]
Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment. It's an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower, to hypnotize viewers and plunge them into a passive state. The film does not seduce you into suspending disbelief. It bludgeons you until you give up.
It seems to me that these movies are attempting a kind of shortcut to the viewer's autonomic nervous system, providing direct stimulus to generate excitement rather than simulate any comprehensible experience. In that sense, they're more like drugs that (ostensibly) trigger the release of adrenaline or dopamine while bypassing the middleman, that part of the brain that interprets real or imagined situations and then generates appropriate emotional/physiological responses to them. The reason they don't work for many of us is because, in reality, they give us nothing to respond to -- just a blur of incomprehensible images and sounds, without spatial context or allowing for emotional investment.
Chaos Cinema Part 2 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
Stork uses frenetic scenes from movies by Michael Bay ("Bad Boys 2") and Marc Foster ("Quantum of Solace"), among others, as examples of chaos cinema's deliberate obliteration of spatial integrity; other pieces from Peter Yates ("Bullitt"), John Woo ("Hard Boiled"), John McTiernan ("Die Hard"), John Frankenheimer ("Ronin") and Kathryn Bigelow ("The Hurt Locker") show how various techniques of chaos cinema (rapid cutting, handheld shaky-cam) can be used effectively to immerse the viewer in a more dimensional rendering of the scene. (Ironic that at a time in which films are shoving 3D effects at us -- and failing -- editing patterns should be destroying illusions of inhabiting three-dimensional space in favor of flat -- two-dimensional -- action-painting. But remember: these stylistic devices are either the result of aesthetic choice, or incompetence, or some measure of both. Their use has been a trend, or a fad, at least since "Top Gun." The key question is: What is the aim of any particular sequence? To create suspense, emotional involvement, astonishment at a physical feat? Or to simply buzz the retinas, zap the nervous reflexes, regardless of anything else?)
In a piece called "Sound and fury" in The Australian last October, critic Lynden Barber quotes Karen Pearlman, president of the Australian Screen Editors Guild and author of "Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit" on Philip Noyce's Angelina Jolie thriller "Salt," a film I cited as a salutary example of how to use chaos cinema techniques effectively. In "Salt, she says,
"we are treated to the sight of Angelina jumping from the roof of one moving truck to another, a trick no real human, not even a Russian-trained evil super spy, could possibly ever do. So, either the fantastical nature of the trick gives the filmmakers a license to be fast and loose with factors of realism such as time, space and gravity, or the filmmakers are thinking that to pull this off they will have to dazzle our eyes with movement from all directions and cut very fast so we can't get our bearings: they are deliberately disorienting us.
"For a chase to be well cut, in my view, it needs to move elegantly and dynamically: there actually have to be rises and falls in the pace and energy, otherwise I just get numbed to the action. The other thing they need is to keep the stakes firmly planted in my thoughts and emotions. This is accomplished by sufficient use of the shots that show me what is at stake."
Good point, but a bad example, I'd say. More about that later. Barber, too, writes:
Noyce is an enthusiastic proponent of the new aesthetic, adapting its methods in "Salt," although in this writer's view he still makes it possible to follow what's happening throughout the action scenes. Asked if incoherence is now a problem in Hollywood action thrillers, he replies: "Not to me, but then I'm not necessarily looking as an audience member -- and I don't necessarily think the audience member is looking for coherence; they are looking for a visceral experience. If they want coherence they can watch television."
Noyce may well be right, given the box-office success of what David Bordwell has called "blur-o-vision," and Steven Boone has dubbed "snatch-and-grab" aesthetics. We've had many a discussion here at Scanners about whether action sequences in movies like "The Dark Knight," "The Hurt Locker," "Speed Racer," Salt" J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" and the Bourne movies hang together or fly apart in all directions.
What Karen Pearlman talks about -- playing "fast and loose with factors of realism such as time, space and gravity" -- does not necessarily result in chaotic incoherence. I'm a hardcore Keatonian, and while most of Buster's stunts obey the laws of physics, some are far crazier (like the ride on the handlebars of a driverless motorcycle in "Sherlock, Jr.," for example) than the truck jumps in "Salt," which are not unlike things Keaton or Yakima Canutt might have done for real. (Probably they did, jumping between trains or stagecoaches; I just can't locate the precise scenes in my memory right now. Take a look at my video essay, "The Architecture of Gravity, in which Alan Ladd jumps from a bridge onto a moving train in "This Gun for Hire" (1935 1942).¹
In "Unsteadicam chronicles," David Bordwell details how the run-and-gun techniques of "Late Tony Scott Rococo" style can be used to cover a multitude of cinematic sins, from plot holes to bad acting. In "Chaos Cinema," Stork demonstrates how sound is used to create the illusion of continuous action between shots, even when there is none:
Chaos films may not offer concrete visual information, but they insist that we hear what is happening onscreen. Ironically, as the visuals in action films have become sloppier, shallower and blurrier, the sound design has become more creative, dense and exact. This is what happens when you lose your eyesight: your other senses try to compensate. Consider how relentless machine-gun fire, roaring engines and bursting metal dominate the opening of Marc Forster's James Bond entry, "Quantum of Solace." The scene's dense sound effects track fills in the gaps left by its vague and hyperactive visuals. But the image-sound relationship is still off-kilter. What we hear is definitely a car chase--period. But what we see is a "car chase."
This is something than merits further exploration. We're so visually oriented, I don't think we pay enough heed to sound in movies. It can really tie the room together. And while I concur with David Lynch about watching movies on tiny screens, I also know that if the sound is big and detailed enough, the image feels that way, too. (It's just as much a sadness to watch a movie on a big screen with tiny sound -- even a picture from the 1930s.)
Barber quotes Lee Smith and John Lee, who edited Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight" and "Inception" -- movies I feel suffered from incoherently edited action sequences. (Stork takes his title from The Joker in "TDK.") And yet they say all the right things:
They stress that while editing elaborate scenes they have lots of private screenings for small groups -- friends and family -- and then quiz them to check they've understood exactly what going on. "It's very important to film the action scene so it has some meaning," Smith says. "It sounds simple but it's not really. It's quite easy to over-cut a sequence: make it visually exciting and lose track of what is happening and who the characters are. Sometimes the logical ability of the audience to know what's going on is lessened."
"Inception," with its ultra-byzantine narrative about dreams within dreams, presented a special challenge. "The action has to be exciting but we didn't want to make it any more complicated than it needed to be," says Smith. "The action has to have cause and effect, to make the audience stay with us and not to wonder why something was happening.
"Where you can't follow action, it's not just action, it's the whole movie you can't follow. Action is very difficult, it has to be very carefully planned and conceived," Smith says, adding that he and Lee work hard to avoid "pointless cuts" or try to give a scene "colour and movement using shots of camera-waggle and blurring. It's a trick, and I'm guilty of using it [on other movies] where the action hasn't been planned as well. Those are never as good as a well-conceived sequence."
Once again, I certainly don't take issue with those statements... and yet (as anybody who's visited Scanners since 1998 knows) I don't find Nolan's action particularly well put-together. (What's happening in "TDK," I'd argue, is that the audience is kept a few beats behind the action, constantly filling in the gaps in the action in retrospect during the lower-level highway chase -- you put it together by the process of elimination: when a vehicle blows up or crashes you know it isn't one of the ones they're still cutting to -- which is a theoretically interesting approach even if the result is a mess.) So, the funny thing is, many of us would agree that "chaos cinema" techniques are commonplace in American commercial cinema, but we don't necessarily agree on which individual movies use them incoherently and which use them effectively. (Except we mostly all know that Michael Bay is bad.)
I quoted something Steven Spielberg said a few years ago:
I go for geography. I want the audience to know not only which side the good guy's on and the bad guy's on, but which side of the screen they're in, and I want the audience to be able to edit as quickly as they want in a shot that I am loath to cut away from. And that's been my style with all four of these Indiana Jones pictures. Quick-cutting is very effective in some movies, like the Bourne pictures, but you sacrifice geography when you go for quick-cutting. Which is fine, because audiences get a huge adrenaline rush from a cut every second and a half on "The Bourne Ultimatum," and there's just enough geography for the audience never to be lost, especially in the last Bourne film, which I thought was the best of the three. But, by the same token, Indy is a little more old-fashioned than the modern-day action adventure.
So, where does this leave us -- or, more precisely, me? I find myself in disagreement with the words (but not the filmmaking) of a director I admire, Phillip Noyce, while agreeing with the words of Nolan's editors, even if I don't think their work lives up to their ideals. Not only that, but I think "The Bourne Supremacy" is superior in action terms to "The Bourne Ultimatum," both of which were directed by Paul Greengrass, and that you can't get a "huge adrenaline rush" when the cuts are coming every second and a half (more like several times a second) because those rhythms are unsustainable and quickly become monotonous simply because no crescendos are possible. (Which is the way I feel about the high bpms of hardcore techno, too, but some people can dance to the stuff all night long, with the aid of the right drugs.)
Your turn. Which films do you think are the worst offenders when it comes to chaotic style? Which work for you? Please give us some solid examples of where you got lost, or how a particular sequence generated excitement.
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¹ I'm not sure which jump Pearlman is talking about in "Salt," because there are three of them more or less in a row. The sequence is structured like an escalating slapstick gag (which is how it plays), each jump outdoing the previous one: 1) Salt tumbles off an overpass onto the back of a container truck; 2) she jumps from that truck onto the top of a tanker truck in the next lane; 3) she jumps from the tanker to a smaller truck on a lower parallel highway ramp. It's hard to convey the sense of velocity in these moving shots, and in the cutting; the camera is in motion in many of the shots, each of which which may last for only a fraction of a second, but each shot has a clear purpose in the way it conveys visual information.
The first jump is in three shots: 1) from the overpass, we see Salt roll over the railing;
2) an overhead shot shows her falling toward the top of the moving container;
3) from the top of the truck, she lands and bounces/rolls into the foreground. This is classical filmmaking style -- with, perhaps some green screen instead of old-fashioned back-projection in the second shot, and CGI (to remove safety cables).
The second jump is set up with a view from behind a stopped police car, looking down on a curved underpass. The tanker truck becomes visible on the other side of the container truck Salt is on as they come through the curve.
Then: 1) medium shot of Salt preparing to jump;
2) high angle from the container truck's side, where we can see both truck tops and Salt starts running away from the camera toward the tanker;
3) moving shot from above, behind and between the two trucks as she actually jumps from one to the other;
4) quick reverse-angle shot from below and between the trucks as she passes over;
5) high angle from the tanker truck's side, beginning with Salt in mid-air and ending after she lands on the tanker and nearly slides off the side facing the camera;
6) close on her landing, grabbing a pipe and pulling herself up.
Again: no cheating -- in shots 2 through 5 we see both trucks, and in shots 3-5 we can clearly see she has both feet in the air. This is emphatically not "blur-o-vision." Also, shots 3 and 4 cleverly take us from one side of the road to the other.
The third and most desperate jump is likewise set up by establishing three agents in the foreground on an overpass as the tanker approaches them on the road below while another, smaller, truck is on another ramp below it and to the right. It's a Keatonesque thing of beauty, actually. On the far left, an agent points his gun at the oncoming Salt. Next to him is Salt's colleague, played by Liev Schreiber. The truck is in center screen, and in the right foreground, the agent played by Chiwetel Ejiofor also has his gun trained on Salt. To his right is the smaller truck on the offramp. They start shooting.
A reverse-angle from the top of the truck shows the agents on the overpass as Salt turns away. Then:
1) a moving shot follows Salt as she runs away from the gunmen along the back of the tanker (note national monuments in the distance) and flings herself into the air toward the truck below and to the right;
2) low angle, looking up at airborne Salt between the two moving trucks;
3) high angle as she falls toward the smaller truck (I dig the shadow);
4) low angle of the rear and side of the truck as she lands, then crane up as she rolls off the top and dangles from the side.
