Action scenes have always departed from classical continuity and used montage techniques to intensify dramatic action, but in post-cinema, this becomes the norm and not only for action.  I am going to use the teen comedy ‘Mean Girls’ to highlight how “People are no longer using continuity editing in blockbuster Hollywood cinema. Rapid cutting and repeated segments of time mean that viewers become unaware of time and space which could be understood as montage cinema. Both Bordwell and Shaviro argue that this model of construction has given way in some instances to a different model for combining moving images that is more about intensifying sensations, than following a linear narrative, disclosed in a coherent unity of time and space.

A continuity editing system is a system used to create a coherent sense of space and time. this is a system created with rules, making events look like they are happening in a believable sequence of time and space. Where action filmmakers once “prided themselves on keeping the viewer well-oriented” in time and space, they now throw disparate images together haphazardly, enslaved to “rapid editing, close framings, bipolar lens lengths, and promiscuous camera movement,” trading “visual intelligibility for sensory overload,” leaving it to the soundtrack to provide a semblance of continuity. 

The clip below from Mean Girls portrays what Bordwell has called ‘intensified continuity’ and Steven Shaviro has referred to as ‘post-continuity’: the idea that images no longer fully follow rules of classical cinema editing and composition. The skip skips between shots filmed at different times and In different spaces. As sound has advanced, cinema can make soundscape that works with moving images, this is portrayed in my chosen media example from Mean girls, the sound works with the scene and is linear, allowing the audience to maintain an understanding whilst viewing. However, the images jump between times, which creates a sense of confusion for the audience. This incoherent sense of reality highlights what it feels like to live in the 21st-century society.

References:

Steven Shaviro, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film Philosophy 14.1, 2010

in Film | January 2nd, 2014 12 C. (no date) Chaos cinema: A breakdown of how 21st-century action films became incoherent, Open Culture. Available at: https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/chaos-cinema-how-21st-century-action-films-became-incoherent.html (Accessed: November 30, 2022).

By Tia Brown