This is a multi-part series that is a slightly modified version of my BA Dissertation.

Here is Part One.

In the 21st century, various critics have argued and discussed the development of film style within Hollywood. This development of film style has gone from the traditional continuity of the classical studio film to a form of ‘Intensified Continuity’ and then to post-continuity or Chaos Cinema.

In traditional continuity editing, a film demonstrates coherence and restraint. For example, in The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston) there is a dialogue sequence between Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) where they discuss the “black bird”. Here the editing is calm and measured, only cutting to show each character speaking, with a long-shot to help establish the action. Even as Sam Spade reacts furiously to Gutman’s threats, the camera doesn’t cut, showing a long-shot of him standing up and verbally berating the still seated Gutman. Here, the traditional continuity editing, even with heightened emotion in the scene, allows the actors to convey the emotion and affect of the scene.

According to David Bordwell, ‘Intensified Continuity’ elaborates upon and amplifies this style of filmmaking. He identifies four key components of intensified continuity.

First, rapid editing, which means that the average shot length of a film is shorter than films which adhered to traditional continuity editing. There are fewer establishing shots, and they are kept brief. Since establishing shots are not there to anchor the sequence, the eyelines and ‘axis of action’ must be kept at all costs. This is evident in the mall shootout between the T- 800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and the T-1000 (Robert Patrick) in Terminator 2: Judgment Day 1991, James Cameron). Here as they shoot each other in rapid fire exchanges, the edit cuts quickly with each gunshot. As the T-800 shoots the T-1000 with a shotgun, the consequent shot is shown hitting its liquid metal body. The reaction shot of the gun firing and the impact is quick, but because the axis of the action is established, with the T-1000 on the left and the T-800 on the right, the viewer is able to clearly understand the action.

Second, intensified continued frequently utilises bipolar extremes of lens lengths. Bordwell highlights how long-focus lens became and remained an “all-purpose tool” for filmmakers for a variety of different shots, and since the 1960s, lens lengths have become more varied. The use of long lenses not only enable the filmmaker to easily switch between close-ups, medium- shots, over-the-shoulder shots and establishing shots, but also allowed racking focus. An example of this is in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015, Joss Whedon). The scene in question is the Avengers all attempting and failing to lift Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) hammer, Mjölnir, as they are all not worthy. However, when Captain America/Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) attempts to lift Mjölnir it budges slightly, with the focus going from the hammer to the look of worry on the face of Thor. What the rack focus does is allows the viewers attentions to be shifted just by a change of focus, so in the scene I have just described for the sake of humour. But it can be used to signify character attentions changing, magnify the situation, or bring something to the viewers’ attention.

Third, dialogue scenes are more closely framed. As already discussed about the lack of establishing shots, so too are there a lack of dialogue shots, but when they are present, they are closely framed. Here the singles, which are medium or close-ups showing one actor, are tighter in on the performer. The tighter framings allow for faster cutting, as the viewer can concentrate on the closer nuances of an actor’s performance. An example of this is in Miami Vice (2006, Michael Mann) as Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) meet Jose Yero (John Ortiz) for the first time. In this sequence, Jose Yero questions them about their work (as they are undercover), the tension between the three characters is felt as the camera switches between close-up and medium shot singles as they verbally spar. The editing quickens as Crockett pulls out a grenade as a show of power against the commanding Jose Yero. The tension of the sequence wouldn’t work if the sequence was like that of the aforementioned The Maltese Falcon, with the close framings and rapid editing building the suspense of the sequence.

Fourth, a free-ranging camera that “prowls even if nothing else budges”. The constantly moving camera moves around subjects and action, even if the frame has static action and actors. An example of this working effectively is in Munich (2005, Steven Spielberg). Here the characters are all sat within a stationary car watching their targets leave a hotel. But the camera starts off outside the car facing forward, then moves inside the car facing forward, focussing on actors’ reflections in mirrors. First looking at the reflection of Steve (Daniel Craig) then Robert (Mathieu Kassovitz). As Robert hands a photograph to Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), the camera focusses on the photograph as Avner looks at it, all in one single fluid take. The effect given here of the camera moving is that it allows the action to stay stationary but helps to build momentum, and keep the viewer interested as the shot progresses.

David Bordwell describes the films produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and those directed by Tony Scott and Michael Bay, are a “pumped-up schema of intensified continuity”. The energy of action sequences from the films of Michael Bay, for Bordwell represent a new style of intensified continuity, removed from action sequences from Top Gun (1986, Tony Scott), Speed (1994, Jan de Bont), or Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan). The article, written in 2002 identifies “today’s cinema” as films like The Matrix (1999, The Wachowskis), Armageddon (1998, Michael Bay) and The Rock (1996, Michael Bay), two of which are directed by Michael Bay.