We can assume that straps, harnesses and CGI-removal were used, but these are not the weightless trapeze flights of Sam Raimi's Spidey. Chances are a regular ol' person would not have made the landings or would have rolled right off and splatted on the roadway. But an action movie's job is rarely to show you what an ordinary driver could do with a commercially available vehicle. (You think Steve McQueen's 1968 Mustang fastback in "Bullitt" was a standard factory-equipped model?)
You could make the argument that it was equally unlikely that Batman in "The Dark Knight" could attach a cable to a semi truck, thread it through the train station while on the back of his Batcycle, and cause the truck to flip over backwards, but that's not the point. It's a cool stunt, and plausible enough because we see it happen. Never mind that it was actually done with a hydraulic piston: we see that truck flip, and we can tell it's a real-world stunt, not a computer-generated effect.
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Not to be pedantic, but the novel This Gun For Hire was based on (A Gun For Sale) came out in 1935. The movie was released in 1942.
I was watching a (Disney?) movie called The Musketeer the other day. In one sequence they cribbed stunts from Keaton (jumping from horse to horse) and Ford (moving under the stagecoach with back on the ground) and in both cases they cut away several times where those directors had let the cameras roll. Interesting from a certain point of view but extremely aggravating to watch.
I'll see your pedantry and raise you, with a ricochet into free association.
I suspect that the 1935/1942 confusion in the reference to This Gun for Hire resulted from mentally sideslipping some tasty film history. This Gun for Hire is the 1942 Paramount picture that made a star of Alan Ladd. The success of TGfH led Paramount to rush Ladd and costar Veronica Lake into another film, The Glass Key. The 1942 The Glass Key, directed by Stuart Heisler, was the second movie version of Dashiell Hammett's novel, which Paramount had acquired the rights to for a 1935 film. The 1935 version of The Glass Key was directed by Frank Tuttle. Frank Tuttle directed This Gun for Hire. I've recently had several conversations in which people have mixed up these three films, had Tuttle directing the Heisler version of TGK, had Ladd starring in all three films (actually, the 1935 TGK starred George Raft), etc. The confusion is furthered by the rarity of the 1935 film these days--which is a shame: it's a fascinating movie, and seems to have specifically inspired a few distinctive touches in yet another sorta-version of The Glass Key, the Coen boys' Miller's Crossing. But I digress even within this digression. Main point is: 1935/1942 This Gun for Hire is not only a forgivable slip--it's almost noble.
I think the first movie I saw that really bothered me in how the action was edited was the Bourne Supremacy; the Bourne Ultimatum had a similar feel for me. It seems I'll always be in the minority on this but to me the first Bourne film was a classic action movie. As for the "adrenaline rush" shown in's two films, ugh, no. There is no adrenaline rush when I can't tell what's going on and it takes me out the film. Instead it just feels like lazy film making, or somebody that can't properly choreograph an action scene. The first film, particular the scene out in the snow with Bourne having a rifle was so much more intense because you could tell everything that was happening and therefore would be surprised by whatever happened next.
I must have watched this scene from "Inglourious Basterds" 20 times to figure out all the specifics of who shoots whom:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypgJq4Fx23o
Luckily someone posted it in slow motion, too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h5auYAwoiw
The only visual information that is NOT in the scene is, interestingly, 2 of the 3 good guys being shot dead. We see who shoots them, but we don't see them going down. The only good guy we do see die (Wicki, the last one), is in long shot.
Thank you for this enlightening article. I sympathize with your dilemma about filmmakers' statements and works. I would like to emphasize and expand upon a particular point you raise in the essay which, in my opinion, crystallizes the crux of chaos cinema.
You conclude that the rhythms of excessive editing "are unsustainable and quickly become monotonous simply because no crescendos are possible". The key words are monotony and crescendo. In classically staged action scenes, viewers can not only the follow the action as it unfolds, they can gain an immersive experience by the careful building of suspense. In chaos cinema which operates on an all-climatic narrative design, suspense-building is a non-entity. And of course, the overuse of stylistic technique is another syndrome. I feel that in many cases, style may not be the Achilles heel. It is not a matter of aesthetic incompetence (many chaotic directors are adept at technique) but of narrative conceptualization. The action scenes do not display any evolution, no dramatic arcs. They begin with a bang, transition into a BANG and conclude with a "BANG,BANG,BANG". As a result, spectators are overwhelmed, numbed by the monotony of the scenario.
This is particularly the case in QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Compare it to CASINO ROYALE or any other BOND opening: QUANTUM shows no true build-up. Car crash after car crash leads to a final car crash, without any pause for dramatic effect. I find that undesirable but it illustrates chaos cinema's compulsion for insubstantial spectacle. More is better, at all times. The principle that you can build more from less, even on the stage of conceptualization, is rare.
The analogy between chaotic technique and drug consumption is apt, particularly the physical effects. And I am glad we both agree that chaotic technique is not inherently flawed. The execution is problematic!
Thank you for expanding upon the essay; as a long-time reader, this is truly an honor for me!
Thank YOU, Matthias, for such a thoughtful and detailed piece of work. I think I've watched it four times now and, if I may say so, I find it thrilling!
I am humbled by your praise. I am glad you consider the piece thought-provoking :-)
"The Hurt Locker" may not suffer from "chaos" editing, but its wobbly, perpetually shaky cinematography was nauseating and completely unnecessary.
I've mostly lost my interest in American action films for this reason. Whether the "chaos cinema" aesthetic is used effectively or noxiously, it leaves me feeling empty at best, confused at worst. I find it disappointing how prevalent the technique has become, and if a film is built up of nothing but action it loses me completely. If this is the aesthetic of action we have to live with, the best uses of it are those where action is simply part of, not the whole, attraction of the film. The Swedish Millennium Trilogy is fairly chaotic it its action sequences, but the films are enjoyable because there are additional elements such as characters, story, etc.
For the most part, I've turned to Asian action for my "adrenaline rush." The precise choreography of entire scenes rather that chaotic editing is a much more prominent stylistic strategy in Hong Kong films like the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy, the whole ouvre of Johnny To and Team Milkyway, and recent South Korean films such as The Chaser and Secret Reunion.
What irks me more than super quick editing is the use of the extra shaky hand held camera. It seldom makes me feel like I'm more in the action; I usually just feel like a cat chasing a laser pointer. If used effectively shaky cam can add a lot of excitement to an action sequence; take Munich or Saving Private Ryan. But all too often shaky cam is used for an entire movie regardless of whether or not it helps the story. Battle: Los Angeles is a good example of how not to use shaky cam.
Most people seem to understand what's going on in an action piece from Nolan, but I can't, so it would be futile to argue that nobody can understand the action, since clearly some people can. All I can do is point to the editing and explain what I find confusing, but if someone tells me that everything is clear for him, who am I to say that he's seeing something that cannot possibly be there? So, altough I do tend to agree on the whole that action movies are more incoherent today, I would not necessarily take the same examples (for the most part, I think Greengrass movies are quite coherent, I can easily follow the scene from The Expendables in that video, and even Bay is not that bad, the last Transformer was well-staged, with long shots, far from the action, and a beautiful display of colors - yeah, I know, I use "beautiful" to describe a Bay movie). I think we can use these action scenes to make a larger point about a movie as a whole, as an example of sloppy editing or of the incoherence of the staging, like you do Jim with Dark Knight, but it's difficult to make any kind of generalization on the basis of something so subjective.
This explains partly why I can't accept this idea of chaos cinema who intends to "overpower" and "hypnotize" the audience. Because if it's the aim, and it suceeds, then we should not be able to see it, we would be hypnotize and we won't be able to talk about it. But if it does not suceed, then how can we know what the director wanted to do, if his intention doesn't show in the final result? The incoherent mess we often see is more likely due to lazyness or a loss of craft, or by simple imitation of something that seems to work (these movies are making money after all, and the audience doesn't seem to complain).
I really like the way you put this, sylvain. I just got a cleaner disc for my MacBook's internal and external optical drives, so I'm going to do some work on getting those frame grabs from "Salt" (and, perhaps, "TDK"). And I want to expand on what you're saying here.
Seconded. Excellent point, sylvain. It's telling that while there are many critics making largely similar arguments, the same individual films -- usually SALT, THE HURT LOCKER, and Greengrass' BOURNE movies -- are alternately cited as examples of chaos cinema done well, or as some of its worst offenses. Which doesn't invalidate the point, but it complicates the discussion.
On a partially related tangent -- the most interesting thing to me about TRANSFORMERS 3, and why it worked better for me than the previous two, is how the 3D actually helped clarify the action. As Jim and others have noted, contemporary 3D forces the viewer to look at only one "plane" of action at a time; with so much flying metal packed into every frame, I found that Bay used this forced perspective aspect of the technology rather effectively, which allowed me to follow what was happening during the action sequences a lot more clearly than in either of the other movies.
Thanks, Jim.
For the sake of clarity: it's possible to make some generalizations, like when Matthias write " Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. It's a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.", etc. It's ok because it's only descriptive and it does apply to many movies, but it becomes problematic when we use this to conclude something like "modern action movies are confusing".
And still, even in a more objective paragraph as the one I quote, we always feel that there is something terribly wrong with that trend of filmmaking, even if the writer takes the time to notice that Bigelow, or Greengrass, or whoever he prefers, use it well. The problem is in the vocabulary: "sensationalistic", "shotgun", "firing", "dazzle", etc., well I wouldn't want to be in front of those images, it looks so dangerous! It's impossible to be only descriptive and witholding all kind of qualitative judgment, all descriptions in art are gonna reveal in some way what we feel about it, but still, it surely is possible to talk about this quick-cutting-shaky-cam-intensified-filmmaking by toning down a little bit the agressive nuance. I've seen a lot of those movies and I'm not beaten, bruised or braindead... yet.
One of the reason I found the Rise of the Planet of Apes such a refreshing surprise was how well the action was staged. In particular, the climactic scene was set up much like Spielberg described his Indy action. Staged on the Golden Gate bridge, it was clear which side the "good guys" were on, and which the bad were on, and the action clearly went from left to right and thrillingly, up to the top of the bridge's supports and down below into the rafters.
So much praise has been heaped on the effects for that movie, and rightly so, and not nearly enough has been made on how director Rupert Wyatt and his DP and editors' work let you SEE the effects.
As for bad examples...I mean, almost all of them. But I do wonder from time to time if when people say they "hate CGI" (and I am occasionally among them), what they really mean is that they hate the photography and editing that usually comes along with CGI-heavy movies and stubbornly refuses to let you believe in the effects.
Jim, have you seen Takashi Miike's "13 Assassins?" If so, where do you suggest that it stands when tested by the chaos cinema standards?
Let us not forget that chaos cinema, or at least film sequences exhibiting some of the identifying marks of chaos cinema, can be effective in limited contexts. For example, with respect to overall spatial coherence, the action sequences in "Platoon" cannot hold a candle to, say, those contained in "Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior." However, "Platoon's" disorienting effects were precisely its director's intent. In the context of a war movie presenting the perspective of a "green," disoriented soldier, the chaotic effect was not only appropriate, it was effective. Another poster mentioned action sequences in "Saving Private Ryan" and "Munich" as examples where context (and probably filmmaking skill) matters in defining the effectiveness of chaos cinema.
Within the context of an action thriller, however, this style often distracts and otherwise detracts from the experience. It is also maddening for breaking the fourth wall: the filmmakers dedicated significant time and energy (one would hope) to staging the action and camera setups, so why do they (this includes editors) undermine the work of so many to create well-choreographed action sequences with solid spatial integrity by trasforming those sequences into incoherent masses of rapid-moving, unsteady shots? Chaos cinema does not "make you feel as if you're there." It only smashes illusions, sharply reiterating the fact that there is somebody intervening between you and the events depicted on screen. When chaos cinema breaks the spell that good filmmaking can weave, it constitutes an infraction by the storyteller against the audience.
