Source Code, while watching the film, we can see the narrative repeats for the same eight minutes. The film feels less smooth, but producing a high-pressure, clipped experience where attention keeps restarting. It looks like more closer to refreshing a feed than settling into a stable scene to the audience. This concept well connected to the post-continuity of Steven Shaviro, that the main goal is impact in the moment of viewing and the sequence can register as a “collage of fragments” , rather than a legible flow.

In Source Code, each reset compresses the processes of orientation. In the film, we don’t gradually bring ourselves to the train carriage by the editing path, but re-enter the space directly in the middle. Editing privileges micro things, for example, a cutaway, a glance or a sound hit, over establishing the exact location. Even when the camera returns to familiar beat, the pacing makes repetition in the film feel like higher level. The same space becomes a train carriage that full of pressure. Post-continuity here is not the absence of narrative but keep the narrative subordinate to sensation.

This kind of sensation can also resonate with the concept of kaleidoscopic perception. It frames screen experience through embodied intensity that “delirium, immersion, and kinesis. ” The loop is not only a plot device, but also a rhythmic audiovisual event which impacts sound design, cues and accelerated cutting emphasis present tense. This film does not prevent audience from deducting the plot, bit it applied high urgent pace to force deduction to occur through a process of fragmented completion.

By Jiahui LIu 33788859, Feb 10

Bibliography:

Jones, D. (dir.) (2011) Source Code. Summit Entertainment. [Film]

Shane Denson & Julia Leyda (eds), Post-Cinema: Theorizing
21st-Century Film (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016).

Bukatman, S. (ed.) (2003) ‘The Ultimate Trip: Special Effects and Kaleidoscopic Perception’, in Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. Duke University Press, p. 0. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822384892-006.