Intensified Continuity
Viola Mathenia
Recent sound studies scholarship has sought to characterise contemporary film sound design and the role that digital sound technology has played in the shaping of film aesthetics. This article contributes to this discussion by arguing that David Bordwell's concept of intensified continuity is a useful framework for analyzing the stylistic norms that govern both sound and image in today's mainstream narrative cinema. Using the films of Edgar Wright as case studies, the article demonstrates how many contemporary films frequently balance highly stylised uses of sound with the desire to ensure coherent storytelling. The author uses examples from Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and The World's End to outline a number of sonic techniques that characterise both Wright's individual directorial style and some larger trends within mainstream cinema. Wright's films give evidence of how digital technology allows sound to become an interesting and important part of contemporary cinematic narration. By using sound to draw attention to a film's construction and method of storytelling, filmmakers like Wright can expand the creative potential of sound, while still mobilising it to tell stories in fairly traditional ways.
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In many post-millennial releases, we are not just seeing an intensification of classical technique, but a perversion. Contemporary Blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload. The result is a film-style marked by excess, exaggeration, and over-indulgence: Chaos Cinema. (Stork)
by building dialogue scenes out of brief shots, the new style has become slightly more elliptical, utilizing fewer establishing shots and long-held two-shots. As Kuleshov and Pudovkin pointed out, classical continuity contains built-in redundancies: shot/reverse shots reiterate the information about character position given in the establishing shot, and so do eyelines and body orientation. For the sake of intensifying the dialogue exchange, filmmakers have omitted some of the redundancies provided by establishing shots. At the same time, though, fast-cut dialogue has reinforced premises of the 180-degree staging system. When shots are so short, when establishing shots are brief or postponed or non-existent, the eyelines and angles in a dialogue must be even more unambiguous, and the axis of action must be strictly respected. (17)
Who doesn't like a good action flick, right? A bullet-dodging, time-bombing, impenetrable hero that doesn't know the meaning of the word physics is one of my guiltiest pleasures. But, over the years it has become very apparent that action films have changed significantly into two hours of sensory overload from the entertaining run/jump/climb jaunts they once were. In this three-part video essay, Los Angeles scholar and filmmaker Matthias Stork takes a deeper look into the changes in filming and editing in the action genre, which, according to him has birthed what he calls "chaos cinema".
The way we tell stories is bound to change. The way we use our medium's tools for stylistic and narrative reasons has changed as well. In the beginning, we simply had a single static shot -- a train coming into a station, a woman dancing, a baby eating. With the development of a diverse film language and continuity editing, our filmic stories began to emerge as complex narratives, and because of that, the true skill of a filmmaker was shown when he/she made a film that was not only interesting and beautiful, but coherent.
According to Mattias Stork, this is no longer the case when it comes to commercial action films. In his three-part essay (the third part is dedicated to addressing the concerns and questions of viewers), Stork investigates the changes action films have gone through since their inception -- a slow exodus from the classical Hollywood style of cinema (purposeful, hidden editing) to what most commercial action films are today. He discusses the sound, the rapid editing (film theorist David Bordwell calls this "intensified continuity"), the loss of spacial awareness, VFX, as well as the "chaos" that all of these things and more produce on-screen.
Whether you think chaos cinema, with its "intensified continuity", is another dimension of our art form that deserves respect, or just lazy filmmaking meant to overwhelm audiences rather than intrigue them, it's a change that has now become a part of our cinematic history, and therefore deserves our study.
What effect, if any, do you think "chaos cinema" is having on cinema as a whole, as well as storytelling? What do you think of Stork's view on it? Are you, as Stork puts it, a "Neoclassical Get-Off-My_Lawnist? Let us know in the comments below.
We chatted with Sowden about his indie film and how he was able to shoot it using a Blackmagic Production 4K in an indie, but creative, documentary style, plus explored a bit more about how Comic-Con is more than just big-name superheroes.
Joshua Sowden: This project began in 2019 with Guy Birtwhistle. Due to the pandemic, he reworked the script to focus solely on a single character's perspective. In the meantime, I filmed my first feature, Extramundane, as a solo filmmaker. By 2021, Guy and the script were ready, and having done solo filming during Extramundane, we were set to go. Guy's story naturally lent itself to solo filmmaking, which was a beautiful fit.