I miss action sequences in the style of the truck chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark. We know exactly what's going throughout the whole scene (where all the players are, and how the stakes change), and are still able to appreciate how it suspends our disbelief. Although barely any shaky cams or rapid cuts, I find this sequence more thrilling than most modern action scenes.
I know Spielberg likes to meticulously storyboard his action scenes well in advance, almost as if he's drawing a comic book and paying a lot of attention to the unfolding the sequence as if it were its own little story. I'm wondering if this practice is largely being neglected with today's action films.
A compete aside here, but something about this discussion made me think of Sebastian Jungr's description of fighting in his book 'War'. Obviously his versions of events are pieced together well after they happened, and he uses his video recordings as well as the recollections of the soldiers to produce an account of particular events. But what struck me about them was how within split seconds the soldiers were able to understand, make sense and respond to what was going on. That's what they were trained to do. There is none of the befuddling adrenalin rush of the kind manufactured for audiences by 'chaos' cinema. It would render them unable to fight. In 'Restrepo' the film, on the other hand, these encounters do look more chaotic, and make less sense visually. And no surprise there, given how they were filmed - but for a while as I watched I wondered why I found these scenes 'underpowered' -and was embarassed to realise I'd subconsciously expected them to be more like 'action' cinema. Mattias puts it well when pointing out the difference between precise sound and imprecise images in chaos cinema, so that we see a 'car chase.' I'd subsconsciously expected to see 'combat' in Restrepo, and what I saw was something else.
Quantum of Solace is probably the best (worst?) example of this, personally. I remember watching it for the first time on a computer screen and having literally no idea what was going on. I can't imagine how disorienting it would be in a theater. It was fun to see a clip of it in the essay because it seemed even more frenetic than I remember it. Casino Royale, though, still impresses me with its finesse and patience compared to most other modern action movies.
I feel like "documentary style" (whatever that means... shaky cam!) can work sometimes. Michael Mann does it exceptionally well. I can appreciate the looser, slightly more experimental approach to shooting a film. Shots get less composed, but you work with what you have to create an overall scene. I get it. But I don't think very many directors do it well and more often than not, it doesn't feel lazy, it feels insecure. Like the director is so unsure of his own talent that he'd rather throw images against the wall and see what sticks, so to speak, then actually compose something.
Fast cuts, shaky camera, etc. can all be done well and effectively, but it takes some serious skill and very few folks seem to have it.
Thank you, Matthias, for the vidtorials. I'm going to refer people to your page when I start inveighing against the new incoherence. I wish more critics would pound on this the way Roger constantly harps on the murkiness of 3D.
TDK started out well enough. The bank heist actually made sense visually. The parking garage sequence dashed my hopes; the high rise sequence at the end was just completely incoherent. I saw TDK in a _real_ IMAX theater and I had to close my eyes at various points at the end because there was no point in trying to follow what was going on. Seems to me the scenes that were well done were the ones shot in IMAX. Perhaps the bulky camera imposed some discipline on Nolan. The most thrilling shot in the movie for me was the bird's eye view of the collapsing hospital. It looked like an actual demolition of an actual building. Maybe Nolan should just avoid close spaces.
When the test viewers said they understood at all time what was going on in TDK, I think they meant they understood what it was they were supposed to be seeing as opposed to what they actually saw. I,e., they followed the action by filling in visual gaps and mentally reediting the movie. I can generally understand Sarah Palin word salad too, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't rather listen to someone with a better grasp of the language, and I wouldn't call what she does "intensified fluency."
In many cases, chaos cinema I think relies on cinematic literacy of the viewer to compensate for lack of same from the filmmaker. Don't try to ape Joyce to mask the fact you're just lousy at sentence construction and don't have basic grammar and punctuation nailed down.
If you watch those behind the scene features and making of documentaries, you can often get a better view of what's going on in a scene and you can enjoy and appreciate the stunt/crash/explosion more. This, usually from a guy walking around with a hand held camera. That's sad.
Chaos cinema doesn't immerse me in the movie, it pulls me out of it. I feel tired and pummeled, like Alex in ACO being force fed random images in rapid succession without the benefit of regularly administered eye drops. I'm also constantly thinking about the scene I could be enjoying in a parallel movie that adheres to more classical filmmaking. Or conversely, I'm conscious of the director trying to amp up artificial excitement for a mundane set up. In the case of Rob Marshall, I cant tell if he's getting in the way of his dancers, or trying to create a performance that perhaps isn't there.
Thanks for fighting the good fight, Jim.
I don't think it’s so much that the editing has become sloppy; I think the editing has to keep up with the current generation (my generation's) skills of visual interpretation. Many of which stem from playing video games, working on computers or managing many tasks at once.
If you look closely at the film making at hand, a lot of it is more technologically sophisticated and complex than the stuff from the 1970s and 1980s; which mostly involved sticking a camera in front of space and allowing time to "play out". The movies of today cost a fortune and they are even more difficult to edit. This makes them all the more impressive in some ways. The slogan stating that every shot is hyper active is an over-exaggeration. There are still many slow/deliberate films today (many of which are comedies). Even those are edited quickly.
Inception was a masterpiece because of the way it made several events crystal clear. The editing was quick, yes; but you as a viewer you must keep up. By comparison a Sam Peckinpath film looks like a lukewarm warm up for the workload that a typical working editor today gets. There is of course a certain art to the whole thing that can't be denied. Even so, I do agree that the visual continuity of a scene is more important than "shaky cam" or effects.
Don't forget, Bourne Ultimatum won the Oscar for best film editing.
"If you look closely at the film making at hand, a lot of it is more technologically sophisticated and complex than the stuff from the 1970s and 1980s; which mostly involved sticking a camera in front of space and allowing time to "play out"."
It doesn't make sense: someone like Nolan can take three or four shots to show a simple gesture from an actor. Maybe this is "complex" in a visual sense (I doubt it), because I have to mentally reconstruct the gesture, I have to patch the shots together, but while I'm doing this, trying to understand what's going on, I'm not doing what's important: I can't focus on why this action is going on, or how it's going on. I want to interpret the gesture, the performance of the actor, and I cannot do this if I can't understand the action in the first place, or if I'm too busy trying to make sense with the editing. So, leaving things "play out" in front of the camera is leaving room for interpretation, and for complexity, especially in the human relationship department. No wonder all characters feel flat and cliché today: there's no room for the actors with this kind of editing. A good actor can put a lot of nuance in a banal screenplay, by using their body to put some contrast with their words, but they're not allowed to do this anymore (even if they do it, it's not gonna show on the screen, not with all those close-up). This is why I hate most of this quick-cutting, and why I find it less offensive in an action sequence than in a conversation scene, which are edited basically the same way : where's the actor in all this? Why are we still hiring them if we're gonna butchered their performances anyway? Why are they still learning to fight with swords or dance ballet if we're gonna edit it and show only some fragments? I want my actors back!
I think chaos has its place. Some films like Electric Dragon 80000v and some of David Lynch's work use it to wonderful effect. The problem is directors doing it without TRYING to disorient us. If we're confused when the director is in fact trying to excite, there's a problem.
I don't understand the constant referencing to the current generation of video game players or even to video games in general. Video games have been around as a widely popular entertainment for 30 years so we can't really say that the younger generation has been shaped any more drastically by them than even the older side of Gen X. And what exactly is this influence that video games have had to drive movie watchers towards shorter shot durations anyway? After all, video games don't really have anything that compares to editing or cuts of any sort during the majority of gameplay. This is true whether we are talking about first-person shooters, side-scrollers, 3/4 overhead perspectives, racing games, sports games, or anything else. No cutting, just one continuous "shot" of the game player's avatar on screen. So, are the broad references to video games that keep popping up meant to be about the constant decision making that comes with some video game playing? Sorry, but I'm still not seeing how this applies.
In a video game, the player is engaged in a completely different way than a viewer is during a movie. In a movie, the viewer has no ability to effect the outcome, and can only sit back and observe. The brain is not being stimulated in the same way as during a video game where the player is actively involved. Even while viewing an example of "chaos cinema," the viewer is not engaged in the same fashion as they would be when playing a video game. Rapid cutting may demand the viewer to process what they see on screen more quickly, but they are still not engaged in the decision making, fight-NOT-flight mode that they would be while gaming. In fact, in the case of true "chaos cinema," I'd argue that the viewer isn't really engaged with the material at all. The film has gone beyond any realm of comprehension and has simply become a rapid series of images. Jim nailed it when he wrote that "chaos cinema" action sequences are "more like drugs that (ostensibly) trigger the release of adrenaline or dopamine while bypassing the middleman, that part of the brain that interprets real or imagined situations and then generates appropriate emotional/physiological responses to them."
That's what I was wondering. I know very little about modern video games, but the first-person shooter games I've seen (like Doom) are presented in looooong "takes." Not even shaky-cam, when the gun remains stable in the center of the frame!
Though I don't necessarily agree with the poster's suggestion that video games have trained younger people to process chaotic movie scenes more accurately, I think he meant that the amount of information that the player of a fast-paced modern video game, especially first-person shooters, is enormous. This is very true. He was positing that this honed image processing may provide some benefit to younger viewers of modern action films.
As a Gen Xer who has grown up playing video games and still does to this day, I don't think it matters. I still hate chaotic action films. I find them tedious. However, I do think chaotic action films has damaged my ability to appreicate more laguid editing techniques. Every once in awhile I'll catch a movie classic from the 70s on TV that I have previously missed. For example I recently watched Coppola's The Conversation. It was like watching paint dry. You have scenes that seem to last for ages where Hackman's character was just walking from place to place or playing on his saxophone. I suppose this was a specific style of the time, but I've certainly lost some ability to sit still for it.
I think there's a balance to be struck somewhere. I think today's movies have taken economical pacing to an extreme on the chaotic end, but I don't think we should go back to the editing style of the 70's, with their improbably long takes of characters driving from place to place instead of just showing them leave, showing them mid-journey and showing them arrive. Somehow, we need to find that balance again.
I was born in 1989, grew up on video games, Saturday morning cartoons (the ASL for the 90's FOX Spider-Man show must've been 0.3 seconds), commercials, and movies like Lost in Space with Matt LeBlanc, and I have no trouble watching, say, a movie like "Police, Adjective." Could you go into more detail about what makes a take "improbably long"?
Zeiram, there may well be a 'generational' element to this discussion, for instance, current film making and editing often crosses over from music video editing, the hotbed for future feature directors. But I cannot agree that it is per se more sophisticated and complex (whatever you think that means) than 'stuff' from earlier decades - what are these point and shoot films from the 70s and 80s you are thinking about, precisely? Jaws, Taxi Driver, A Touch of Zen,The Last Emperor, for instance? - nor that increased cost and difficulty in editing makes the type of film we are discussing here more 'impressive.' It just means they are expensive and complicated to edit. If budget size and complexity ( a word which time and time again seems confused with mere complicatedness) impresses your generation, whatever that is, that's great, but without examples you are just saying 'old films are boring.' And your statement about slow/deliberate films which are edited quickly just doesn't make sense.
The one glaring piece of information I should point out about this subject is that it is entirely limited to live action films, which should really say something about where the problem is coming from. In animated films, the action sequences, like everything else, have to be planned out from beginning to end in pre-production. Even in anime, the limited animation style of motion pictures manages to maintain a coherent sense of what happens in an action scene while, like chaos cinema, filling the screen with exaggerations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9keoN-uCyG8
What really irks me though is that nowhere in the videos or anything written here is there any mention of "United 93." Greengrass' other well known films are brought up, but this one, which also used the techniques discussed here and had one of the most intense and unforgettable endings ever put on screen is never mentioned or referenced. If this topic is about how this style of editing disengages an audience's ability to believe and be emotionally invested in what happens on screen, you cannot avoid one of the most emotional sequences (the final charge to take back the cockpit) ever assembled with this style.
