1.2 Post-Continuity:
An Introduction
BY STEVEN SHAVIRO
In my 2010 book Post-Cinematic Affect, I coined the term “post-
continuity.” I used this term to describe a style of filmmaking that has
become quite common in action films of the past decade or so. In what
I call the post-continuity style, “a preoccupation with immediate effects
trumps any concern for broader continuity—whether on the immediate
shot-by-shot level, or on that of the overall narrative” (123).
In recent action blockbusters by the likes of Michael Bay and Tony Scott,
there no longer seems to be any concern for delineating the geography
of action, by clearly anchoring it in time and space. Instead, gunfights,
martial arts battles, and car chases are rendered through sequences
involving shaky handheld cameras, extreme or even impossible camera
angles, and much composited digital material—all stitched together
with rapid cuts, frequently involving deliberately mismatched shots. The
sequence becomes a jagged collage of fragments of explosions, crashes,
physical lunges, and violently accelerated motions. There is no sense of
spatiotemporal continuity; all that matters is delivering a continual series
of shocks to the audience.
This new action-movie style has not been unnoticed by film critics and
theorists. The first writer to come to grips with this new style, as far as
Steven Shaviro
I know, was Bruce Reid in the Seattle weekly newspaper The Stranger.
More than a decade ago (2000), Reid wrote, with tongue not quite in
cheek, of Bay’s “indefensible” vision:
“I had to train everyone to see the world like I see the world,”
Bay states in the DVD commentary to Armageddon. That world
is apparently one of disorienting edits, mindless whip pans, and
rack focuses that leave the background in a blur to reveal the
barrel of a gun. Colors are treated with equal exaggeration: Entire
scenes are lit in deep blue or green with no discernible source for
the reflection. It is an anarchic, irresponsible vision, despite all
the macho, patriotic chest-thumping.
Reid went on to slyly suggest that, despite being a “crushingly untalented”
hack, Bay nonetheless shared with avant-garde filmmakers like Stan
Brakhage and Bruce Conner “the same headlong thrill of the moment,
the same refusal to dawdle over or organize their material.”
Much more recently (2008), David Bordwell has complained on his blog
of the way that, in recent years,
Hollywood action scenes became “impressionistic,” rendering
a combat or pursuit as a blurred confusion. We got a flurry of
cuts calibrated not in relation to each other or to the action, but
instead suggesting a vast busyness. Here camerawork and editing
didn’t serve the specificity of the action but overwhelmed, even
buried it. (“A Glance”)
More recently still, in the summer of 2011, Matthias Stork gave a well-
nigh definitive account of these changes in action editing in his two-part
video essay “Chaos Cinema,” which led to a storm of commentary on
the Internet. (A third part of the video essay has since been added, in
which Stork replies to many of his critics). Stork directly addresses the
transformation from action sequences (like those of Sam Peckinpah,
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John Woo, and John Frankenheimer) which offered the viewer a coherent
sense of action in space and time, to the sequences in recent action films
that no longer do this. Stork says:
Chaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. It
consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Every single frame
runs on adrenaline. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of
a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes
building toward. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of
flair and spectacle. It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of
sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking
style to bits. Directors who work in this mode aren’t interested
in spatial clarity. It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely
matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action
films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.
Stork’s video essay is extremely interesting and useful. He really makes you
see how action editing has changed over the course of the past decade or
so. I have been showing it to my students in order to explain how editing
styles have changed.
But I can’t help feeling that Stork’s focus is too narrow, and that his
judgments—about the badness, or “illiteracy,” of “chaos cinema” in
comparison to the older action-editing styles of Peckinpah, Woo, et al.—
are too simplistic and unequivocal. Stork deliberately adopts a provocative
and polemical tone, in order to get his point across. But he only talks
negatively about the new style; he points out what it fails to do, without
giving enough credit for the positive things that it actually does. To my
mind, it is inadequate simply to say that the new action films are merely
vapid and sensationalistic. Ironically, Stork’s dismissal of action films
today sounds rather like the way in which, in years past, Hollywood fare
in general was disparaged in comparison to self-conscious art films.
