Affective Trajectories: Locating Diegetic Velocity in the Cinema Experience

Cinema’s own speeds seem to be increasingly at issue. The contemplative “cinema of slowness” of directors such as Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan is valorized at the expense of a “fast” cinema—action-filled blockbusters like the Bourne films (The Bourne Identity [Doug Liman, 2002], The Bourne Supremacy [Paul Greengrass, 2004], The Bourne Ultimatum [Paul Greengrass, 2007], The Bourne Legacy [Tony Gilroy, 2012]) and the Transformers franchise (Transformers [Michael Bay, 2007], Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen [Michael Bay, 2009], Transformers: Dark of the Moon [Michael Bay, 2011], Transformers: Age of Extinction [Michael Bay, 2014])—that is persistently dismissed for its formal and narrative preoccupation with acceleration.¹ The negative positioning of popular films that make the heightened diegetic velocity of bodies, vehicles, and objects their subject is not in itself new, but what is notable is its combination with a growing critical focus on these films’ presentational speeds.² From David Bordwell’s writing on intensified continuity to Steven Shaviro’s work on postcontinuity, critics and film scholars have highlighted the quickening pace of editing and camera movement in mainstream American cinema, foregrounding the pressure this puts on continuity editing’s traditional role of marking out spatiotemporal relations in explicitly visual terms.³ In the ensuing critical discussion it has become commonplace to suggest that, as fast cinema has sped up, so the spectator has lost more of her sense of diegetic spatial relationships. I want to suggest that this critical commonplace obscures important aspects of both the relationship between speed and visual narration, and the experience of intense diegetic velocities.

In 2011, Matthias Stork published three video essays on what he called “chaos cinema,” illustrated with high-speed action sequences from films like Transformers, Bad Boys II (Michael Bay, 2003), Quantum of Solace (Marc Foster, 2008), and the Bourne franchise. This cinema, he suggested, deploys rapid editing and shaky camera movements to “overwhelm” and “overpower” audiences, and in doing so “trades visual intelligibility for sensory overload.”⁴ In the same year, Jim Emerson deployed video essays to undertake a pointed comparison of high-speed chase sequences in Salt (Phillip Noyce, 2010), The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), and older films like Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968) and The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), in which The Dark Knight’s inconsistent deployment of screen direction is held up as an example of those films that deploy fast, mobile framing and high-speed dissection of space without sustaining “spatial integrity between elements within the frame or between shots,” thus producing “sensation without orientation.”⁵ Emerson and Stork are echoing David Bordwell’s long-established preference for “sensation” to be anchored by clarity of physical action and by a spatial legibility located in the image track and the cut.⁶ Yet such a preference carries echoes of what Adrian Martin has called “the baggage of classicism”: an overvaluing of coherence, narrative articulation, and formal balance that risks preventing adequate attention to those moments, sequences, or films constructed along other kinds of aesthetic principles.⁷

The fact that so many writers are demanding this type of visually conveyed spatial clarity from the intense diegetic velocities and presentational speeds of popular cinema is symptomatic, it seems to me, of cultural anxieties about how we orient ourselves in relation to intensifying technological, social, geographical, and economic accelerations that have constructed a “speeded-up world in which . . . everyday life skids along on the plane of velocity”—and about, in particular, the “negation of space” these accelerations imply.⁸ Paul Virilio has influentially argued that the accelerating speeds of contemporary technologization and modern transportation are changing our relationships to geography, terrain, and territory, thereby producing an increasingly “fleeting figuration of the transfer” between different locations, or what he elsewhere calls the “ruin of the interval.”⁹ In the era of drone warfare, the circumstance of being unable to visually verify one’s spatial orientation in relation to fast-moving screen action might well reverberate with a more general unease about one’s orientation to the state and military capacities for near-instantaneous spatial penetration...