I absolutely agree with you in theory. That's why I was so confounded by the Wachowskis' "Speed Racer." They could do whatever they wanted, had unlimited control over every single shot, and yet they made some of the car chases incomprehensible.
The editing style of SPEED RACER is so breakneck and revolutionary (the use of in-screen transitions disguises a lot of otherwise single takes, the way it cuts on action, cause and effect, the use of internal and external motion, the refusal to slow down a ridiculous sport that can only be interpreted as hyperbolic [as per the title]...) that I'd forgive anyone who thought it was slippery the first time around (myself included). Nolan's action set pieces are messy, but the Wachowski's strike me as incredibly fine-tuned and hyper-aware (even when they bit off more than they could chew in the MATRIX sequels, I never felt lost in space).
I mostly laughed when I finally saw THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS; few new "car" movies do it for me (the final stretch of DEATH PROOF is an exception, natch), as vehicles by themselves don't give me a hard-on like they're apparently supposed to (per male expectations of society, w/e), but I'm continually amazed by SPEED RACER in how the style emphasizes the driver/artist, and the perception of their art, over the visceral spectacle. It's closer to interpretive dance than THE ROAD WARRIOR. The Mach 5 is a metaphor for life. Someone with the name Speed Racer is clearly a God in training, and the sports announcers are like a Greek chorus.
And not to slam too hard on your negative assessment, Jim, but I always felt you were much to quick to slap the film for use of color. Yes, Royalton's purple fetish is a smug attempt to appear welcoming and friendly, and it's readily associated with his corporate skullduggery, but purple is also the color of the Racer family couch, where the heart of the movie takes place. It points to the central, Illuminati-style assessment of how truths are distorted and used against us. See Pops Racer's (that's his actual name) early dig against media-controlling sponsors. I swear to God had this movie come out AFTER the financial meltdown, A----- W---- would have been singing its praises.
Speed Racer has a posse.
Yes! The posts you write on this topic are among my favorite on this blog. As soon as I saw this video essay I wondered if you would have something to say about it. As far as I'm concerned the topic is inexhaustible and is well worth the conversation.
I myself wanted to comment on the flawed attribution of videogames to this style but John Haggstrom and Scott have already put it so eloquently that I feel there's nothing to add. Besides, the argument I find quite annoying is that the evolution of film requires "chaos" film making and any complaint is an attempt to stop progress. Few seem to understand that a new technique is not necessarily an improvement.
On that note I expect an ADDENDUM coming from you very soon seeing as there is a very interesting response over at PressPlay addressing the Chaos Cinema Essay and it is definitely worth the read.
P.S.
How do you do create those frame grabs? I have been interested in making some myself but I don't know how exactly.
Response to Helena.
The films of the 70s (for instance) compared with the films of today are no different or worse than one another. They are just different in the way that they take unique approaches to arrive at more or less the same emotional weight.
Take the 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni film The Passenger, starring a very young Jack Nicholson. That film while sparse utilized a unique sense of time and space between shots that really made you feel you were in the desert with him. The special differentiation between angles and empty screen space (as I like to call it) simulates a sense of time and place. Much like a convoluted more confined arena of sensory motion might signal a sense of claustrophobia, mania or panic. Such as is masterfully executed in the Bourne Ultimatum.
The comment that I may think films of the 70s and 80s are "boring". The answer is I do not think they are boring at all. In fact, the editing has a lot to do with the way the film makers tell their stories. For my money, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest is practically responsible for more modern style and tension in domestic drama. With its artistic way of expressing the different emotional dilemmas of the characters simply with editing. A great example is the scene where Jack Nicholson is breaking down the glass wall to give his friend a pack of cigarettes. This simple action, which deliberately places itself in conflict with Louise Fletcher's loss of control as well as the ups and downs of the "crazy people”, is a flurry of artful ingenuity which I cannot quite explain and neither can the audience. They just "feel" it so to speak. Equally as impressive as a final scene in Sam Mendes' American Beauty which shows different people in different time frames (while spread little apart) reacting to the same situation. That was a more modern film was it not?
I do not disapprove of so called old-fashioned editing. For starters there were all kinds back in "those days". Like the experimental stuff in Midnight Cowboy or Clockwork Orange. The strange after effects in Hitchcock's Vertigo and funny flurry of angles and faces in Fritz Lang's M. I understand that there’s a certain "pacing" to editing. Part of this charm has to do with the way they cut film in the first place.
My teacher in film school, who won an Oscar in the 1960s for her student documentary about kids with disabilities once, explained the age old dictum of "cutting" the film with scissors and tape. You know, like they used to? While somewhat inefficient compared to todays; it had a kind of elegance and craft that had to be mastered. This was especially true with action films like Bullitt. In this sense, not every kid with a laptop can be a great editor. Then again, not everyone who lacks the emotional nuance and intellectual capacity to see things in a certain way can be a great storyteller.
Chris Nolan's Inception and Slumdog Millionaire are good contemporary examples of stuff filmed in the so-called hyper-stylized film making standard that still manages to tell an artful story in a (I feel) coherent and understandable way. The important thing is that it relates to the universe of the movie, the intent of the writers and the vision of the director. And isn't that the most important thing of all?
As for the generational thing, I don't think it has any significance. A person (who is not of age or whatever) can be aware of many different styles and genres. Can have varied tastes and sensibilities. It does not take a genius to see something clearly. Perhaps it does take one to see other standards in a different light, rather than to compare them to the original status quo. This can change in quality with the tide on the eve of a great storm. A storm is coming in the visionary standards of storytellers and I don't think the industry is brain dead just yet. We just need new minds to see things in a new way, and envision new ways for future generations to tell the best stories we can.
So in my opinion, I think I do make sense. What I said doesn't change the truth about those films but it doesn't diminish them either. What people sometimes fail to realize is that there is always another side to the coin of someone's point of view that doesn't always manifest itself on the page. Like two souls passing glances at a train station. One look might signal one thing but mean something else entirely. To find out, you must seek information.
"It's an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower[...]"
I don't know why an overwhelming audio-visual experience necessarily precludes mental and emotional involvement.
*Gamer spoilers*
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor's "GAMER" is a movie about criminals that are used as avatars played by teenaged boys in first person shooter games, and it contains some of the fastest-cut action sequences I'm aware of, but it also comments on the situation in the midst of all the bullets and the body parts flying. There's one shot of a man set on fire, falling from an overpass...and then robotically standing up and walking. The man must be feeling unendurable pain, but the boy is just playing a game. In one sequence we are introduced to a female avatar played by Zoe Bell, who we think will become a major character. She - rather, the person playing her - follows Gerard Butler's character (the star of the game) through a level, only to have her head blown off. There's two layers of information here: the person controlling Bell's body wants to form a partnership with Butler's controller, and thus gain a similar level of fame and fortune, but there's also the visceral, subliminal image of a woman seeking help from a man in a violent situation. Her death is blunt, gory and sad.
Later on Gerard Butler manages to gain control of his body and escapes the game by (I kid you not) chugging a bottle of vodka, peeing and vomiting into the ethanol-only gas tank of a truck and then driving the truck out of the game. It's an over-the-top, funny sequence, but it has an emotional appeal, because he's using a simple organic function to escape a system where bodies are viewed and used as toys. The chase and escape, set to Marylin Manson's "Sweet Dreams," is a thrilling, comprehensible (but certainly fast-cut) sequence.
The only one I can remember thinking of was the fight scenes in "Batman Begins" which I think were improved a little bit in "The Dark Knight" (maybe just because there wasn't really anyone able to fight Batman in TDK). In "Batman Begins" during a fight scene, it literally just did all these quick cuts/flashes of just an arm or a leg which was hardly moving, and it seemed like what it was trying to do was use cuts as a substitute for actual physical movement; so you end up getting a lot of the Beginnings of a lot of movements (or I guess the End of movements), but never really a full movement: even just a punch.
You'll see what I mean if you look at the 1:14 minute mark on this scene, just a random fight scene from "Batman Begins."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3XXZMD4q78
I have no idea what is going on in that moment of the fight scene.
I remember watching and feeling so cheated, and thinking "I'm watching Batman fighting and all I just saw was lots flashes of an arm and a leg...and whatever else that was."
You can see what he was trying to go for, but the editing didn't let you see what the movements of the characters were supposed to be, and if it was intended to be a "these guys are just THAT fast, so you can't see anything" kind of logic, then there didn't seem to be an understanding of where the movement originated; for instance, in fighting, energy is generated from the heels and then snapped with the waist. There wasn't really the feeling that the energy of the fight movements was coming from the waist.
I saw "Bourne Ultimatum" and I can't really remember too much about shaky cam except I think it did make me a bit nervous, which I think might have just been a kind of sloppiness (but not sure). It didn't seem too bad. And I could tell what was going on with the fighting, which was obviously a real fighting style being done in a realistic way.
Bale's costume for Batman Begins was so bulky that Nolan decided it'd be best not to show too much of it. I realize that's not going to make you say "oh, well in that case, it's a great fight scene," but you can tell that Nolan isn't shooting and editing with the choreography in mind, rather, as you say, he's trying to highlight the speed of the players, and isolate single movements. I think it works...I don't really go to American movies for choreography anyway (except The Matrix), so rather than what would probably be an awkward, run-of-the-mill fistfight, I'll take the simple movement of a fight. And there are some awesome movements in the clip you posted: look at that shot of Batman pulling himself forward on the subway rails. Don't you feel the momentum? I do.
"he's trying to highlight the speed of the players, and isolate single movements."
Yeah, I said that he might have been going for that whole speed thing, but I think he could have gotten us into the mind's of the characters more and made it more dramatic, or at least, slowed it down just a tad; film can't capture movement that fast; you miss all the subtleties.
But also, I was kind of more trying to focus on that point of the video (the 1:14 mark) because I remember that every fight had moments like that, where I just didn't know what was going on. I think he could have completed movements; what he's kind of doing is jump-cutting (and I think maybe unintentionally), because he'll cut in the middle of a movement and then the next cut will kind of be a later part of the movement or the start of a whole new movement. About this speed thing, maybe he was trying to make it seem like they were faster than they were. I think he should have just completed the movements before cutting; let them do a full swing of the punch before cutting.
What I think he was trying to go for, was kind of perhaps the comic book poses, such as, where it would look like a nice good dramatic pose if you paused it, except he was doing them too fast (as well as not completing movements); you don't really have time to see the dramatic poses; I think he cut a little too early.
But also, I think he could have gotten us inside of their heads more (or told a story) with the fighting, like where we kind see what they are thinking before they do it, a little foreshadowing of movements, such as maybe having the camera focus on the turning of their head/body or the actor's face and seeing his eyes move a certain direction so then it makes sense when he moves a certain direction; you'll go "Oh, so, that's why he was looking in that direction."
Ah, I could go on and on.
But I guess I'll just say that I say this as someone who has watched a lot of kung-fu movies and has kind of come to expect mainstream movies to incorporate those elements into their fight scenes.
I can kind of see why you (or others) would like the fight scene, because it seems like it was a fight scene that was made for people who aren't fans of fight scenes (just kind of seems like the wrong platform to do such a thing to me, it being based on a comic book with lots of gritty fight scenes).
Still I still think you can maintain the excitement of a fight scene, or to make it for the fight scene crowd, and still make it for the people who aren't fans of fight scenes (such as by a few of the examples I gave: of reading their body movements or faces, or maybe doing something After the fight to kind of see why one was the victor over the other; basically trying to tell a story with the fight scene...why one person won over the other: work ethic of training, ego, luck, fate, etc.).
Ah, there's too much to say.
Basically, what Nolan did was use camera angles to kind of make it look like someone is getting his when they are not; oldest trick in the book.
But I think he is jump-cutting when probably he is not intending to, or maybe if he is intending to, it is because he is Also trying to make it seem, not only that they are getting hit when they are not (w/camera angles) but that they are faster than they are (w/jump-cuts).