When I showed “Chaos Cinema” Part 1 to my Introduction to Film class
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earlier this semester, the students agreed that they could really see the
stylistic differences that the video put on display. But many of them also
said that, having grown up with “chaos cinema,” they enjoyed it and
weren’t bothered by the failings of which Stork accused it. New forms
and new technical devices imply new possibilities of expression; I am
interested in trying to work out what these new possibilities might be. This
will involve picking up on Bruce Reid’s not-entirely-facetious suggestion
of ties between the most crassly commercial recent filmmaking and the
historical projects of the avant-garde.
In the third part of his “Chaos Cinema” video essay, responding to
criticisms by Scott Nye, Stork grudgingly admits that Tony Scott’s Domino
(2005)—surely one of the most extravagant examples of post-continuity
style—is not devoid of aesthetic value. But Stork complains that, because
of its radical “abstraction,” Domino doesn’t work in a genre context—it isn’t
really an action film. I note, however, that Bruce Reid had already credited
Michael Bay with pushing filmmaking “to the brink of abstraction,” and
yet making movies that mass audiences love. Stork complains that Domino
is an avant-garde experiment; the avant-garde, he says, is “a hermetically
sealed environment,” with “different audiences, reception spheres and
ambitions” than the commercial genre film. But I am rather inclined to
agree with Reid; the mass vs. avant-garde distinction just doesn’t hold
any longer. After all, there isn’t a technique used by Jean-Luc Godard that
hasn’t become a mainstay of television and Internet commercials.
One way that we can start to work out the potentialities of post-continuity
styles is by looking at their genealogy. Stork notes, as I also do in my
book, that what he calls “chaos cinema” is an offshoot, or an extreme
development, of what David Bordwell calls intensified continuity.
Bordwell demonstrates how, starting with the New Hollywood of the
1970s, commercial filmmaking in America and elsewhere has increasingly
involved “more rapid editing . . . bipolar extremes of lens lengths . . .
more close framings in dialogue scenes . . . [and] a free-ranging camera”
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(“Intensified Continuity” 16-21). But although this makes for quite a
different style from that of classic Hollywood, Bordwell does not see it
as a truly radical shift: “[f]ar from rejecting traditional continuity in the
name of fragmentation and incoherence,” he says, “the new style amounts
to an intensification of established techniques” (16). It still tells stories in
the classical manner—only more so, with a vengeance.
I think that Stork and I are both arguing that this is no longer the case with
the 21st-century developments of action cinema. (And Bordwell himself
might even agree with this, as witness the blog posting I quoted earlier [“A
Glance”]). In my book, I suggested that intensified continuity has “jumped
the shark,” and turned into something else entirely (Post-Cinematic Affect
123). We might call this, in the old Hegelian-Marxist style, a dialectical
reversal involving the transformation of quantity into quality. Or we
might see it as an instance of Marshall McLuhan’s observation that every
new medium retrieves an earlier, supposedly “outdated” medium; and
then, at its limit, reverses into its opposite. In the 21st century, the very
expansion of the techniques of intensified continuity, especially in action
films and action sequences, has led to a situation where continuity itself
has been fractured, devalued, fragmented, and reduced to incoherence.
That is to say, the very techniques that were developed in order to
“intensify” cinematic continuity, have ended up by undermining it. In
using the word continuity, I am first of all referring to continuity editing
as the basic orienting structure of Hollywood narrative cinema. But I
am also pointing toward a larger sense of the word, in which it implies
the homogeneity of space and time, and the coherent organization of
narrative. It is continuity in this broader sense, as well as in the narrower
one, which has broken down in “chaos cinema.”
Michael Bay himself can be quoted on this point: “when you get hung up
on continuity,” he says, “you can’t keep the pace and price down. Most
people simply consume a movie and they are not even aware of these
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errors” (qtd. in Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect 119). It’s noteworthy that
Bay seems equally concerned with “pace” and “price,” and that he sees his
movies as objects which the audience will “simply consume.” As far as Bay
is concerned, the frequent continuity violations discovered in his films by
hostile critics are not “errors” at all; they are just nitpicky details that only
matter to those few of us who analyze films for a living. It’s easy enough
to ridicule this sort of attitude, of course; and I have done so as much as
anybody. But beyond ridicule, the crucial point is that the classical values
of continuity simply don’t matter to certain contemporary filmmakers
any more.
