Indiewire’s Mattias Stork (STORK PATROL! NASTY PLUMAGE!) has put together a two-part video essay called “Chaos Cinema,” about the evolution of action-movie editing and cinematography. I’d recommend checking it out whenever you’ve got 18 minutes or so to spare. While his narration is a little overwrought and silly at times (really, dude? “promiscuous camera moves?” Also, “similarily” is not a word), the basic thesis is something I’ve been bitching about for years, and the side-by-side comparison of older action film composition to recent is fantastic. To boil it down to a single sentence, the idea is that in the 21st century, action movies began to “trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload,” as he puts it. (Or, a more “immersive” or “subjective” experience, as a shaky-cam proponent would probably call it).
I would argue that one of the first to do it (or at least the most influential) was Gladiator (and to a lesser extent, Saving Private Ryan), and perhaps the worst offender was Quantum of Solace, where the blurry camera and fast editing are so incomprehensible that you’re blind to method, only results. You might as well fast-forward through the action sequences and have the hero hold up a sign that says “I lived.” The hand-held, quick-cut bullsh*t isn’t terrible in small doses (it still bugged me in Saving Private Ryan, but didn’t ruin the movie), but lately it’s infected entire films, and I’ve been praying for the pendulum to swing back. I used to enjoy even mediocre action films, and these days, trying to sit through the Transformers was like getting a root canal. I’d even throw movies like Sucker Punch and Tron Legacy onto the pile, not so much because they’re shaky-cam, quick-cut, but because they seem to take place in a space with a confused spatial awareness, where you’re not sure which way is up or down or what the rules are. And no gravity equals no consequences equals no tension equals boring. It’s the same disorienting effect. Anyway, check out the videos for a full explanation of what I’m talking about. Let’s hope Hollywood wises up and finds a better way to communicate chaos. Reaction shots of scared cats, maybe? What? I think that’d be fly.
[via Indiewire.]
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Couldn’t agree more – Gladiator gave me a headache. Most of my friends loved it, but they might literally be retarded. Literally. Might.
A spare 18 minutes? In between which pornos?
I’m just glad the “read the rest of this entry” is back below the story. It takes too long to scroll over to “Read More”.
A shaky-cam video on the same day everyone’s griping about Earfquakes, eh? I like it!
[clops up on horse, easily 24 hands high]
Cheap and easy. I’m convinced that this is just a way for film rapists to not even have to try to stage a realistic or coherent action sequence. Cheap CGI, when all it is is blurry shaky colors. Cheap fights when all you do is just swing a camera around a couple of actors throwing coordinated punches and rolling around. Cheap editing when you don’t have any good looking footage so you just quick cut it to the point that nobody can notice. Why take the time to compose a bad ass chase sequence when you can just fly a camera around over some cars and edit it into a first person POV epileptic seizure. It’s clear that directors/editors that lean on this crutch to compensate for their lack of skills truly suck. I just tend to think it is less stylistic than it is financial. Which is contrary to the budget of films nowadays, but I posit that a lion’s share of that goes to talentless hack actors who are overpaid because they have a wealth of experience spazing out in front of a green screen.
Speaking of pornos, why not film action movies with the same style and pace? You can sure as hell see what the hell is going on in a porn. Imagine a shaky-cam porn, it’d look like the parking lot of Candlestick after a 49rs/Raiders game.
Hey film school geeks, do they even bother to show say, The French Connection, or Bullitt during the ‘How to film action’ lesson?
Ridley Scott was fucking up action before Gladiator. G.I. Jane had this pseudo-cinema verite-zoomy-wavey cam shit that pissed me all that way off.
This thesis seems to boil down to “everything sucks now”, which is sort of reductive even for a film critic. I happen to agree that everything sucks, but I think it’s too simple to say it’s just laziness or the “more is more” theory of modern studio logic. There’s a clear shift from treating the audience as an observer with an on-again-off-again connection with the action to treating the audience like they’re actually the guy in the scene. I’ve wrestled with giant transforming alien robots. That’s what it’s like, you don’t know what’s coming from where and you feel very off-balance. I prefer the old style of action sequences too, but I’m certain that psychologically/chemically/hormonally/whateverly the brain is more switched on during the jump cut stuff. I also don’t think it’s coincidence that this change happened alongside the rise of first-person videogames. I’d bet you the studios have market research somewhere that says audiences today have a greater expectation of feeling like they’re behind the wheel than they did in Sam Peckinpah’s day.
I wouldn’t describe his narration as “overwrought” so much as “incredibly dorky.” He certainly has a point, but he’s so intent on proving his theory about “chaos cinema” that he lazily lumps together filmmakers with completely different styles that don’t at all fit the description. Yes, Michael Bay movies are visually incomprehensible, Battle: LA is an utterly unintelligible mess, and so were most of the fight scenes in Batman Begins. But Nolan demonstrably improved his action scenes in Dark Knight, and the foot chase in Inception isn’t remotely chaotic.
The car chase scenes in Bourne Supremacy and Ultimatum, meanwhile, are brilliant because of just how good they are at being fast/chaotic while still always deliberately cluing the viewer to understand what’s going on even if that clue is only a fraction of a second. That’s not lazy filmmaking that has abandoned a century of cinematic technique; it’s building on those techniques while adapting to an audience that is able to digest visual information much more rapidly than in generations past.