So, what you kind of got is a bad/sloppy mix of camera angles with one actor being covered up by the other actor or something in the foreground (to cover them up to make it seem like they are being hit by said object/person) and then not completing movements, probably to make it seem like they are faster than they are....it's all kind of trickery...but it's not a successful mix of tried and true trickery, in my opinion; it's kind of trying to have it both ways...the speed that isn't there on the one hand with its uncompleted movements mixed with camera angles designed to sell movements to make it seem like one person is being hit by putting things in the foreground in front of them. So, that's why I think he should at least just complete the movements and sacrifice making it seem like the actor's are faster than they are. In fact, their movements are probably perfectly fine for capturing on film; many martial artists in martial arts films have to slow it down because they are too fast.
I love me my kung fu movies as well, although I'm not an expert in the genre I treasure fight scenes like the ones in The 36 Chambers of Shaolin that play out like a chess game, but I don't mind different styles.
You're right about the jump cuts, but I don't see that as a negative thing, or as particularly sloppy. In the example I picked from The Bourne Ultimatum there's obviously time missing between the second elbow to Julia Stiles face and the next shot of him kicking her a full leg's length away, but I think that what you lose in immediate continuity you gain in sudden impact. And I feel the same way about that fight from Batman Begins.
"Still I still think you can maintain the excitement of a fight scene, or to make it for the fight scene crowd, and still make it for the people who aren't fans of fight scenes (such as by a few of the examples I gave: of reading their body movements or faces, or maybe doing something After the fight to kind of see why one was the victor over the other; basically trying to tell a story with the fight scene...why one person won over the other: work ethic of training, ego, luck, fate, etc.)."
Didn't you watch the scene? They are tremendously well-matched, but Neeson eventually overpowers Bale...before Neeson realizes he's been outsmarted, and thus distracted, Bale turns the tables on him. The drama is maintained even with all the jump-cuts.
Actually, looking at that "Batman Begins" clip, I saw that Liam Neeson actually did look like he was using his hips to punch: and then I just remembered: he used to be a boxer!
"Most chaos cinema is indeed lazy, inexact and largely devoid of beauty or judgment. It's an aesthetic configuration that refuses to engage viewers mentally and emotionally, instead aspiring to overwhelm, to overpower, to hypnotize viewers and plunge them into a passive state."
Okay, but I can't take it seriously as an observation about the filmmakers' intentions or the audiences' reactions (he might as well have said "people who like what I call chaos cinema are brainwashed")...because I've found beauty in a lot of these quick-cut sequences, been engaged mentally and emotionally, and didn't feel as if I'd been hypnotized.
There are a lot of movies mentioned on this page, a lot of which have nothing to do with each other (the bomb disarming scenes in "THE HURT LOCKER" really have nothing in common with fast-paced action sequences like the ones in a Nolan or Bay movie, beyond quick cutting). And these are just examples used to represent even more movies. I don't think everything Stork says applies across the board ("hysterical framing," for instance, when Bordwell has complained that Nolan frames his action too "casually"). So I don't know where to start...I agree some of these films can be incomprehensible ("QUANTUM OF SOLACE" is quite hard to follow) and at the same time I've been totally invested in some of them (Nolan's films).
There are ways directors can preserve your sense of continuity during these rapidly edited sequences. In the rain gunfight in "INCEPTION" - probably the quickest cut and most closely framed sequence in any of Nolan's films - the shots of the attackers outside the cab are almost always set up with a reverse shot of the member of Cobb's gang that's looking/shooting at them. If you have a sequence that plays out like: Shot A: JGL looking through his windshield, Shot B: bad guy shooting, Shot A: JGL looking through his windshield; then you don't need a wide shot to tell you where everything is. The editing alone is enough to guide you through the scene. And some scenes are supposed to be chaotic, aren't they? The clip from "28 WEEKS LATER" doesn't seem to be aiming for coherence, rather a frenzy, and if it works, then what's the matter?
But watch the rain gunfight in "INCEPTION":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIRmlYu7XwE
Watch the scene and then read how this piece, beginning at 3:39, is edited together so that although we might not have a perfect picture (wide shot) of the "geography," we still fully understand what's going on:
(Cobb has been separated from the others by the train and is just now catching up to them)
A)Cobb's car driving around a corner.
B)Cobb at the driver's seat, squinting, focusing on something ahead of him.
C)Cobb's car from the front speeding forward.
D)An attacker crouching on the pavement, loading his machine gun, and then standing up and firing at the team in the cab. Notice the SUV behind him.
E)Eames firing back at him through the shattered rear window of the cab. Even if we weren't watching the scene up until now it would be clear from these two shots alone that the attacker is behind the cab.
F)Wider shot of attacker, placed between a car in the foreground and that same SUV next to him.
G)Cobb at the driver's seat, focusing harder, looking like he's holding his breath, the soundtrack tells us he's speeding up.
H)Exterior shot of Cobb's car, speeding and turning a hard left in the middle of the street.
I)Repeat of shot D, the attacker firing with the SUV behind him.
J)Inside Cobb's car, Cobb and Ariadne straining to stay in their seats against the momentum of the car.
Now, just by nature of filmic association, we should know where Cobb is headed...
K)The (wide) money-shot that ties everything together: Cobb's car turns hard into the SUV so that the SUV spins and knocks over the attacker. Accomplished with a quick pan from right to left: Cobb's car hitting SUV -> SUV spinning -> SUV knocking over the attacker, in an impressively real-looking stunt.
That's eleven shots in thirteen seconds, and not just static shots, so I can understand how some could find that hard to follow, but I think it's constructed in such a way that, even if you don't consciously absorb every detail, you should still have had a sense of what happened. And if you are able to keep up with it, it's rewarding.
Good point, but bad example. There's something you left out in your description of the gunfight: each time we see Cobb, he's going in another direction. First he's driving to the left, then he's going right, but oh! now he's going left again. Where he is going exactly? The problem here isn't that Nolan broke the axis, most movies do, but that he did it 4 or 5 times in less than ten seconds. I do "have a sense of what happened", but it's not what I want: I want to see what's happening, I want to know, I dont want to doubt, I dont want to open an epistemological quest every time I see an action scene (but maybe Nolan is more clever than I think and that's what he wants, making us doubt what we see, his movie is supposed to be about dreams after all...) And I would like to see how you can make sense out of the shooting in the snow, the James Bond gunfight, which, for what I remember, is a total mess.
Huh? Cobb turns left down a street and the next three shots are of him driving straight and then making a hard left into the SUV. Watch the scene again.
I chose the scene in Inception specifically because it was the fastest cut and most closely framed of Nolan’s action scenes (although I forgot the climactic fight in Batman Begins which Keith posted). I wanted to show how simple editing can tell you what’s going on in a scene that’s quick-cut and closely framed. For instance: we don’t see Arthur turn the cab down the side street before the train hits, but later on, in the selection I broke down, we don’t need to know where the cab is to know that Cobb is catching up to them (there is a continuity error here, though: later on Arthur knows about the train even though none in the cab reacted between its appearance and the gunfight).
Of course I don’t enjoy the scene just because I think the editing makes it understandable enough, but I wasn’t too distracted by the editing to enjoy: the yellow of the cab against the blue-grey rainy atmosphere, a shot of Ken Watanabe stretching and firing out of his window, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s cool expression, Tom Hardy shooting out of the shattered rear window, the way an attacker falls lifeless like a bad guy in a video game after he’s been shot, the stunt I mentioned, the other that has Levitt jamming a bad guy between the cab and the car behind him, the rumbling on the soundtrack and the way the seat shakes underneath Levitt as he backs up, the way the bad guy hits the pavement, you know, the how, rather than the what.
The worst part about the snow sequence is the business with Fischer and Saito sliding down the mountain to escape the gigantic avalanche, and then appearing fine and just a little snowy in the next shot. That is probably my least favourite part in the movie. But I understand everything with Eames and the projections, and the entrance into the forest, which is handled mostly in wide shots.
When we go from the outside to the inside of the car, the 180 axis is broke and Cobb is driving(if we follow what you listed as shots ABC) towards the left of the frame, then to the right, then to the left again. Granted, in reality, he is always driving in the same direction, it's the camera position that gives this impression. It wouldn't be important if the shots were longer, if we had enough time to understand the frame, but we don't (or at least I don't). When, in shot B, Cobb is squinting to see what's ahead of him, it creates a desire in the audience to see what's there, what's outside the right edge of the frame, but in the next shot, this spatiality is reversed, so we have to reconfigure what was given in the previous shot, what we were anticipating to the right is now to the left.
Ok, it's not very confusing, I can still follow what's going on, but it's distracting, it's exactly what Spielberg describes as "sacrificing geography". I think this sequence is ok, I kinda like the "how" you described, but I would appreciate it even more if I had the time to do so, if Nolan slowed down a little bit. Anyway, what is worse with this sequence is what's bothering me most with Nolan: for him, it seems that one shot = one action, everything that's important is blatantly put in front of the camera, all actions and reactions are isolated and there is rarely any kind of variation on this pattern. The action sequences go faster because the actions are quicker, but it's still edited and framed the same way he edits and frames every scene. Well, almost every scene, his best sequence happens to be the one where he tries something different (the corridor sequence with Gordon-Levitt in Inception).
And, no, figuring out the spatiality of a scene is not the same thing as interpreting certain grey areas in the scenario, you first have to get a good sense of the scene, of the spatial relation of the characters towards one another, to be able to interpret further. Spatial relations need to be clear, or if they're not there should be a good reason for it, it's the basis of the language of cinema.
I don't have any problem understanding where Cobb is going.
"When, in shot B, Cobb is squinting to see what's ahead of him, it creates a desire in the audience to see what's there, what's outside the right edge of the frame, but in the next shot, this spatiality is reversed, so we have to reconfigure what was given in the previous shot, what we were anticipating to the right is now to the left."
I don't know what you mean, here. Shot B shows Cobb in profile looking through his windshield, Shot C shows his car speeding forward from the front (I wouldn't say the spatiality is exactly "reversed"), and shot D shows us where he's going (the bad guy), and the further intercutting takes care of the rest, for me.
So, I have no problem with this scene. But I think I can understand why you do. I don't have any problem with piecing it together in my mind...and really the movie is piecing it together for me, which is part of what makes it engaging and fun for me (I was kidding with the critic comment).
Yeah, you're right, I was writing earlier from work, without access to youtube. In shot C he is indeed going towards us. But everytime the camera goes in Cobb's car,he's facing the right side of the frame, even if the car is changing directions a couple of time in the entire sequence.
More importantly (but it's related): I've watched these thirteen seconds a lot for writing these comments, and I still can't understand that Cobb is deliberately trying to hit the bad guys until he actually does it. A good action sequence creates suspense by giving clear goals to the characters, and since I don't understand what is the goal of Cobb (I dont even know if he's close to the others), I have no sense of fulfillement, no satisfaction when he hits the SUV. Things just seems to happens, nothing is developped, or so briefly, in one shot for one second, that we don't have enough time to grasp it. This is exactly what someone like Spielberg is good at, each character has a clear goal, each point of view is clearly presented, the suspense always comes from this confrontation between different perspectives. In his best movies, each point of view seems to be of equal value, so we don't know exactly who whe should root for, or how it can be resolved without losing something that seems important. Good "chaos cinema" (I don't really like this expression) have some value, for sure, but I find it far less satisfying than a good old fashion sequence, with clear point of view.
I don't know if it's uncommon to keep the same setup of an actor driving from inside the car, no matter what direction he's going.
I've already said that I think the intercutting between Cobb and the villain makes Cobb's aim clear enough. When Cobb starts turning, we don't know what he's doing, but that makes the crash a better payoff, imo. I like my old fashioned action sequences as well but I can't think of a better way to shoot the kind of thing that's happening in the Inception sequence. Agree to disagree?
