By Nick Kelly
“During the first decade of the 21st century, film style changed profoundly… 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.” –Matthias Stork, Press Play
It is possible that no filmmaking technique is more controversial than the combination of quick cutting and handheld camerawork, the technique known (among other terms) as Shaky/Queasy-Cam, Run and Gun, Snatch and Grab, and Intensified Continuity (the indispensable term from David Bordwell). A recentvideo essay by film scholar Matthias Stork has introduced another term to the conversation: Chaos Cinema. The quote above essentially sums up Stork’s argument (but don’t let that summary stop you from watching the video): the modern trend toward fast editing and handheld cinematography makes action sequences unintelligible and has led to a decline in action filmmaking.
Predictably, this has stirred up a lot of discussion on the Internet. The best responses I’ve read so far have been from Jim Emerson at Scanners and Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com. What is a little odd is that the discussion about the shakycam style is not anything new. I would say that the debate started becoming more heated in 2007 with the release of Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum, but recent discussion of audience and critical discomfort with handheld camerawork dates back at least to The Blair Witch Project in 1999 and probably toNatural Born Killers in 1994. Earlier this year, Matt Zoller Seitz declared war on the shakycam, and Stork might just be answering his call. But perhaps no one has summed up the common arguments against the shakycam technique quite as succinctly and angrily as Stork.
I have been hesitant to join either side of the debate in either heaping praise on Stork or vehemently condemning his argument. In general, I agree with him in lamenting the current state of action pictures and the wild overuse of the shakycam. I particularly agree with his criticism of the opening car chase inQuantum of Solace, which may have been the first time that I decided that a movie was going to be awful within the first thirty seconds of its running time (and having stayed to the end, I can say that my early judgment was correct).
But there are some holes in the essay that bother me. First of all, I don’t think that Stork provides particularly good analysis of the images that he is showing. The exception is the part about Quantum of Solace where Stork makes a brilliant observation about the increasingly intricate sound designs of action movies (“What we hear is definitely a car chase…but what we see is a ‘car chase’”). But I think some of his other examples don’t work so well. It’s not that I always disagree with them. I just don’t think his analysis is very good. He shows clips and describes them with various adjectives: “coherent”, “comprehensible”, “riveting” (for good examples), and “overstuffed”, “hyperactive”, “sloppy”, “blurry” and “shallow” (for bad examples). He cites cinematic techniques that are a general part of this chaos cinema (“rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement”), but he rarely draws attention to specific examples of them. Instead, Stork’s strategy is to juxtapose action sequences that he thinks are effective with examples from the chaos tradition so that we will see the difference.
And this leads me to my second problem with Stork’s essay: I’m not entirely sure what he means when he uses certain clips. He uses scenes from The Dark Knightto begin both parts of his essay, specifically scenes involving the Joker: “Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order and everything becomes chaos” (hence the title of the essay). Stork also uses action clips from The Dark Knight in the introduction, but he never uses or refers to them again in the body of his essay. Isn’t it a little strange that Stork would use a particular movie as the basis of his argument, but never specifically refer to it? It’s especially strange because The Dark Knight is such a fascinating jumping-off point for a discussion of this chaos cinema. By having the Joker shoot videos with a handheld camera (that he shakes around a lot), Christopher Nolan deliberately associates the Joker with the shakycam. This creates all of sorts of interesting implications about the Joker as a movie director: think of the way Heath Ledger acts during the hospital demolition scene and the way that the Joker essentially hijacks the pacing of the movie in the third act. But aside from the introductory passages, Stork never refers to The Dark Knight.
I assume that Stork does not care much for Nolan’s direction of action sequences (though he responded positively to the film) because he uses a clip of the Mombasa chase scene from Inception in his negative examples of chaos cinema. But for me, this just leads to more confusion because Stork does not really explain what is wrong with this scene. A common reaction from detractors of this essay is to say: “I didn’t think those scenes were incomprehensible.” Since this reaction is entirely based on subjectivity and personal taste, it is not very helpful, but Stork does not do much to prevent this reaction, and honestly, I couldn’t help from thinking it several times during the essay. I found the Inception clip particularly lacking in purpose because it was so brief. Stork excludes Nolan’s use of overhead shots that establish the locations of the pursuers and the pursued (in addition to bringing in some wonderful maze-like images). And frankly, I just don’t understand what specifically Stork finds wrong here. Again, the point is not that I disagree with Stork’s argument. My problem is with his method of argument. A quick glance through the (admittedly brief) archive of this blog will let you know that I am a huge fan of director Christopher Nolan. Yet, I found Jim Emerson’sshot-by-shot criticism of the truck chase in The Dark Knight fascinating and thought-provoking. Emerson uses various elements of film grammar and composition to explain in great detail why he finds this sequence confusing and poorly-made. I’m not suggesting that Stork should have gone into this level of detail, but some more in-depth analysis would have made his argument much more effective.