And if you’re going to hate on a director with the last name Scott for having a chaotic visual style, you should be talking about Tony, not Ridley.
I remember watching a special feature on the Batman Begins DVD where they go into the Krav Maga training and choreography they put into the fight scenes. I was impressed with how much work they did so that the guy in black could shuffle around at night with a camera up his nose. ELBOWS! BAT EARS!! PEOPLE FALLING DOWN!!!
Lazy, bullshit, amateur regurgitation of the same crap people have been complaining about since the 90′s (see the Simpsons and “music video culture” references in this stupid video). Whining masquerading as film theory. Just cause you give it a snappy name (“Chaos Cinema”) doesn’t mean you’re saying something unique or intelligent.
I’m not saying I even disagree with a lot of the complaints. But the premise that all of the movies that use these techniques fall into this one pejorative category is bullshit. That’s all they are – techniques: shaky camera, rapid editing, complex sound design. They are tools at the disposal of of the filmmakers.
You could make the exact same argument – that they are lazy, obnoxious, distracting, etc – about ANY technique if used improperly: e.g. CGI, score music, slow-mo, 3D …. anything.
For some movies, they just suck, were terrible stories to begin with and no director or lack of shaky cam is going to make them better. For others, a better director could have drastically improved a disappointing movie. But these stylistic devices used or not used are just part of the many decisions made that resulted in a movie being good or not. Yes, these techniques are popular right now (have been for well over a decade). Sometimes they are used in a lazy, obnoxious manner. But they are not the thing that makes a movie good or bad. Some of these devices aren’t even new: Sam Peckinpah and Walter Hill were using rapid, elliptical editing in action sequences in the 70s. The Wild Bunch was in fact one of the first movies to so aggressively disorient the viewer’s sense of space and time in an action sequence. The fact that he’d use it as an example of the “old style of filmmaking” illustrates how little this guy knows about the topic.
The line “the use of after effects software” was pretty entertaining though. Pretty sure he has no idea what After Effects is. And I still have no idea what the difference between Car Chase and “Car Chase” is. Nor did the Bresson quote help clarify it much.
The “overwrought” part was stuff like “promiscuous camera movement,” the “dorky” part was things like “similarily.” I wasn’t “hating” on Ridley Scott, I was saying Gladiator is probably the biggest, most influential movie to use that style, and it seems like the one people were ripping off. But you’re right, Tony’s obnoxious close-ups and visual chaos were present going all the way back in True Romance.
The problem is directors fill their white space with as many different actions as possible in as little time as possible. If Michael Bay had filled that empty space with sphincter mice instead, Transformers might have won an Oscar
This guy just really needs to stop watching Tony Scott movies.
The combat scenes in DR STRANGELOVE have a ton of shaky cam. Check it out.
I agree that Gladiator was the first. I have a clear memory of watching the opening scene thinking ‘this is the stupidest shit ever, is there even choreography? I hope this doesn’t catch on’.
Transformers films are so bad that I actually enjoy re-watching them and figuring out what is happening like some visual puzzle. I enjoyed being one of the few to notice things like Optimus’ energy sword being used to decapitate Bonecrusher. *shakes asthma inhaler*
I’m under the impression that you cannot lump all these movies into one category. Take Ridley Scott’s Gladiator versus Michael Davis’ Shoot ‘Em Up. One was an extremely deep narrative and the use of “Chaos Cinema” techniques were to give the audience a sense of being in the situation. Complaining that it is hard to figure out where you are is like complaining that a book using stream of consciousness storytelling is too difficult to understand. Ask someone about what happens to their senses when they are in a long drawn out and potentially life threatening situation. It becomes hard to process everything in that heightened state. Maybe the director is taking that approach as I believe Ridley Scott was attempting in Gladiator. Would a situation like that be disorienting? I don’t know about you but having a FUCKING GIANT TIGER swatting at me while a huge angry Austrian swings a sword at me might cause me to look back and forth in a shakey manner… Moving on to Shoot ‘Em Up, that movie was supposed to be a full frontal assault on the senses. It was not supposed to be easily digestible. It was basically an over the top kill fest and in a way particularly minimalist as far as cinema goes; what story there was only served to set up an escalating level of over the top insanity. The point of all this is that saying that “Chaos Cinema” is destroying the art of cinema harkens back to people saying that Jackson Pollock was not an artist. Artist will constantly try to change how they portray there art to evoke different messages. That being said Michael Bay sucks ass and including him in a discussion on cinema is fucking retarded.
One of the reasons the shaky-cam filming technique is so irritating is the fact that so much of it is filmed in close-up. The Hurt Locker example being doing it a bit better. The more action oriented parts are drawn back more so as to take in more action while keeping a sense of frantic action.
The later Bourne movies however or the last Bond movie with that opening car chase lose you with straight on assault of your visual sense. The cars are speeding right towards already fast moving camera followed by a quick cut to a car crash immediately followed by a car zooming until the end of the chase where you are wondering exactly what just happened.