During an insomnia last night, it poped out of nowhere, what's bothering me finally became clear (about time!) It's a small thing, really, but the position of the cab is always consistent, the front is facing the left side, and the rear the right side of the frame. If Cobb is hitting the SUV behind the cab, he should be driving toward the left, so when we see him inside the car, he seems to go in the opposite direction of the action. That's why I can't understand his goal, I can't see that he's aiming for the bad guys, the intercutting between the two action doesn't seem to be interrelated until it happens (and the last shot before the accident, we see Cobb in his car, still coming from the opposite direction). Anyway, like I said, I think the sequence is ok, but it could be better. It's possible with an handheld camera, close-up and quick cutting to get a good sense of the geography of a scene, but I don't see it here and in most of the modern action movies. So, yeah, agree to disagree (like I said in an earlier comment, there is something very subjective in what we can understand or not in an action scene like this).
In my desire to highlight the coherency of the scene I overlooked one of it's obviously intended effects: to jar and scare the audience by dropping the characters into a seemingly inescapable (I want to say "nightmarish") situation. And this is also accomplished with the same editing patterns I mentioned: most of the cuts involving the cab are shot reverse shot with - let's say - Shot A being one of the three heroes in the cab and Shot B being one or more of the attackers. Our heroes are all in one small car that's stuck between other cars* while the attackers seem to be coming from all directions. The shot-reverse shot pattern creates a wide shot in our minds that would look something like this:
Attacker
Cab Attacker
Which is at least as effective as a master shot that would depict the same thing, if not more effective, because it lets us do some of the work ourselves (that's what critics like to say about smart movies: "they leave it to you to figure it out.")
*All of which suddenly appear to be empty. You could say this is a convenient continuity error but remember it is Fischer's subconscious that's attacking them and it's worse for them if the others cars aren't moving than if they're all filled with frightened drivers. Yet another element that adds to the jarring, confusing quality of the scene.
"Inception was a masterpiece because of how it made several events crystal clear"? It's easy to make ideas clear when a film's characters are basically walking footnotes. And perhaps "Bourne Ultimatum" deserved best editing for piecing together something relatively comprehensible from snatch-and-grab dailies, but it's more likely that it won because it had the most editing, not the best. The sound editing and sound mixing awards also tend to go to the films with the most sound as opposed to those that carefully make brilliant and subtle choices. "No Country For Old Men" should have beaten Bourne Ultimatum in all three of those categories in 2007. The edits are crisp and perfectly timed, the sound makes subtle changes--such as the shifting winds when Brolin discovers the money, hinting at doom to come--and the big sound hits are saved for the most intense sequences. It's knowing when to pull back, allowing contrast from scene to scene, that shows an understanding of drama in these fields.
"No Country For Old Men" is a good example of great classical action filmmaking. Brolin's shootout with Bardem is quite possibly the most suspenseful shootouts in modern movie history.
Joel and Ethan Cohen may be the finest action directors working today, they just don't make action movies. If you look at their films like Blood Simple, Razing Arizona, Miller's Crossing, and even segments of Fargo, they always keep their camera trained on the actors, never cut away without a good reason, allow time to build-up suspense, and always choose their shots carefully. The only movie they've made that comes close to a modern action movie is "No Country For Old Men".
And I think your comment shows a bias towards slower, subtler, quieter cinema. With The Bourne Ultimatum the editors are cutting together "dailies," while with NCfOM it's all "brilliant" and "subtle" choices.
Well watch this scene from The Bourne Ultimatum:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLt7lXDCHQ0
At 1:51, in the midst of the fistfight, Bourne has twisted his enemy's hand, and has him for a moment in a powerless position. For the half a second that the enemy is stuck the editors cut to a close-up of his hand, locked inside Bourne's grasp, and all the sound goes off the soundtrack. The fight is over? This is followed by a quick medium shot of the villain starting to jump accompanied with an exaggerated (but still quiet) whooshing sound, and then a third wider shot - both actors' full bodies in the frame now - of the villain impressively back-flipping out of Bourne's grasp with a double-whoosh on the soundtrack followed by the double-stomp of his feet landing on the floor.
There's an obvious rhythmic accordance between size of focus (hand-medium shot-master) and amount of sound which - no matter who is responsible for it - does show contrast and thus, by your own definition, "drama."
But look at another, louder moment in that scene: at 1:34 Julia Stiles climbs on the bad guy's back to get him off Bourne. We in the audience should be feeling nervous for her safety considering he's a super-assassin and she's...Julia Stiles. In one second's time the editors cut from a shot of the bad guy elbowing her in the face with his left arm to a closer shot from the opposite angle of him elbowing her with his right arm and then to a wider shot of him kicking her full-force in the stomach. The quick succession of shots are so blunt and brutal that they would be effective even without the sound of the blows and the pained, ugly sounding grunt she lets out after receiving them.
The editors may just be "piecing together something relatively comprehensible from snatch-and-grab dailies," but they might also be thinking about the audience, how they're receiving the information, and how to play with those effects. I don't even like The Bourne Ultimatum (that is literally the only scene I remember from that movie) but I don't see why the style of it's editing is objectively worse than a slower, more measured one.
As I think many of us have stated, a large part of the problem is the over-reliance on CGI to create physical movements that aren't possible. And we can talk about the intended effect of quick editing, but I think it's more significant that the chaotic editing works then to intentionally obfuscate the less-than-realistic CGI.
There's a somewhat famous fight scene in Tony Jaa's The Protector (or Tom yung goong) that is one cut and contains very little CGI (I believe it's only used to show one window break), and I find it more exhilirating than most of the Bourne films.
Tony Jaa's uncut fight scene, staged over three flights of stairs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79ditPebZ8g
I just watched the video and I didn't know there was going to be much talk about sound, but I actually think that sound is more important than visuals. I agree with director Mike Figgis on this and the French critic who Stork mentioned. Mike Figgis mentions this a lot in interviews, that he actually became interested in movies because of sound, the first one being Polanski's Repulsion (which I haven't seen) where he talks about his "awesome" use of sound during the frightening parts. He also mentioned that in the beginning of cinema, film music was what actually drew people in to pay to see movies; it was kind of like a carnival and people would hear the music on the outside and became interested in what they heard to go see the movie. Also, he mentioned that he could watch a kind of blockey movie as long as the sound was good and I know what he means. A movie that kind drew me in as a teen was "All the President's Men" where most of the movies was Redford and Hoffman whispering in low tones trying to get the story: and that pretty much got me hooked in the movie. But anyway, yeah, I think I would rather have a kind of blockey movie with good sound rather than a very sharp looking picture with bad sound.
One more thing about sound that Mike Figgis said. Some people say that the way to test if a movie is good is if you can watch it with the sound off, but Mike Figgis said, rather, that he agrees with the idea that you should be able to listen to the movie without picture, Then try watching without the sound, ...then of of course together. Just kind of a different take on something people always say...about visuals before sound....when it should be sound, then visuals, then both.
Filmmaker, martial artist, and professional stunt person Eric Jacobus, co-founder of "The Stunt People", had written an editorial about Hollywood's ineptitude when it came to directing action movies. He places the blame on the studio systems emphasis on division of labor taking control out of the hands of the choreographer.
http://blog.thestuntpeople.com/?p=951
The article is a call to action for amateur action filmmakers to take advantage of cheap digital technology and distribution networks and to make content that competes with big budget studio product.
I've been scanning all these articles and comments and I've yet to see anyone mention the difference between watching flash-cut action on home video as opposed to the big screen. I've sure noticed that, while flash-cut action (to which I've always been particularly sensitive) doesn't "improve" in any way at home, it is far less impossible to take. I saw exactly one Bourne movie in the theatres, the last one, and I had to stop watching about two thirds of the way through. I was with people and couldn't leave, so I simply lowered my head for long portions of the flick.
On TV I sat through the second movie without much problem (or much interest).
I'm left wondering if many directors today simply don't think of the big screen experience at all anymore, knowing that their work might be/will be consumed in other ways. And with younger directors (younger than Greengrass) I wonder if they even realize the effect that their lifetime diet of "small screen big screen" cinema exposure, not to mention editing on digital NLEs and other factors, is keeping them from realizing and respecting the power of a theatrical presentation. And that's a shame.
My favorite action scene ever is the side-scrolling hallway fight in Oldboy. So much energy expressed in what is a single 4 minute shot of absolute clarity of action.
However, I don't have a quarrel with Nolan's action sequences, which he edits with the sort of immediacy that would fit the scenarios of the action. You get the sense of motion and music in a fight, even more so if it's somewhat indistinct. Obviously, though, his films are hardly chaos cinema since they take rather frequent intervals to bring the audience up to speed. I think general audiences share this opinion, thus why Batman Begins, TDK, and Inception still shoulder good strong reputations. The action is there as a pressure-release, and there's nothing which occurs within it that needs to be understood and is not.
Nice vids, but I have to say seeing Inception and Dark Knight clips next to clips from Gamer and Quantum of Solace, and I have to say i just don't get lumping them together. I never had to think twice about that foot chase in Inception or that car chase in The Dark Knight. Quantum of Solace was quite literally incomprehensible. Hell, I'm not even sure that Expendables clip fit in there. I haven't seen the movie, but I could follow that clip just fine. I wasn't even sure what I was looking at in the Gamer clip.
It's not that I don't think there isn't talent involved in this process, but you're greatly over-simplifying what an editor does. Every example you gave involves the fine-cutting of an action scene. It's a given that these sequences will be cut quickly and with precision, and there are thousands of editors who could do that just as well. Bourne Ultimatum had fifteen associate/assistant/additional editors, and it's likely that one or many of them worked on these action sequences at some point because those fine edits are not the most important job of an editor. It's building characters out of performances shot over the course of a week, it's restructuring a film so that the stories themes and character's through-lines play more clearly, it's removing scenes because they're no longer needed because something that happened on set works better, it's ADDING scenes or beats by assembling footage that was never intended to be cut together, but brings a new resonance to a film. Of course we can never really know what goes on in an editing room, so it's hard to know who should win best editing, but I don't feel that Bourne Ultimatum holds up as an Academy Award winning picture for editing in terms of the larger issues of editing I just mentioned
Well, I think you over-simplified The Bourne Ultimatum by saying it only won editing because it had the most, and it consisted of just piecing together dailies, and I wanted to show how I thought the "most edited" style can still contain choices that show care for the audience's reactions. Which movie is the better edited I couldn't really say. It seems to me like comparing a violin concerto to hip hop.
As I was saying to Andrew, I think maybe the reason they are doing all of this, on top of what Stork said (he didn't really give a reason Why), is because they are trying to make it seem like everything is faster than it really is: so they jump-cut; they'll skip continuity, skip capturing whole movements and just move on to a different movement just to make it all seem like it's happening for "real", or rather "really" happening "really fast" (cheating by jump-cuts). As I was saying in the last blog, it seems with most movies, they overemphasize "realism" (attempts at realism) for subtext, where it seems like the whole subtext of the movie is for you to see how "real" it is.
Also, I think it has to do with a brainwashed audience that banally worships all forms (not sources) of insubtle authority from advertising (aesthetic authority as well as a person-form of authority). So, in this case, the insubtle form of authority is action, as if to redundantly over and over again say "Did I mention this was action? Did I mention this was action? Did I mention this was action?" It is probably done in this way also to kind of grab the attention of someone who just happens to be walking by the television set, to kind of get their foot in the door (although it already is in the house), so that is probably also why these movies are done in the trailer-style. It's because people are so brainwashed and so worshiping of all forms of insubtle authority, the authority that announces itself as such ("I'm/it is an authority on this subject, god damn it!") that they're just kind of living in a noisy fantasy/hypnosis. Haven't you noticed how people seem so deeply offended when you just merely criticize their insubtle authority? Just look all over youtube at the comments and you will see the comment that gets all the votes or likes or whatever is the one that worships the video.