This is why I prefer my own term, post-continuity, to Stork’s “chaos
cinema.” Film today is post-continuity, just as our culture in general is
postmodern—or, even better, post-literate. Even if we’ve discovered
today that “we have never been modern,” this discovery is itself a product
of modernity. And it’s not that we don’t read anymore, but rather that
reading itself has been recontextualized, and subsumed within a broader
multimedia/audiovisual environment. In the same way, it is not that
continuity rules are always being violated or ignored; nor are the films
made in their absence simply chaotic. Rather, we are in a “post-continuity”
situation when continuity has ceased to be important—or at least has
ceased to be as important as it used to be.
You can still find lots of moments in post-continuity films in which the
continuity editing rules are being carefully followed, as well as moments
in which they are thrown out the window. And it’s also true that, as Stork
notes, continuity cues that are not provided visually are instead provided
subliminally on the soundtrack. (The role of sound in post-continuity
cinema is something that I will need to address elsewhere). In any case,
however, the crucial point for post-continuity films is that the violation
of continuity rules isn’t foregrounded, and isn’t in itself significant. This
is in sharp contrast to the ways that jump cuts, directional mismatches,
and other violations of continuity rules were at the center of a film like
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Post-Continuity
Godard’s Breathless more than half a century ago. Today, neither the use
of continuity rules nor their violation is at the center of the audience’s
experience any longer.
In other words, it is not that continuity rules—whether in their classical
or “intensified” form—have been abandoned, nor even that they are
concertedly violated. Rather, although these rules continue to function,
more or less, they have lost their systematicity; and—even more—they
have lost their centrality and importance. And this marks the limit of
Bordwell’s claim, in his “Intensified Continuity” essay, that even the
flamboyant camera movements and ostentatious edits and special effects
of the “intensified” style still serve the same ultimate goal as classical
narration: putting the audience in the position of “comprehending the
story” and “surrendering to the story’s expressive undertow” (25).
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.
In post-continuity films, unlike classical ones, continuity rules are
used opportunistically and occasionally, rather than structurally and
pervasively. Narrative is not abandoned, but it is articulated in a space
and time that are no longer classical. For space and time themselves have
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become relativized or unhinged. In this sense, Bordwell is wrong to claim
that “in representing space, time, and narrative relations (such as causal
connections and parallels) today’s films generally adhere to the principles
of classical filmmaking” (“Intensified Continuity” 16).
Part of what’s at stake here is the relation between style and significance.
Of course, we know that it is impossible simply to link a particular
technique, or stylistic device, with a fixed meaning. This is why Bordwell
rejects the sort of theorization that I am pursuing here; it is also, I think,
why Stork can only say of the “chaos cinema” style that it is poorly made.
But against this, I’d like to cite some remarks by Adrian Martin. Martin
begins by giving Bordwell his due:
In his droll 1989 book Making Meaning, the American scholar
David Bordwell makes fun of a standard procedure in discussing
film. Let us take shot/reverse shot cutting, proposes Bordwell.
Critics like to say: if we see, as part of the same scene, one person
alone in a shot, and then another person alone in another shot, it
means that the film intends us to see them as emotionally far apart,
separated, disconnected. But (Bordwell continues) it can also be
taken to mean the exact opposite: the rhythm of the cutting, the
similarity of the positioning of the figures in the frame—all that
signals a union, a oneness, a deep connection between these two
people! Bordwell repeats the same mock-demonstration with
camera movement: if a panning or tracking shot takes us from
one character, past an expanse of space, to another character,
critics will unfailingly say either that this means they are secretly
connected, or (on the contrary) that there is a gulf between them.
