It doesn't matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what's happening onscreen. Directors who work in this mode aren't interested in spatial clarity. It's a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits. Chaos cinema is a never-ending crescendo of flair and spectacle. Every shot feels like the hysterical climax of a scene which an earlier movie might have spent several minutes building toward. It consists of a barrage of high-voltage scenes. Contemporary blockbusters, particularly action movies, trade visual intelligibility for sensory overload, and the result is a film style marked by excess, exaggeration and overindulgence: chaos cinema.Ĭhaos cinema apes the illiteracy of the modern movie trailer. Rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths and promiscuous camera movement now define commercial filmmaking.
Matthias Stork, a German film scholar now based in Los Angeles, has created a most stimulating two-part video essay on a subject near and dear to my heart: "Chaos Cinema." At Press Play, it's given the sub-head "The decline and fall of action filmmaking," while an analysis at FILMdetail considers it from the angle of technology: "Chaos Cinema and the Rise of the Avid." Stork, who also narrates his essay, describes his premise this way: Chaos Cinema Part 1 from Matthias Stork on Vimeo.
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