That's a very ambitious comment, this is the second time in a couple weeks that I've been accused of being brainwashed on this site, first for not liking Batman Begins enough, and now for liking it too much.
I think it really has more to do with context. I really like that fight scene in The Bourne Ultimatum for its impact and creativity (that stuff with the book was delightful) but it doesn't make me want to rewatch a movie that I found bland and uninvolving. The fight from Batman Begins, which is less coherent, I am invested in, because it involves a face-off between two characters whose relationship has been developed throughout a 2 1/2 hour movie and which I am emotionally involved in for whatever reasons. I actually want to see who did what and to whom, I intensify my focus, I want to know what Batman's gonna do after R'as smashes his face through a window, and if I don't understand everything (meaning: if I couldn't pass a test about how many hits Person One landed on Person Two) it's okay, because I get the gist, I remember moments that I, as an individual human being, liked, and the payoff seems right. Watch Batman's eyes go white.
A really funny example of this worshiping I was talking about in the youtube comments, if you look at the comments in this Jurassic Park clip, one commenter says to the uploader...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7WABVTE1XI&feature=related
why arent you more famous yet ? cant understand this
mmogogo03 2 weeks ago
Eh, what ?
FoxterzCOM 2 weeks ago
The commenter is worshiping the product, the uploader....he's prepared to worship all insubtle forms of authority, the kind of authority that has to announce itself with words because in action it really isn't an authority.
Intolerance has an interesting example of chaos cinema in the last thirty minutes, mainly because Griffith rapidly goes between the Babylonian and "present day" stories to create a blended narrative. The film had a relatively quiet first three hours, but the last half hour leaves you in knots at the end.
We've talked on this page about scenes from modern movies that are rapidly cut and perhaps don't pay utmost attention to the spatial relationship between characters in scenes and we've agreed and disagreed about whether these scenes properly thrill us. I think if you watch the supplied clips of Inception, The Bourne Ultimatum and Batman Begins you will find that the continuity is generally respected. What I mean is, it might be hard to make out, it might not be working for you, but one character isn't doing a handstand in one shot and across the room in the next.
I want to bring your attention to an action scene where the continuity and spatial relationships are blatantly disregarded but that I still find effective. It is the climactic gunfight in John Ford's "WAGON MASTER" (beginning at 1:20 in the clip. Spoilers, obviously.):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiLhDzFTxUY
There are five bad guys. Everyone is close together. Harry Carey Jr. shoots one. Ben Johnson jumps off his horse, grabs Uncle Shiloh's gun and shoots...we don't see. In an isolated shot Carey rides by on his horse and shoots another bad guy down. In the very next shot Carey is off his horse and crouched behind a wagon wheel, shooting another. During these two shots of Carey there's a lot of offscreen shooting and yelling. The next shot has Johnson firing on the last armed baddie, who was standing very close to him, aiming at Carey before turning on Johnson.
Who did Johnson shoot after he got off his horse? How did Carey get behind that wheel so fast? What were Johnson and the last bad guy doing while Carey fell the other two guys? Couldn't Johnson have shot him easily, especially since he had his back turned?
Does it matter?
I would say no. Ford shot the scene very particularly, with emphasis on isolated, character-centric moments rather than preserving a perfect picture of what is going on.
But what do you think about it?
About those modern movies you mentioned, yeah, I was never saying there was continuity errors.
About that John Ford scene, I don't think he's cheating. When the first guy jumps off the horse, Ben Johnson, I think, you see him do it right on camera. And he turns around and shoots backward. If you were paying attention to where all the bad guys were (as some people might; I probably would) you see there is guy actually right in front of him, where he is shooting. . Then Carey rides by and takes the other guy down (yes, the next shot of Carey is him behind the wagon, but after having watched that other guy jump right off his horse on camera, you kind of know that it Is possible to be done). Then in all the yelling, you hear them saying "get the big one, get the big one!" The big guy was Behind the guy that Ben Johnson was shooting when he jumped off the horse over by the wagon.
So, if you are paying attention, everything is all there and there's no jump cutting to try to make it seem like they are all faster than they are.
If you look at the Stork video, in that army movie, you see an army guy sliding, and then the movie cuts to about 1 or two seconds later and shows him hiding behind a car. He was NOT as fast as the cutting would have us believe or else there would have been no cut.
So, I think maybe they are going to fast, but it's like we won't know because they are cheating with editing.
But also to be fair to that army movie with respect to chaos cinema, they are yelling "Where's it coming from?" again and again: meaning they don't actually know where the direction of the fire is coming from. Yes, the movie was probably made with the intention of shooting it in that chaos cinema way...but at least they sort of gave it a reason.
So, those are kind of my issues..either too fast, or not too fast, but trying to look like it is too fast.
That fast-editing I mentioned with "Batman Begins" is probably the biggest problem I have with chaos cinema. Fast cutting doesn't necessarily equal excitement and chaos cinema seems to think that it does. Bad movies have been doing this for a long time...just copying some technique that they saw in a better movie and don't really put in the rest of the effort; take "Halloween" for example, it spawned countless imitators.
SO I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, this chaos cinema, as long as you have good reason
I have no idea what you think is happening in this scene.
Harry Carey Jr. shoots three of the five bad guys. Ben Johnson takes Uncle Shiloh's gun off of him but we see him shoot exactly one villain, the last one. So assuming Carey Jr. wasn't shooting guys that were already riddled with Johnson's bullets - should we have to assume that for the scene to work? - then Johnson was shooting no one between the time he jumps off his horse and the time he shoots the last bad guy, despite all the offscreen gunshots during Carey's moments. The person shouting "get the big one" is clearly Uncle Shiloh, the villain, and wouldn't be shouting that about his own guy (I think he's referring to Johnson).
I think the cut between Carey riding past the front of the wagon and shooting one guy to him off his horse, crouching underneath the front wagon wheel that we just saw him pass qualifies as much as a jump cut as your examples from Batman Begins, and anyway, if it's not a jump cut, it's a serious erasure of time and a confusing jumble of space.
And yet I think it works.
To conclude,
yeah, I think Stork is right when he said that these are scenes that are usually built up to and that they are not earning it or building up to it etc.
hi Jim,
Have you seen the excellent recent Korean action film 'the Yellow sea'? (the second film from the director of 'the Chaser')
To say it 'redefines' action cinema would be stretching it a bit perhaps but it's everything Hollywood doesn't do (anymore)
Having quite a long set-up......so that when the first BIG action sequences hits it's actually ABOUT something
And the sequence itself is so so captivating. No CGI. Great dynamics in the scene. And it's totally clear what's happening and where everybody is.
And to repeat: something is at stake in the sequence.
I simply cannot believe that ANYONE that loves an action movie wouldn't agree this is way more exciting than any of the chaos-type movies you mention above
Jim,
Thank you for saying that Bourne 2 was better than Bourne 3. I felt like Bourne 3 was the exact same film as Bourne 2. No new tricks, no new style, nothing. It felt stale. Bourne 2 and United 93 are both Paul Greengrass films that are heightened by the chaos filmmaking. But so many other film directors have gotten it wrong and have done nothing but confuse and nauseate their audience (see Transformers 2 and 3).
What about the change in the approach to music? The editing style certainly has to do with how music is used (and/or vice versa). Used to be a composer wrote a lot more music for a film and it was front and center. Now it's in the background, just another voice competing for attention on the soundtrack, if it's there at all. Who remembers the music from Inception? All anyone remembers is that low rumbling brrrroooooomp sound.
In classical cinema you've got these great orchestral scores for action scenes. Even in something like the last charge in Charge of the Light Brigade (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiyg-Y1IgKY), when you've got hoofs pounding, cannon blasting, swords clanging, trumpets blaring, it's all just icing on a Max Steiner cake, even when it's cut pretty quickly (see around 6:45-7:05 in the above clip).
Fast forward to today and all you get is this wall of sound effects and little if any score. Look at the big armored car chase in The Dark Knight. No music. Or this sequence from Generation Kill (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWGvY-8qLW0). Chaos aesthetic and again, no music, just a track of sound effects and minimal dialogue. Tarantino works it both ways in Kill Bill: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4lrUR1bdRI); using music to build the dramatic tension, then cutting it off and letting the foley artists do their thing when the real action kicks in.
Not saying one approach is necessarily better than the other, just noting that if we're talking about how action scenes have changed, this is definitely one appreciable difference.
You're ex. are perfect. Borne and Bond.
Do you recall exactly when you were first made to fill middle aged? "Old". Well now I don't think it was my aging that was the issue, it was gimmicky, terrible movie making.
I'll never forget seeing the Borne Supremacy and almost not being able to stand it. I loved the story, I liked the performances but I couldn't stand that shaky cam bullsh--- and "chaos" editing. Latter came Ultimatum and the pathetic Borne wannabe Bond movies. Emerson it is only going to get worse.
I still for the life of me can't understand how anyone could find The Dark Knight visually confusing, as far as its action sequences go - most of them are filmed in a relatively sparse number of shots, and it's only when the tension begins to really hurtle forward that the editing speeds up. Take, for example, the middle-of-the-movie chase through the city, with the Joker pursuing Harvey Dent in the SWAT van.
It starts off, visually, rather slow - with a wide pan from one end of the street to the other, following the caravan through their procession through the dim city street. The film cuts to the policeman telling the driver of the Joker's van to stop and wait, and it's only then that the editing suddenly becomes more rapid, when the Joker pops up from the window and shoots him in the face - and, only for a second before we return to the SWAT procession, which is still paced economically but with a strong sense of forward momentum.
The editing stays at the same general pace for most of the sequence, until Batman's Tumbler makes the leap to block the caravan off from the Joker's bazooka - it's a sudden collage of shots in frenzy, that lets up just as easy after the car comes to a stop and the Joker follows the procession out onto the main streets.
It's right there, when the Bat-Bike pops out that the chase really gets going, and becomes more frenetic, visually - particularly when he makes the hurtle through the shopping center and parking lot - but, it's still clear. Every single shot that actually means anything lasts for upwards of about ten seconds - from the helicopter crashing, to the Bat-Bike slalloming under the Joker's truck and turning it over, to the Joker firing at random civilians and urging Batman to hit him, to - finally - the Joker loping toward the collapsed Batman, knife in hand.
All of this is spaced out with clarity and intent, so I don't really know how anyone could be at all confused by that. And the same goes for the fight sequences - which are even more sparsely edited, like the one in the Hong Kong office, which is all of four shots, altogether. If you wanted to talk about stiff choreography that'd be one thing, but visually it's as obvious as it could be.
I'm working on a video essay dissecting that very SWAT chase sequence to show exactly how and why it doesn't make sense from shot to shot. I hope to publish it in a day or two...
Andrew,
Carey only shoots two guys...the first guy and the guy by the side of the wagon.
I'll give you the jump cut of Carey, but it might have been because he can't jump off his horse on camera like Ben Johnson and rather than draw attention to that [that there was a stuntman], he just jump-cutted.
It might have been a bit disorienting, but not in the way of chaos cinema w/rapid cutting involved too, but more in the sense that any cut is disorienting; when movies from came out, when the camera did a close up a woman in the Russian audience screamed because she thought he was decapitated.
You're right: I didn't realize he shoots James Arness twice. Still, that means the scene doesn't account for one of the bad guys getting shot, a major part of the action is offscreen, and that cut is a huge continuity error and confusion of space, far more disorienting to me than any of the cuts in Batman Begins.
He doesn't shoot him twice; he shoots the first guy (who is clutching his stomach) and the kneeling down right behind him w/the shotgun. I wouldn't say shooting a bad guy off screen is a continuity error (and, once again, he is right there next to Ben Johnson) and once again, the reason they probably did that was because of the stunt work; it probably took them a lot of takes to get Ben Johnson to knock over a bad guy with his horse, jump off the horse, take his weapon and shoot a bad guy all in one take w/no edits; to include the bad guy on camera w/acting would have probably taken many more takes,to have him die in a dramatic way as part of the take. I think the audience, once again, is probably sophisticated enough to know when something is stuntwork-related; they were probably glad enough that Ben Johnson did what he did.