Building on Bordwell’s work, Matthias Stork in his video, ‘Chaos Cinema 1’, argues that:

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)

What Matthius Stork does is he identifies the aspects of intensified continuity that have been dialled up. This is Chaos Cinema, a “film-style marked by excess, exaggeration, and over- indulgence”. He says that the intention of all of these aspects is to force the viewer to feel the images, in ‘Chaos Cinema 2’ he states that films within Chaos Cinema do “…not seduce you into suspending disbelief, it bludgeons you until you give up.” He says that the films subject the audiences to a seemingly random force of images that would be near incomprehensible if not for sound bridging the sequences.

One of his most effective examples in ‘Chaos Cinema 1’, is a fight sequence from The Bourne Supremacy (2004, Paul Greengrass). In this sequence, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) fights with Jarda (Marton Csokas), as, Jarda attempts to subdue Bourne, with Bourne fighting back in self-defence. The two fight with kitchen knives, magazines and power cables, slamming into the wall, the floor and a table. The camera keeps at a close-up between the two; shots of punches, kicks and parries are rapidly edited together. Throughout this sequence, the whiplash of shaky-cam shots that follow one another are almost too fast for the spectator to follow and comprehend. However, the sound design helps to bridge and allow for interpretation. Through the sounds of concrete being broken, explosives colliding and detonating, and tyres screeching, the spectator is able to interpret the action on screen.

These three paradigms are not rigid categories, but can be thought of as both historical developments and points along a spectrum. They can all be observed in the Transformers franchise, and within each film the action sequences are generally more intensified or chaotic than the non-action sequences. Despite being the most recent film in the series, Bumblebee is also the one which comes closest to classical continuity – or is the least intensified – and therefore it provides a baseline against which the rest of the series can be judged. To explore this, I will consider three similar chase sequences, from Bumblebee, Transformers and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

The Bumblebee sequence (timestamp: 6 minutes, 20 seconds) takes place as eponymous Autobot crash-lands in California in 1987, interrupting a Sector 7 training exercise. Seeing his men being hurt, Agent Burns orders them to open fire on the robot. In a closeup dutch angle, an army 4×4 pulls away from a dead stop, travelling from right to left. It drives away in mid- shot, a soldier in the gun turret on top; dust flies up at the camera, filling the frame. There is then a close-up of Bumblebee’s head, as he runs left to right, trees zooming past his face, and then looks behind him. Cut to the interior of a 4×4 going downhill, with Bumblebee running in front of it. A soldier shouts, “There!”. A midshot of Bumblebee running follows; the camera circles from left to right as Bumblebee transforms into a yellow Jeep and speeds out of frame. In a reaction close-up, Burns, looking left out of the windscreen, says “What the hell?”, and then shouts to the gun turret, “Take it down!” In close-up, the gun turret fires a spear. In long shot, the 4×4 chases the Jeep, with the camera following the spear as it hits Bumblebee. Bumblebee skids away from the camera, snapping the rope and rolling sideways down the hill out of frame before the 4×4 then comes back into shot.

Throughout this sequence we can identify the traits of intensified continuity. The way the action sequence is filmed, with slow relatively long shot lengths and no extreme close-ups, allows the audience to stay follow with the action. However, the editing needs to be kept at a pace in order for the viewer to understand the anticipation of the sequence. The viewer can piece together what is happening through these successive shots, able to understand who is chasing Bumblebee, why he is running, and the spatial arrangement of the action. However, even in intensified continuity, or at least this close to Classical Hollywood filmmaking techniques, the viewer has to stay with the sequence in order to understand it. If the viewer looks away from the screen then a vital piece of information for the film could be missed. What this does, as Agent Burns barks orders to his soldiers, is heightens the viewing experience; the viewer feels attentive to the action, and has a “sharpen[ed] emotional resonance” because of these techniques.

While Bumblebee lies somewhere between classical and intensified continuity, the first Transformers film establishes the franchise’s standard way of constructing action sequences as lying between intensified continuity and chaos cinema, with the sequels moving further and further into the latter category.

The highway chase sequence in Transformers (timestamp: 1 hour, 49 minutes) shows the “pumped-up” version of intensified continuity. Rapid editing, extreme bipolar use of lens lengths, close framings and a free ranging camera. These techniques, whilst they can be disruptive, still secure the audiences sense of spatial and temporal relations that are also typically produced by classical continuity. However, this “pumped-up” version of intensified continuity thrusts the audience into the middle of a heightened sequence, by creating a sense of confusion and uncertainty. For Bordwell this shows how the filmmakers, with assistance from all these tools, force the viewer to become more involved within the action sequence.

En route from the Hoover Dam to Mission City, Sam and Mikaela are travelling inside Bumblebee, with Optimus Prime and Jazz following, and Bonecrusher and Barricade in pursuit. The sequence ends with a fight between Optimus Prime and Barricade.