However, Martin suggests that there is more to it than Bordwell is able to
properly recognize; and in this, he moves from Bordwell to Deleuze:
Maybe we are not asking the right question. It might be enough
to answer Bordwell by pointing out that such meanings, of
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interconnectedness or disconnectedness, are not just the handy
hallucination of the critic; and that each film, in creating its own
dramatic context, will subtly or unsubtly instruct us on how
to read the emotional and thematic significance of its stylistic
devices. OK, argument settled—at least within the framework of
an essentially classical, organic aesthetic. But there is another way
to attack this matter, and it is more philosophical. Let us turn to
Gilles Deleuze’s meditation on the films of Kenji Mizoguchi in his
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image:
this seems to us to be the essential element in what
have been called the extravagant camera-movements in
Mizoguchi: the sequence-shot ensures a sort of parallelism
of vectors with different orientations and thus constitutes
a connexion of heterogeneous fragments of space, thus
giving a very special homogeneity to the space thus
constituted. . . . It is not the line which unites into a whole,
but the one which connects or links up the heterogenous
elements, while keeping them heterogeneous. . . . Lines
of the universe have both a physics—which reaches its
peak in the sequence-shot and the tracking-shot—and a
metaphysics, constituted by Mizoguchi’s themes. (194)
What a concept to boggle Bordwell’s mind: the camera movement
which is (to paraphrase Deleuze) a line which connects what is
disconnected, while keeping it disconnected! Yet this is precisely
the complexity of what we are given to see, as spectators, in a film
by Mizoguchi or so many other filmmakers: this ambiguous or
ambivalent interplay of what connects or disconnects, links or
unlinks, the people and objects and elements of the world.
Without necessarily endorsing Deleuze’s particular mode of analysis,
I’d like to suggest that Martin gives us the way in which we can indeed
assign some broader significance to the larger phenomenon of post-
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continuity: to see what it connects and what it disconnects. In classical
continuity styles, space is a fixed and rigid container, which remains the
same no matter what goes on in the narrative; and time flows linearly,
and at a uniform rate, even when the film’s chronology is scrambled
by flashbacks. But in post-continuity films, this is not necessarily the
case. We enter into the spacetime of modern physics; or better, into
the “space of flows,” and the time of microintervals and speed-of-
light transformations, that are characteristic of globalized, high-tech
financial capital. Thus in Post-Cinematic Affect, reflecting on Neveldine
and Taylor’s Gamer, I tried to look at the ways that the post-continuity
action style is expressive of, as well as being embedded within, the
delirium of globalized financial capitalism, with its relentless processes
of accumulation, its fragmentation of older forms of subjectivity, its
multiplication of technologies for controlling perception and feeling
on the most intimate level, and its play of both embodiment and
disembodiment (93-130).
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.
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I would like to conclude by suggesting that the notion of “post-continuity”
may well have a broader cultural scope, rather than just being restricted
to what Stork calls “the woozy camera and A.D.D. editing pattern of
contemporary [action] releases” (“Chaos Cinema, Part 2”). Consider, for
instance, the following:
• On his blog, the cinematographer John Bailey interviewed Stork
and commented extensively on the ideas from his video essay.
Bailey proposes that the real hallmark of “chaos cinema” is “spatial
confusion,” even when this is accomplished without “eruptive
cutting.” He therefore suggests that even films that “embrace the
long take”, and mimic the hypercontinuity of first-person computer
games, may also partake of what I am calling post-continuity. Gus
van Sant’s Gerry, for instance, accomplishes “such a complete
spatial dislocation that it slowly, inexorably becomes the heart of
the film.” Bailey’s observations are quite congruent with work that I
have been doing on how space time relations, as well as audiovisual
relations, are radically changed by the new digital technologies (see
my essay “Splitting the Atom,” in this volume).