I also think I remember Batman taking a lot of guys out on camera; because he's a ninja and everything; so, once again, I don't think that off-camera violence is a continuity error...there's so many movies that do that; and the reason Ford did it was most likely because of all the stunt work involved and didn't want to have to include acting at the end of all of that stunt work.
Okay, now,speaking of Batman, let me tell you some things I saw when watching it, that I thought of as continuity errors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmdWPv5R_J8
in that scene, Batman throws chinese stars at all of those above-head lights. If you look at those lights, you see that they have a metal-casing covering the top of the bulbs, which means, that the only way to break those bulbs with chinese stars is to throw chinese stars from BELOW the bulbs. But what happens in that scene is, after the bulbs are busted out, the bad guys look up and see Batman come down from above,hanging by a rope. So, there's a continuity error. How does Batman throw chinese stars from below, when clearly he has been hanging up above the whole time?
There are a lot of scenes like that in the Batman series
Actually, I'm not sure if there were a LOT scenes like that in Batman, but that was one where i remember thinking about how the bulbs could only be broken from below and he was clearly hanging around up there for a while waiting for them.
I'll try to be as brief as possible:
-I've finally figured out that scene in Wagon Master. Carey shoots three guys, the third I thought was James Arness again because he wasn't wearing a hat, but upon further inspection I realize it is Hank Worden, hat off. Still, that means that, unless Johnson is shooting a now-unarmed James Arness after he jumps off his horse, or one of the two guys that Carey is about to shoot - we simply don't know - he is shooting no one, and the point of the shot is simply to show him jumping off his horse and shooting a gun, not for it to fit puzzle-piece-perfect in with the rest of the scene.
-I didn't say a bad guy dieing offscreen was a continuity error, I said the cut between Carey riding by the wagon to him off his horse crouching behind it was a blatant continuity error, which it is.
-you defend the above-mentioned cut by saying it was because Carey probably couldn't jump off his horse, and the shot of Johnson by saying it would have been hard to merge that shot of him jumping off his horse with the rest of the gunfight: fine, that does not make the scene any more coherent.
-that scene in Batman is full of a lot illogical instances like that: the point is Batman is everywhere at once. Like Ford, Nolan isn't thinking primarily about continuity (especially of the sort you mention).
"I didn't say a bad guy dieing offscreen was a continuity error, I said the cut between Carey riding by the wagon to him off his horse crouching behind it was a blatant continuity error, which it is."
No, you did say Ben Johnson shooting the bad guy off screen was a continuity error....too.
A quote by you...
"doesn't account for one of the bad guys getting shot, a major part of the action is offscreen, and that cut is a huge continuity error and confusion of space, far more disorienting to me than any of the cuts in Batman Begins."
About point 2,
Well, I guess we disagree about the audience's sophistication of stunt scenes. I believe John Ford let the actor's do as much stunt work as he could and the audience was probably aware of that...that Ben Johnson did his and Carey didn't. That is why I think he shot the scene in that way....the audience got to see the actor doing his own stunts....and I bet they didn't care that they didn't get to see an actor die at the end of it; having an actor shoot a stunt scene was probably plenty. Many Many people, I believe, look at the wheels at work in cinema when it comes to stunts; that's probably one of the few areas where just about everyone knows something. If you've ever been to Universal Studios, you know they have stunt shows....I myself have been to the Indian Jones stunt show at Universal Studios...when I was 7...so, at that very young age, I've been able to think about stunt work and I think it's had that kind of a relationship for a long time...where even kids know what is stunt-work related in movies and why it had to be shot that way.
about that Batman, I never said I had a problem with Batman being everywhere like the Ninja. In fact, I like that, What I had a problem with was even a Ninja has to throw a Chinese star at a light bulb from below when it is protected by a top overhead casing.
Sorry, but I actually look for very small things when watching action scenes, particularly, martial arts scenes to see if they are realistic, or basically aren't just arbitrary.
I look for in Kung Fu movies to see if the moves are just lazy and arbitrary and don't make any choreographical sense (and a lot of them don't) or if it seems realistic.....I'm looking at every little move to see if it makes sense and often it is so lazy as to be laughable. like a guy will be on the floor and they will just continue the fight with one guy standing and fighting the guy on the floor and the guy on the floor is fighting back and blocking...as if anyone fights like that.
I meant the cut of Carey was a continuity error (my error was incoherence), but now that I realize my original thought that Johnson is shooting no one was correct, considering how close he is to everyone else, it could as well be considered a continuity error, and at least a jumbling of space. I don't understand your point about "the audience's sophistication about stunt scenes;" the audience is supposed to think, in that moment, "well it would have been hard to integrate that shot of Ben Johnson jumping off his horse with the rest of the gunfight, so that's why we don't see him shoot anyone, even though he's so close to the other characters, and I guess Carey couldn't jump off his horse himself, which is why he magically appears behind that wagon wheel"? I think that could be qualified as "lazy" cinema.
But the thing is, Ford obviously could have shot that scene for coherence if he wanted to, but he chose to focus on individual, interesting moments rather than a perfectly seamless whole; and although those moments are clearer and last longer than any cuts in chaos cinema, they're actually less continuous, so who knows how to judge which style would be more or less "chaotic" for the audience.
But I remain pretty "in the moment" when I watch movies, so I don't mind that kind of direction myself.
Anyway I think I've said all I need to say about "Wagon Master." I think you're defending it as coherent when you've shown that you don't understand the scene yourself (a ways up this page you say Carey only shoots two guys, which is not-so-clearly not the case). Maybe you're brainwashed by the insubtle authority of Ford's established directorial prowess, and you have to believe it makes perfect sense when it doesn't?
Oh my god. So, you watched the debate between me and Sylvain and just had to come at me, huh? Unfortunately, I saw this from the beginning but feel it wouldn't have been appropriate for me to get into that kind of discussion every time I see it on Jim's blog: because then that would be just about the only thing I would say to almost everyone and I don't think I should spend a thousand words on every single blog entry Jim writes to go after people who are asleep and live out of habit (and he would definitely, I would assume, ask me politely to stop turning every blog into this...which, unfortunately, has just been done again..when I tried not to get into it again).
Yes, you stole my line "brainwashed insubtle authority", not even sure if it was stolen or just some kind of, as I said, avenging because you saw the past blog with me and Sylvain and just wanted to kind of throw, what you perceived was, feces when really I was just expressing my opinion.
It took me years of dedication to lead up to that line of "banally worshiping all forms of insubtle authority" and not sound pompous etc. and seeing as how you didn't steal the whole line, it seems that you WERE perhaps just trying to sound that way.
I'm not even going to talk to you anymore.
This is so just what it was with Sylvain.
I hope your mindset stops becoming ruled by a mechanism that only understands fighting as well as wakes up from being on auto-pilot from living out of habit from brainwashing.
Guys, can you bring it down a notch and focus on the movies?
Sorry, that's what I was doing, but it seems he wanted to get back at me for the discussion from the debate I had about Spielberg recently...using my exact quote from there (a whole different blog) and trying to use it here against me...as if what i said was about sides and going at people.
I am looking for truth, and truth is for everyone.
Point being,
he tried to say that I was so brainwashed about Ford (just blatantly trying to use my line against me), but in fact, I said that I give him the credit for finding the continuity error/jump cut in Ford's scene where Carey is suddenly behind the wagon....In other words, I'm NOT brainwashed for Ford and am not seeing him as infallible, flawless etc. and did give Andrew his credit about that particular part.
It seems he wants to paint me in that way, because I'm not painting HIS "side" as infallible, flawless etc.
there's only been one of us who has been looking at their "side" as flawless, infallible etc. and it wasn't me, so using my line against me isn't accurate.
Sorry,that didn't help. And I was wrong that what I said was from a different blog. Sorry, Andrew...but still, he is just trying to use my line against me, which is not about sides, but about truth (or for everyone).
I'm surprised and delighted to see people referencing Ford's too-little-known Wagon Master -- the antithesis of chaos cinema, yet brilliantly relevant to this stimulating discussion. It should be noted, however, that the unconventional treatment of the climactic gunfight is no isolated oddity but very much in keeping with the entire, at once deeply classical and idiosyncratic film. You'll find a couple thousand words on this theme at http://www.fipresci.org/undercurrent/issue_0509/wagon_master.htm, one-eighteenth of a comprehensive John Ford tribute. For a briefer consideration along similar lines, here's a review I wrote for Amazon to help stir interest in the movie's DVD release:
How is it that John Ford's greatest film remains largely unknown? All right, let's not kick sand on The Searchers, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Ford's many other masterworks. But the director himself numbered Wagon Master among his personal favorites, and it's an utterly unique and original film no one else could have made.
This crusty, eccentric production, slipped in between installments of Ford's Cavalry trilogy, doesn't really star anybody. Ward Bond plays a Mormon elder, a reformed sinner still given to "the words of wrath" who asks a slightly larcenous young horse trader to lead a wagon train through the desert to a valley "the Lord has reserved" for them. The newly anointed wagon master is played by Ben Johnson, an amazing horseman Ford had been bringing along in character roles; at this point Johnson was still getting used to delivering lines, though that's part of his charm and serves his character beautifully.
A transcendent allegory of the opening of the frontier, Wagon Master follows no conventional, linear itinerary. The Lord moves in mysterious ways and so does the movie, which begins before it begins (that is, before the opening credits) and ends a few luminous seconds after THE END has come and gone. Storytelling takes a backseat to poetry, with long passages consecrated to savoring faces, landscapes, and raw sunlight. Some of these passages are supported by songs, and sometimes music rises faintly like an auditory mirage borne in from a great distance. The musicality extends to communal dancing, and to the demonic jingling of spurs that signals the appearances of "Uncle" Shiloh Clegg (Charles Kemper), patriarch of an inbred outlaw clan whose dog-legged journey eventually intersects the wagon train's.
In keeping with Ford's vision of civilization and its discontents, Wagon Master is populated mostly by pariahs. Besides the deservedly outcast Cleggs, there are the Mormons, the vagabond horse traders played by Johnson and Harry Carey Jr., a medicine-show troupe, and the first people on the land, the Navajo. As individuals and groups drift and coalesce, then separate and coalesce again in fresh configurations, a new nation gets its footing while marching west--"out across the backlands, where the dust has lain so long...." This is the heart's-core of American cinema.
Thank you for taking the time to respond, and I enjoyed reading the italicized review, but the link didn't work for me, don't know if anyone else is having this problem. Can you explain how/if the odd treatment of the gunfight is stylistically necessary, if perhaps there is some subtextual importance behind the odd cut of Carey and the lack of focus on spatial relationships (i.e.: who Johnson is shooting after he jumps off the horse)? Maybe, why Ford felt it necessary to jeopardize the audience's complete understanding, for the sake of the scene?
I do prefer watching action scenes to the idea of action scenes being conveyed by the sound and shaky cam. But I don't think editing is all bad. I feel the fight scenes in the Bourne movies are easy to follow. There may be some rule somewhere that say you shouldn't edit action scenes that much. I think sometimes that the people making the most interesting movies are the ones who know how to properly break the rules.
The chase scene in Bullit was a great chase, but what would be the point if every car chase since then looked like that. If you have cars going high speeds and crashing, with bullets flying everywhere on a crowded highway there would be chaos. Fast editing done right can convey that, fast editing done wrong just makes it a mess.
The part from Hard Boiled is a good action scene, but I think it is bolstered by it's uniqueness. If every action movie had action scenes like that it would lose some impact. It seems there is a thin line between a good action scene and a bad one.
Also important is the aspects outside the scene. The characters don't have to be deep, but they have to be likeable. A non stop barage of action scenes can be as boring as an action movie that is laking action. How the movie builds up to the scenes I think is as important as how the scene is put together.
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