EDITOR'S NOTE: Press Play is proud to present Part II of Jim Emerson's In The Cut series. In this piece he deconstructs an action sequence from Phillip Noyce's 2010 hit Salt to highlight compositions, camera movements, editing and spatial awareness. We have included the full, uninterrupted scene so the viewer can compare Jim's analysis with the finished product.
By Jim Emerson
Press Play Contributor
Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what’s important in the scene. If you shoot the action cogently, with all the moves evident, that’s realistic because it shows you what’s 'really' happening. If you shoot it awkwardly, that presentation is 'realistically' reflecting what a participant perceives or feels. If you shoot it as 'chaos' (another description that Nobles applies to the Expendables action scenes)—well, action feels chaotic when you’re in it, right? Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer? — David Bordwell, Observations on film art (September 15, 2010)
In Part I of In the Cut we looked at part of an action sequence from The Dark Knight and examined many questions, ambiguities and incongruities raised by the ways shots were composed and cut together. In Part II, we delve into a chase sequence from Phillip Noyce's Salt (2010) that uses a lot of today's trendy "snatch-and-grab" techniques (quick cutting, shaky-cam, but very few abstract-action cutaways — I spotted one doozy, but I didn't mention it; see if you notice it). And yet, there's very little that isn't perfectly understandable in the moment.
There are certain directors I think of as "one-thing-at-a-time" filmmakers. That is, they seem to be incapable of composing shots that have more than one piece of information in them at a time. This makes for a very flat, rather plodding style. You see what the camera is pointed at in each shot, but you get very little sense of perspective when it comes to relating it to other elements in the scene. Noyce's technique is much more fluid, organic and sophisticated. He keeps things from one shot visible in the next, even when shifting perspective — whether it's only a few feet or clear across several lanes of traffic.
In Part I: A Shot in the Dark (Knight) I asked (rhetorically) whether the techniques used made the action more exciting or just more confusing. I left the question unanswered because it's something viewers are going to have to decide for themselves. And, as usual in criticism, the goal is not to find the "right" answers but to raise the relevant questions. Noyce himself raised a good one when he said he thinks viewers are not looking for coherence but for visceral experiences. And yet, his filmmaking is quite coherent (grammatically, if not "realistically"). "Visceral," like "realism," is in the eye of the beholder.
That is why I also wanted to mention the quotation from David Bordwell at the top of this intro (and near the beginning of the video essay). Arguments made in the name of "realism" are susceptible to subjective interpretations. Whether a film is classical or impressionistic, employing long shots or close ups, extended takes or quick cuts, each of these choices has effects on the viewer (including the critic) and that's what we try to notice, describe, understand and assess.
Finally, let me quote critic , who said: "One can summarize a plot in one sentence, whereas it’s fairly difficult to summarize one frame." That's not only a fascinating statement about the nature of film, it hints at a kind of "close reading" approach to criticism that was previously available only to scholars with access to film libraries and Movieolas. Now we can pause, rewind, slow down and otherwise examine films — shot by shot, even frame by frame — in video essays shared over the Internet. Amazing.
You can watch Jim Emerson's deconstruction of The Dark Knight here. Coming soon: In the Cut Part III: I Left My Heart in My Throat in San Francisco, which looks at Don Siegel's 1958 filmThe Lineup. Emerson is a Seattle-based writer, critic, editor, blogger, video essayist, gardener and pedant. He is the founding editor of RogerEbert.com, where he also maintains his blog, Scanners.
“These facilities” were the offices of park rangers, loggers, an SUV dealership and a horse slaughterhouse. In the ’90s and ’00s, the E.L.F. targeted a range of businesses and organizations it saw as powerful agents of environmental destruction. The members were mostly very young protestors radicalized by brutal police response. Footage of cops beating and pepper-spraying non-violent activists who refuse to disperse does resemble classic civil rights/counterculture tumult. (Scenes of confrontation with loggers, from an E. L.F.-made documentary ostensibly shot in the mid-90s, look as if they could have been shot in the late ’60s.) This was a classic, bright-eyed, idealistic strain of the environmental movement, led by resourceful twenty-somethings.
This essay takes a long, hard look at roughly the first half of the big car and truck chase sequence from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, set on the lower level streets by the Chicago River. It stops, starts, reverses, repeats, slows down… taking the sequence apart shot by shot. The idea is to look at it the way an editor would — but also as a moviegoer does. We notice lapses in visual logic whether our brains register them consciously or not. I found this sequence utterly baffling the first time I saw it, and every subsequent time. At last, I now know exactly why.