Joshua Sowden: Guy Birtwhistle, a talented actor and producer, had his first sci-fi feature Alistair 1918 screen at Comic-Con in 2016. Our goal was always to submit Our Man in L.A. to Comic-Con, given its unparalleled platform and networking opportunities. The film's indie vibe and exploration of high sci-fi concepts made it a perfect fit for the festival's film showcase.
Joshua Sowden: I aimed to capture the film in a documentary style, reflecting the protagonist's perspective in this version of L.A. I embraced imperfections like slow focus pulls and harsh lighting to enhance realism and grittiness. This approach required flexibility and forgiveness, except for the final scene in the NASA Bunker, which demanded precision to contrast with the rest of the film.
Joshua Sowden: I predominantly used the Blackmagic Production 4K camera due to its affordability and ability to deliver the desired gritty image. I rigged it for versatility between handheld and tripod setups, allowing quick adjustments during filming. We relied on lav mics and a Rode NTG-2 shotgun for sound.
I would have the Rode mic usually in shotgun form and run the recorder into a fanny pack so that I could run sound and roll camera myself. We often utilized natural light supplemented by occasional bounce and artificial lighting. You will see the occasional DJI drone shots and go pro when the Blackmagic was not an option.
Joshua Sowden: Upon reading Guy's script, I envisioned an indie version of Michael Mann's Miami Vice meets District 9 (without the aliens).' I aimed for a gritty, hot portrayal of L.A., adjusting color tones and employing the camera to achieve a realistic, documentary-like feel.
Continuity structures, however, are not just about articulating narrative. Even more importantly, perhaps, they work to provide a certain sense of spatial orientation, and to regularize the flow of time. Where Bordwell sees the establishment of spatiotemporal relations as crucial to the articulation of narrative, I am inclined to think that the actual situation is the reverse. Even in classical narrative films, following the story is not important in itself. It is just another one of the ways in which we are led into the spatiotemporal matrix of the film; for it is through this matrix that we experience the film on multiple sensorial and affective levels.
I am making a rather large theoretical claim here, one that I will need to justify, and further develop, elsewhere. But I think it has major consequences for the ways in which we understand post-continuity.
I think, however, that there is much more to be said about the aesthetic sensibility of post-continuity styles, and the ways that this sensibility is related to other social, psychological, and technological forces. Post-continuity stylistics are expressive both of technological changes (i.e. the rise of digital and Internet-based media) and of more general social, economic, and political conditions (i.e. globalized neoliberal capitalism, and the intensified financialization associated with it). Like any other stylistic norm, post-continuity involves films of the greatest diversity in terms of their interests, commitments, and aesthetic values. What unites, them, however, is not just a bunch of techniques and formal tics, but a kind of shared episteme (Michel Foucault) or structure of feeling (Raymond Williams). It is this larger structure that I would like to illuminate further: to work out how contemporary film styles are both expressive of, and productively contributory to, these new formations. By paying sustained attention to post-continuity styles, I am at least trying to work toward a critical aesthetics of contemporary culture.
The visual and sonic field of Transformers is motivated by a desire for spatial revelation rather than obfuscation; all elements of the spatio-temporal field are directed toward the sensory experience of space, and objects within space, rather than toward sensory stimulation as an experience in itself. Each action sequence is framed in relation to the revelation of bodies within space, and in almost all instances, bodies moving freely through space. Engaging the frenetic action of the several set pieces in Transformers, culminating in the half-hour audio-visual barrage on a city street, is thus not to engage a spatio-temporal field devoid of continuity, but to encounter complex, densely populated spaces carefully framed within a spatio-temporal whole. While Bay has clearly adopted the fashionable action film aesthetic founded on an unstable frame, rapid discontinuous cutting, and a barrage of noise loosely related to a visual source, each set piece of frenetic, disorienting action is punctuated by a sequence of relative stability: a lowering and stripping back of the sound layers, a relatively stable, frequently character-motivated point of view, and the lengthy, distended revelation of what I call impossible images: digital special effects compositions framed in relation to the pro-filmic space. In the Transformers franchise, and particularly in the first film, such digital effects exhibitions are almost always depicted in a wide/extreme long shot, in relatively stable framing, held at some duration (frequently in shots exceeding five seconds), and frequently in highly expressive slow-motion sequences. We see such careful framings of digital compositions in relation to the military base in the first Transformer attack, the desert village of the second attack, the freeway confrontation between Optimus Prime and Bonecrusher, and the visual and aural maelstrom of the city street in the concluding sequence.
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