• Dogme95-influenced handheld cinematography also produces a
post-continuity style. Excessive camera movements, reframings
without functional justification, and rough, jumpy editing
lead to a vertiginous sense of dislocation. Writing about Lars
Von Trier’s Melancholia on his Twitter feed, Adrian Martin
(@AdrianMartin25) complains: “I tend to dislike almost every
stylistic decision made by Lars von Trier. Other things can be
interesting, but the style! Where is the craft in this MELANCHOLIA
thing? Some of the actors are great, but nobody is being directed, it’s
an amateur movie!!” Now, I value this film quite highly, as Martin
evidently does not. But I think that his discomfort bears witness
to something that is genuinely true of the film: its indifference to
the traditional aesthetics of continuity, and the sorts of meanings
that are produced by such an aesthetic. My own argument is that
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this is altogether appropriate to a film that rejects modernity
altogether, and envisions the end of the world. (I try to discuss
the positive effects of Von Trier’s post-continuity style in my essay
“Melancholia, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime”).
• I think that post-continuity is also at work in the minimalism and
stasis of such recent low-budget horror films as the Paranormal
Activity series. These films are evidently not dislocated, as they are
shot, and take place, in single locations. In each film, the point of
view is restricted to the rooms and grounds of one single-family
home. But these films are entirely shot with home-video and
home-computing equipment; and the machines that capture all
the footage themselves appear within the diegesis. This means
that everything comes either from jerky handheld video cameras,
or else from the fixed locations of laptop cams and surveillance
cams. As a result, the patterns of traditional continuity editing are
completely missing: there are no shot-reverse shot patterns, and
no cuts between establishing shots and close-ups. Instead, we get a
point of view that is impersonal, mechanized, and effectively from
nowhere. Nicholas Rombes argues that the Paranormal Activity
films are in fact avant-garde works, due to their use of fixed or
mechanically-controlled cameras. (For further discussion of this,
see the Critical Roundtable on these films, featuring me, Rombes,
and Julia Leyda, and moderated by Therese Grisham, in a recent
issue of La Furia Umana [reprinted in this volume]).
Although I have yet to explore any of these more fully, it strikes me that
the following might also be considered as instances of post-continuity:
• The casual, throwaway style of “mumblecore” slice-of-life films.
• The widespread integration of graphics, sound effects, and
mixtures of footage emulating video games, that we find in a film
like Scott Pilgrim.
• The promiscuous mixtures of different styles of footage that we
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find in such films as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and Brian
De Palma’s Redacted.
In all of these cases, the films do not altogether dispense with the concerns
of classical continuity; but they move “beyond” it or apart from it, so that
their energies and their investments point elsewhere. What is common to
all these styles is that they are no longer centered upon classical continuity,
or even the intensification of continuity identified by Bordwell. We need
to develop new ways of thinking about the formal strategies, as well as the
semantic contents, of all these varieties of post-continuity films.
Works Cited
Bailey, John. “Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part 3.” John’s
Bailiwick. 5 Dec. 2011. Web. .
Bordwell, David. “A Glance at Blows.” Observations on Film Art. 28 Dec.
2008. Web. .
—. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film.”
Film Quarterly 55.3 (2002): 16-28. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print.
Grisham, Therese, Julia Leyda, Nicholas Rombes, and Steven Shaviro.
“Roundtable Discussion on the Post-Cinematic in Paranormal Activity
and Paranormal Activity 2.” La Furia Umana 11 (2011). Web. .
Reprinted in this volume.
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Martin, Adrian. “Tsai-Fi.” Tren de Sobras 7 (2007). Web. [no longer
online]. .
Reid, Bruce. “Defending the Indefensible: The Abstract, Annoying Action
of Michael Bay.” The Stranger, 6 July 2000. Web. .
Shaviro, Steven. “Melancholia, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime.”
Sequence 1.1 (2012). Web. .
—. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero, 2010. Print.
Stork, Matthias. “Chaos Cinema [Parts 1 and 2]: The Decline and Fall
of Action Filmmaking.” Press Play. 22 Aug. 2011. Web. .
—. “Chaos Cinema, Part 3.” Press Play. 9 Dec. 2011. Web. .
Notes
This chapter was originally published on Steven Shaviro’s blog The
Pinocchio Theory, under the title “Post-Continuity: Full Text of My Talk,”
on March 26, 2012: . It was
originally presented at the 2012 Society for Cinema and Media Studies
conference in Boston. Reprinted with permission from the author.
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