Fast, Cheap and Out of Control
I’d like to use The Bourne Ultimatum as a stick with which to beat modern American movies – which may not be completely fair to Paul Greengrass’s movie, mildly mature and refreshingly nitty-gritty summer-actioner that it is. But there’s something wrong on display here, something essentially amiss with the basic syntax of contemporary moviemaking as it has evolved in Hollywood – and, yes, I’m talking about camera style, which in this case (as in The Bourne Supremacy and countless other new films) suggests nothing so much as what a movie would look like if it were shot from inside of a high-speed clothes dryer. Forget the valid but easily dismissible old-fogey naysay about the handheld shaky-cam effect being simply irritating – it is, to the extent that I and everyone I know had to look away from the screen occasionally, so as to avoid motion sickness or migraine. No, let’s just consider this extremely popular movie as an act of visual storytelling – the yardstick by which most of film culture’s great old lions (Renoir, Mizoguchi, Murnau, Ford, Welles, Keaton, etc.) gained their eminence. Any five-minute hunk of Greengrass’s film would serve as an illustration: storytelling – clarity, eloquence, rigor, substance – is an irrelevancy in this movie world. You watch, but the camera smooshes are so constant and extreme you can’t focus on anything at all, much less follow an action narrative visually. You’re just looking at white noise, and listening to pounding quasi-African music, waiting for the filmmaking to settle down after many minutes of tumult to inform you where you are, and what had just happened. It’s not exciting in itself – we’d have to see it for that to occur. What it seems to be as a simulacrum of cinematic excitement – a faked impression of chaos, designed to make us feel the action rather than experience it on our own as observers. It’s a feint, a magician’s diverting maneuver – not even the trick itself. America might love this, but as movielover I cannot tolerate being made to feel anything. This is Spielberg’s legacy, after many a fashion, a fascist-style agenda that intends only to dictate to the viewer what his or her experience will be, shot by shot, smudge by smudge.
It goes without saying that this is the exact antithesis of the storytelling mise-en-scene that made the great filmmakers great (one cannot imagine any filmmaker, even Spielberg, be revered in years hence for this smash-&-shove brand of cinema, and Greengrass will surely only be remembered for his much more astute and patient docudramas). The old argument used to be montage vs. mise-en-scene, Eisenstein vs. Murnau, a combat that Murnau and his many sons and daughters had decidedly won, in the heads of attentive cinephiles if not in the kill-a-Saturday-night market at large. But now the fight seems to have evolved into visceral effect (Eisensteinian montage included, plus the new digital-editing achievements, plus whatever) vs. visual experience (meaning, having the experience of seeing things actually happen) – the difference between spinning in circles and falling down, and skiing down an unknown mountain. One is childish distraction, the other, potentially, transformative and substantive and profound. Cinema, even popular cinema, is not, I dare pontificate, indistinct chaos and high-speed blurriness, but the pleasure of actually seeing, say, Buster Keaton ride a motorcycle’s handle bars across a speeding train’s path, or Anna Karina dance the Madison, or Joey Wong sail through the fake HK air, or Clive Owen hustling through a war-torn city block and up multiple flights of stairs, following a baby’s cry. Or, insert your own favorite.
Michael,
Thank you for calling attention to this growing problem. However, believe it or not, it is not limited to action films. In the last five years documentaries on PBS and cable channels like The History Channel have increasingly employed this hackneyed "technique" in contexts where it seems almost obscenely inappropriate: Here's a shot of John Adams walking into the Continental Congress and oh look, they've sped up the film for a split second then slowed it back down then did a quick motion blur towards his face. WHY?????
As for the work of the great directors I wonder what current directors think when they see a scene like Kane typing Leland's review before firing him where the camera is motionless as we focus on the two men, Kane in foreground, Leland in background. Or what about the dynamite planting scene with Welles and Heston in "Touch of Evil" that lasts for minutes without a single cut. Do modern directors understand why those scenes work so well? Do they understand that it is precisely because we are allowed to follow the scene without visual interruption that makes the scenes so effective, and ironically, visually stunning?
I find nothing visually stunning about the "I'm running with my camera towards the actor" style, just annoying. At a viewing of the latest Harry Potter recently I had to look down from the screen on a few occassions because I'd swear my eyes were starting to hurt. During the clash of wizards at the end, the scene was edited so poorly with so much pyrotechnic motion blur photography that it was damn near impossible to even follow along, much less care.
Oddly, I don't read many critics complaining about this so I was glad to read your article. It lets me know I'm not alone in my disdain for this discouraging trend.
Thanks,
Jonathan Lapper
Cinema Styles
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I dunno, Michael, but I loved Bourne Ultimatum. As a piece of pure cinema, this was brilliant. Greengrass might be described as a filmmaker who embodies what the theorist Paul Virilio calls "velocity" (Michael Mann might be another filmmaker in the Virilio mold). Reality is no longer understood as the unity of time and space. Rather, we have a technological paradox, this being able to be everywhere while being nowhere at all. It's "reality" at the speed of capital and information.
In Bourne reality is mediated, constructed, even, by technology. Bourne, himself, tries to construct it as best he can, on the fly, and we with him. Everything is a lethal, situational construct. Human consciousness pitted against all-seeing technology.
