Marvelous. A video after my own heart.

Lazy was highly accurate and appropriate to describe this trend. I'd also say filmmakers utilizing these techniques lack courage. It has its appropriate uses...but I couldn't agree more with your assessment. Nice!

Thanks for putting into words, what I have felt for a long time.

Yap, that's what I felt over and over again in the last decade! Thanks for summing up so clearly - brilliant work!

Ok… I’ve got to call bullshit here. Especially referring to “Part 2”. While I agree that frenetic, shaky cam and quick cuts are overused and annoying. And that they are a very inexpensive method (good if you’re an indie filmmaker) of imparting intensity and action via “post” in a scene. But to then say that it all sucks with the exception of Kathryn Bigelow’s Academy Award winning “Hurt Locker” is either.. A) Way too convenient, obvious and politically correct. Or… B) Your entire theory is full of crap. Or C) Both A & B are correct. I’m going with A & B. Further if you take any of the “Hurt Locker” chaotic action scenes out of context and view juxtaposed with any of the other “offending” scenes describe in this piece, they are indistinguishable from one another and all facilitate the very same thing, a hyper state of energy, confusion and intensity. It’s also idiotic to compare the long uninterrupted takes of Donald O’Connor dance sequences from the 1952 “Singing in the Rain” for so many reasons that it would take volumes. How about suffice to say you don’t like the overuse of this style of shot/editing except when it wins an Academy Award. That I’ll buy.

This essay should be called, Fuck You Tony Scott.

Great work, wish you highlighted the great work done in Children of Men. The incredibly long takes of the 2 action films went a long way to combating "Chaos Cinema".

The clear result of Hollywood giving 30 second commercial directors the responsibility of making feature films.

I listened to a radio panel show a while back with a bunch of directors talking about the best gunfight in a western. It was interesting how they (all old-school or old-timers) kept coming back to geography - a gunfight in which you can't tell where everybody is will always lack tension/narrative/something.

Most of them plumped for the gunfight in Open Range, by the way.

I always think of this geographical aesthetic as the Yojimbo method. The whole opening of the film, with the cafe-owner opening the shutters and progressively disclosing the town, is a spatial set-up for the action of the film.

You've chosen a couple 'bad' films here I like (which is maybe why @410 Garfield Films is so - incoherently - cross?) but, in the main, I'm totally with you.

There's also a case for this chaos extending to time too?

A very good essay. It was thought provoking. Many film makers revel in the use of 'effects' with out considering effect. But, I fear, we are on an escalator. Could we go back to action sequences like 'Bullit' ? Probably not. The secret will be to concentrate on the story, the audience and the desired effect. But, this essay was well considered; even if you didn't agree with premise or conclusions. Well done.

An edit should come to further enhance a scene or tell a story better. Now their is a cut every 3 seconds thrown into a blender hoping something edible comes out. If you agree with it or not, great essay.

Being a wedding videographer, but coming from a film background, I have to relate how chaos cinema is relevant in the DSLR world of filmmaking. I call it "visual porn", beauty shots that occupy no realistic space, and in it, we lose the human element. A lot of young filmmakers coming out of film school(and who happen to make ends meet shooting weddings) have no idea of space and the wonderful rich history of old school filmmaking. They grew up in a time that showcase images without meaning. And truth be told, I've had to change my ways to what the trend is now or else be deemed "a dinosaur". Chaos cinema is here to stay...

This would have been revolutionary in 2010. Go watch any given film by Nicholas Winding Refn, Park Chan Wook, or Jee-Woon Kim. Or Takashi Miike's "13 Assassins," which is a masterclass in exciting, yet intelligible action. The tide's been turning for a while.

I really enjoyed this essay Matthias! I'm not a student of motion pictures, so the section on sound design was really interesting to me.

There's a reflection going on here. There's an escalation in freneticism in media across the board, not just in cinema. News stories, books, magazines, even advertising, have been getting shorter, shallower and more guttural for some time now as the race to "cut through" the sea of competing meda escalates. Competition for attention is fierce, and if you're a commercial film producer it seems risky to invite when you can grab.

I don't know that chaotic style is necessarily here to stay. The pendulum has to swing back in order for new releases to be differentiate themselves. It's funny that you should ask when cinema will recapture it's "visceral appeal" because contemplation and chaos are (at least) equally visceral.

Maybe it will take a reawakened appetite for delight in audiences? Miyazaki's films are literally characterised by long periods of semi-meditative reflection that invite the viewer into the story world (e.g. youtu.be/lwMSSzjlJaw), and it is beeeauuutiful to experience.

The counter movement in other media is coming from social media. News as word-of-mouth, citizen bloggers and tweeters. Organic dialoge instead of rigid institutions and media processes. There's a discernable a shift in what is valuable as we move from economics based not on scarcity (media rights, control of physical distribution) but on excess (the endless sea of media). The coming problem isn't so much signal vs noise, it's finding space to allow signal to resonate into meaning.

I guess there's a concern is that in learning to interpret, accept and, really, expect chaos mainstream audiences are losing the skills needed to interpret reflective scenes. I guess we'll see!

Thanks for the essay, it feels well timed and well done.

Excellent essay. Good work.

So true. Very good work !

shit just got real.

Slightly better than Part 1, but still extremely nearsighted and pretentious. I said what I had to on the Part 1 comments, so all I'll say here is thank GOD you (and those agreeing with you wholeheartedly) are not the ones determining cinema's progression.

Regardless of my disagreements, I appreciate the time and effort and provocation of thought.

I am glad that the video appeals to some of you. As for the diverging views, I appreciate your comments.

More please! Very interesting and good for discussion.

Again, interesting POVs. I can't help but to think that audiences are trained to see fast sequences that aren't necessarily linear between the sounds and action that we see and hear. For example, how do you change Transformers to make the scenes less convoluted? I do agree that I had a tough time distinguishing between the various action shots and I never really got a good feel of who the other characters were outside of Bumblebee and Optimus. Would audiences be bored with longer scenes? Tieuel Legacy! Motion

interesting points. but even in the last train crash. its comprehensible. this is a definate sense of begin middle and end.
And in BOURNE. the fight scene visual style maybe not let you see every punch but it gives you a sense of actually being in the fight. same thing goes for clover field.
Be nice if you talked about the opposite like JARMUSCH and TROPICAL MALADY