The sequence starts with a low close-up of Optimus Prime’s back wheels, the camera panning from right to left to the front of the truck. This cuts to a low angled mid-shot of Bumblebee, the camera circling left-to-right, light shining between Bumblebee and Jazz, to a mid-shot of both in frame. A mid-shot of Optimus Prime follows, accompanied by the sound of sirens. Cut to a shot of Barricade and Bonecrusher in their vehicle state: Bonecrusher is in the background, and Barricade enters the frame and comes into a close-up. A mid-shot of Bonecrusher driving right to left is followed by a close up of a Bonecrusher’s front wheels: a car in the background swerves off road, and the camera shakes as Bonecrusher rams another car off the road. Metal clangs, cutting to a people carrier being forced into the middle of the road, where it grinds noisily against the concrete divider. Cut to a man screaming, his care moving left to right. Cut to car being flipped up into the air by Bonecrusher, smashing into the road. A long shot following Bonecrusher reveals more cars getting thrown into the air. A close- up of glass shards, then an impact shot of another car getting hit. In long shot, Bumblebee points and move from left to right, and the camera quick pans to Optimus Prime, who is following, his speed conveyed by camera shakes. Cut to a close-up of Sam and Mikaela inside Bumblebee, looking behind them (frame right). Sam says, “No, no, no.” Mikaela replies “What?” Sam shouts “Block ‘em!” Cut to Barricade racing towards them. A shot of Optimus Prime, Ironhide and Ratchet speeding head on towards the camera follows, ending with a closeup of Optimus Prime’s back wheels breaking.

In this sequence, the free-ranging camera, especially its left-to-right circling, the close-ups of the action and rapid editing exemplify Bay’s use of the conventions of intensified continuity. Amid this barrage of sounds and images, the extreme close-ups and (admittedly minimal) reactive dialogue of characters in peril heighten the tension and offer the audience emotional resonance. When the edit cuts to people in cars screaming and cowering in fear because of the destruction brought upon them, Bay uses them as the audience surrogate to help with those that could feel no emotional resonance to the events on screen.

Throughout the sequence there are audio bridges, sound cues that help the audience identify the nature of the image. For example, Bay’s multiple rapid cuts of successive images of Bonecrusher ramming a car provide visual cues but, for example, shots of the Decepticon grinding against the car are accompanied by the scraping of metal, a man’s screams and the sound of glass shattering. These audio cues emphasise actions that, thanks to the pace of the editing, the viewer might have trouble following. The sound here is constructed to give signifiers to the physical action, these aren’t sounds created on set, but added in a computer to accompany the action. Matthius Stork in ‘Chaos Cinema 1’, when describing the car chase sequence in Quantum of Solace (2008, Marc Forster) states that, “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’.” He puts the quote marks in to distinguish between the actual thing of the car chase, and what the cliched sounds of a car chase are. The former ‘Car Chase’ has a real- world referent, whilst the latter only refers to a representation of a ‘Car Chase’. Such moments push the film from intensified continuity closer to chaos cinema.

The highway chase sequence in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (timestamp: 1 hour, 45 minutes) moves further into the terrain of chaos cinema, a development which better enables us to see retrospectively that the Transformers sequence is closer to intensified continuity. Sam has figured out that the Decepticons want to use Sentinel Prime to activate the Space Bridge and thus bring Cybertron and more Decepticons to Earth. Sam, the Autobots and Sentinel Prime are travelling back to their headquarters, with the Decepticon Dreads, Crowbar, Crankcase and Hatchet in pursuit.

About halfway through the sequence, a low angle shot of the three Autobots shows a half- transformed Bumblebee firing bullets at the Decepticons, and the other two firing rockets. Debris crumbles off the road and cars crash as the camera follows a rocket as it hits the four- legged Decepticon, which crashes onto the other side of the highway. The camera races past it, turns to look behind as Mirage, transformed into his robot form, hurls his cables – in slow motion – to grab onto the Decepticon, with Mirage skidding past the camera. In close-up, Sam shouts, “Shoot ‘em, shoot ‘em, shoot ‘em”. Cut to a dutch-angle of Bumblebee firing rockets at the Decepticon being grappled by Mirage. The rockets are followed by the camera as they hit the Decepticon and explode, throwing the robot past the camera and out of the left of the frame. Cut to a slow-motion mid-shot of the Decepticon falling into the right of the frame, smashing into a car and destroying itself.

The visual overload of the “pumped-up schema of intensified continuity” is now full-on Chaos Cinema. Whereas before in the highway chase sequence in Transformers, the free-ranging camera and rapid editing nonetheless allowed the viewer to comprehend what was happening, here the audio cues bear the brunt of the narrative flow.

Bordwell understood the shift to intensified continuity as being concerned with reducing the redundancies of classical continuity while also reinforcing some of its principles:

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)

As this sequence from Transformers: Dark of the Moon shows, the omission of spatial cues in particular become more extreme. Eyelines and the axis of action might be maintained – the Decepticon falls out of frame left and enters the next shot frame right – but they are no longer “strictly respected.”

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