Did you notice how young the analysts were who worked with Vosen? How when someone was finally taken out, this loss of life, engineered by their young hands, registered painfully on their faces?
Taking nothing away from Renoir, Mizoguchi, et al, Greengrass's accomplishment seems perfectly right for right now.
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At last, some kind of thoughtful defense of the new all-effect, jittery-carnival-ride style -- a quantum cinema, right?, wherein discernible "reality" is as illusive as an electron's path? But the dichotomy implicit here (not, unfortunately, fully explicated) pits the unarguable ubiquity of technology and its "mediations" against "human consciousness" and "reality." But consciousness and, more to my point, perception, is the same regardless of technology; time and space may be enigmatic factors on a particle level, but let's not confuse our mode of attention online, or our electronicization of capital, with subatomic quantum mysteries. There is, really and despite the theory-speak, no relationship. Info might fly instantaneously around the globe, but roof-jumping, car-crashing, and fist-fighting are still, last time I checked, realities "unmediated" by hypertechnology.
But as a metaphor? Is Bourne a symbolic rendering of addled consciousness/perception, like an Ashbery poem or a Pollock canvas? If it were about reinventing visual form and not simply attempting to recreate a rollercoaster's woozy vertigo, then maybe you'd have something.
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I just returned from seeing the new Bourne movie and could not agree more. What a jittery piece of crap. The hand-to-hand combat scene in the apartment in Tangier sets a new bar for cinematic incomprehensibility.
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You joking? That fight scene owns. Best scene in that whole film. My own skull felt cracked after that and it felt cool because it wasn't actually cracked: I was just watching a harmless action movie.
On another note, Bunuel forever.
That's right. It's my first post here.
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What do you think about the Dardenne brothers or Lars von Trier's "smash-and-shove" cinema? Is there something particularly pernicious about shakycam and fragmented editing in a big-budget Hollywood film, because it's not the only place where one can find it ? I thought UNITED 93 was a really creative synthesis of the vocabulary of filmmakers like the Dardennes and Dogme crew with that of the modern American action film. And I suspect that making some audience members physically ill was intentional.
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A valid point -- I see a distinction, and am not a tripod/dolly-only aesthete; handheld quasi-doc camerawork is a timeworn and valid approach, but like anything else can be abused. I love the Dardennes, and United 93, and never once in any of those films did I feel a lack of clarity or place, or a dishonesty of intention. Von Trier is a more troublesome case for other reasons, but even his mysteriously subjective handheldness, whatever its mixed intentions and upshots, is clear and simple -- never does he simply shake the camera like a bottle of salad dressing simply for the sake of impressing upon us, bullishly, a cheap sense of chaos and speed. (Von Trier's program has more to do with Godardian metafilmic rupture, in its own complex way.) This is a little subjective, however; one viewer's sick-making shaky-cam (The Blair Witch Project) is another's ultra-realism. I've heard of no one who got sick from United 93, but given the thrust of that film, I'd suspect it had something to do with the subject at hand and Greengrass's unblinkingly authentic depiction thereof. But the Bourne movies have none of these escape hatches; they're just pulp, made up of deliberately unfocusable images.
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Haven't seen it yet, but I think what you wrote applies doubly, or trebly, or quintuply, to the ADD style of editing employed on musicals employed by Baz Lurhmann and then modified to (for me, anyway) something more tolerable by Rob Marshall.
It's really the same principle, though, when you're talking of either musicals or action films -- you're paying top notch professionals to perform these amazing choreographed movements and maybe act a little too; it'd be nice to see it.
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You're right, and musicals have an even more imperative need to avoid that approach -- the "dancing" in Moulin Rouge, Chicago, Dreamgirls, Hairspray and even Idlewild isn't dancing, it's a simulation of dance routines wholly manufactured in the editing room. The excitement, if you're susceptible to it, is to be found in the editing strobe effect, not in the actual dance steps. It's quite like watching athletes and being satisfied in seeing a montage of physical feats, not the actual prowess itself. Dancing is about the dancer, and what he or she can do, not a manipulated, fragmented "impression" of the dance. If you don't see it actually happen, then what are you watching?
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You are so absolutely positively 100 percent right about this jumble of chaos masquerading as a movie.
I saw THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM last week, on the basis of strong recommendations by liberal critic friends and I kept thinking to myself ... is some supposed anti-Bush subtext about gov't surveillance and secret skullduggery supposed to hide the fact that you literally cannot make head nor tail of what is happening.
I will acknowledge being handicapped by not having seen the first two BOURNE films; but the unintelligibility is at a level more basic than the parsing of plot points. No coherent space emerges for any of the three main set pieces -- Waterloo Station, Tangier foot chase and New York car chase. And so all we see is large metal objects crashing into one another, fists flying somewhere (where was Tony Jaa when you need him), all manipulated by characters that are complete robots despite being made of too-too-solid flesh.
The edited-to-death mise-en-scene, combined with protagonists with an omniscience God would envy, and with the bad guy manipulating the action to the step a bazillion miles away in real-time (a Godly omnipotence to match the omniscience) ... I thought -- this isn't a movie; this is a big-screen video game, with cutaways to the players "onstage." Like ESPN showing a Madden07 tournament (which it has done).
The Dardennes reference is apropos ... the motorbike chase near the end of THE CHILD puts this manufactured falsity to shame.
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