Written by: Kaja Sunde

We have all seen it: fast-phased editing, framing too close for most people’s normal manners, and licentious camera movements. It has become the golden ticket of the 21st-century era of action films, the chaos consuming the most important parts of the cinematic experience. But what is really chaos cinema, and what benefits does it bring to a film?

Chaos cinema is, as the word itself states, chaos. Jim Emerson writes about the phenomenon in an article from 2011, where he dives into the study of the term through filmmaker Matthias Stork’s ideas. Here, chaos cinema is explained as ‘a barrage of high-voltage scenes’ where ‘every single scene runs on adrenaline’ (Emerson 2011). Furthermore, V Renée explores the term, also in correlation to Stork’s ideas, as rapid editing and the loss of spacial awareness through Visual Effects (VFX) (Renée 2014). These characteristics of chaos cinema, mainly and most commonly found in action films, have been a recent development in the cinematic world. It is no longer a requirement to keep the classic Hollywood-style continuity in cinema, but there is rather a door opened to explore disparate images and a dissent to keep the viewers well-oriented (openculture.com 2014).

A great example of this chaotic cinema is the 2008 James Bond: Quantum of Solace and its opening scene:

A scene filled with all elements of chaos cinema, starting with a slow build-up of the surroundings and scene setting, before all hell breaks loose through a car-chasing scene. Marc Forster and his team of editors explore every element of what the core of chaos cinema is, with its rapid on-screen images, disparate clips, and an adrenaline-filled soundtrack, accompanied by a foreign language; every feature adds to a value of chaos and incoherence. 

References:

Emerson, J. (2011): Agents of Chaos
https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/agents-of-chaos Retrieved 11th of November 2022 (Online)

IMDB (2022): Quantum of Solace
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830515/ Retrieved 11th of November 2022 (Online)

Openculture.com (2014): Chaos Cinema: A Breakdown of How 21st-Century Action Films Became Incoherent
https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/chaos-cinema-how-21st-century-action-films-became-incoherent.html Retrieved 11th of November 2022 (Online)

Renée, V. (2014): Blowing the Lid off of ‘Chaos Cinema’: How Action Films Have Changed
https://nofilmschool.com/2014/01/blowing-the-lid-off-of-chaos-cinema-how-action-films-have-changed Retrieved 11th of November 2022 (Online)