Stork’s examples of classical action filmmaking should have offset my confusion, but in actuality, they just deepened it. I understand his inclusion of the iconic chase scenes from Bullitt and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I think the reference to John Woo’s Hard Boiled is out of place because shooting most of an action sequence in one long take is not necessarily a staple of classical filmmaking. But the source of my greatest confusion is with his inclusion of the final shootout in Sam Peckinpah’s Western masterpiece The Wild Bunch, one of the most beautiful and visually poetic examples of pure cinematic chaos that I have ever seen. Yet, Stork considers this an example of classical filmmaking.
And this leads to my final objection. Film scholar David Bordwell characterizes the modern trend toward faster cutting and moving cameras as “intensified continuity.” But Stork believes that “Bordwell’s phrase may not go far enough. In many post-millennial releases, we’re seeing not just an intensification of classical technique, but a perversion.”
I think Bordwell is closer to the mark. In the 2002 Film Quarterly essay that Stork cites, Bordwell describes the trends of increasing camera movement and decreasing average shot lengths throughout film history, noting that cutting started becoming a great deal more rapid during the 1960s. Certainly intensified continuity has grown more intense in recent years, but my point is that this technique did not suddenly come out of nowhere. In tracing the origins of chaos cinema, Stork blames the usual suspects: music videos, television, shortened attention spans, CGI. But he ignores the many films that have been pointing the way toward the modern trend. The Wild Bunch’s average shot length of 3.2 seconds might seem a little tame now, but I doubt that anyone thought so in 1969. Perhaps the biggest flaw in Stork’s argument is that he ignores what may be the single most influential action scene in any film: the Battle of Shrewsbury in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight from 1965. Surely influenced by Akira Kurosawa’sSeven Samurai (itself perhaps the most influential of all action pictures), Welles cuts rapidly between handheld shots placed amongst groups of men and horses. The two sides are seen separately as they charge through mist, but when they clash, all order disappears. The men slash and bludgeon each other, and by the end, they are all writhing around in a pile of mud and blood. Welles said that this sequence (along with the death of Harry Hotspur later in the sequence) is supposed to represent the end of chivalry. These are no knights in shining armor fighting a glorious battle for honor. These are common men in a struggle of life and death for no clear purpose. We cannot even tell who belongs to which side. Though not widely seen, this sequence has had an enormous influence on action pictures, particular medieval epics like Braveheart and war films like Saving Private Ryan. Anyone who has seen a modern action movie will recognize the cinematic techniques here.
And there is no denying it: Welles’ Battle of Shrewsbury is chaos cinema. It is marked by rapid cutting and handheld camerawork. It is loud, intense and disorienting. Aside from being shot in black and white, it would not be at all out of place in a modern action movie. And it was made in 1965 by one of the great visual stylists of the cinema.
To be clear, I am very much in sympathy in Matthias Stork’s complaints about modern action cinema. Nearly every Michael Bay film gives me a splitting headache. (Why, oh why, did I pay to see that last Transformers movie? I should have at least brought some aspirin.) Aside from his work in Deathly Hallows Part Two, I think that David Yates’ shakycam action sequences have been the weakest parts of his Harry Potter films (the forest chase scene near the end of Deathly Hallows Part One is an embarrassment in an otherwise glorious entertainment). I guess I’m not quite as quick to vehemently condemn or passionately support this not-really-so-new chaos cinema as others clearly are. Personally, I would rather that we all join forces to slay the monster known as 3D or form a task force advocating for the tasteful use of CGI (critics won’t have to fear much opposition from Nolan fans on either of those fronts). Yes, I have grown more than a little tired with the shakycam, and I agree with Matt Zoller Seitz that it is time for filmmakers to “get a new fad.” Maybe directors should take a sabbatical from intensified continuity and explore other methods of filmmaking. Perhaps they will find new and better ways of visualizing action. If not, the handheld camera is always waiting for them when they return.
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