Anyone who has participated in the making of a movie, whether a D.I.Y. project or a Hollywood studio picture (I've been involved in both kinds of productions), can tell you about the seemingly insurmountable difficulties of planning, shooting and editing a movie. Surely the use of large IMAX cameras for this segment of The Dark Knight made the filming more of a challenge. Problems that could have been easily fixed on a film with such a huge budget (removing that phantom extra police car with CGI, perhaps) were also no doubt complicated by the IMAX process. And to the filmmakers' credit, they decided against using CGI for the actual stunts, using real vehicles, miniatures and explosions instead.
In the end, however, all that matters, to paraphrase Martin Scorsese, is which pieces of film wind up in the picture and which are left out (intentionally or otherwise). And then, to quote the great actor 
Though it’s more serious than the series’ preceding entries, 3-D Sex and Zen is very much a sex comedy that infrequently mistakes itself for a serious drama about fidelity and carnal vice. Wei Yangsheng (Hiro Hayama) is a lascivious but dutiful man lucky enough to marry Yuxing (Leni Nam), the woman of his dreams. Though they enjoy just being with each other, the young lovers spend much of their time having sex. Or as much sex as they can have before Wei prematurely climaxes. The fact that they can’t have more than a few seconds’ worth of bliss at a time bothers Wei very much, so he goes on a quest to the Pavilion of Bliss, where he learns that the key to seducing women is having a massive penis. Wei replaces his penis with a donkey one, and beds a harem or two full of women — all for the sake of better pleasing his wife.
Director Christopher Suen makes it perilously easy to ignore the pretext of seriousness to 3-D Sex and Zen’s outlandish series of disproportionate events. Amidst panoramic shots of many much naked women running around and gasping for joy as they’re taken by force, even the threat of rape is a joke. A scene where a woman dies while being raped becomes impossible to take seriously in this context. Her flailing body is violated underneath a writing desk after a bed sheet is inadvertently draped over her head. We know that this scene is supposed to be a tainted form of spectacle because of its pompous, foreboding orchestral score, but it ends with a corny close-up of the attacker’s face, now bathed in a lurid and fittingly cheap-looking red light, making it very easy to dehumanize a male protagonist who was Wei’s idol just moments ago. But hey, isn’t that the kind of cheese you came (no pun intended) to see?
insentience, I found myself listening to David Bowie’s 1971 magnum opus, 
Super 8 is like E.T. meets Cloverfield meets cholera, at least in aesthetic estimation if not literal form. Admittedly, it’s been a few months since I saw the film, but, was it a hallucination or did the little kid (Joel Courtney), the Elliot surrogate (let’s call him E.S.), actually look a hideous, slobbering alien in the face, have a heart wrenching moment, and say, “Everybody hurts sometimes,” or some such drivel? I’m really hoping it was a hallucination, because when E.S. looked into the eyes of the giant man-eating alien and spouted out an anachronistic, Southern-Californian, wishy-washy aphorism, another pillar of western civilization was obliterated – the pillar marked “Common Sense.” Like a cannibal narcissist with gastric flu, I threw up my hands.
Current pop-cultural zeitgeist (as nebulous a term as that might be) is defined by futile attempts at recreating the delicate ambience of the past. Nostalgia, in all its forms, is the usurper of wit and intelligence. Famously, Super 8 tries to recreate the early-’80s Amblin pictures of Steven Spielberg, specifically E.T., but also Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Goonies (though I doubt the latter ever boasted the Amblin logo – I could be wrong). The superficial sympathy the film asks the audience grant the man-eating alien (who, let us recall, develops an unbreakable bond with whomever it comes into tactile contact with, which, nonetheless, does not deter it from devouring the fuck out of them, hats, jeans, shoes and all) is illustrative of the ill-informed liberal ethos of the current depoliticized Hollywood mindset: “Just understand the villain’s motives and then it’s okay!” (By the way, I am a liberal, thus, in the previous sentence, “ill-informed” is not a generalization but a particular specificity.)
Instead, what the film reflects is our ideological uncertainty. So deranged is our sense of right and wrong that a man-eating alien has become a monstrous slimy figure of sympathy. Super 8 strives for the nostalgic effect of early Spielberg without committing to any deeper political motives and is emblematic of the depoliticization of popular culture. Abrams tries to recreate childhood memories all the while weaving it around a “modern day” pseudo-fable, but there is nothing to it except for the 
J.J. Abrams lacks the political insight and the aesthetic wherewithal of Steven Spielberg, and instead opts for imitating him in the most superficial manner. What made Kipling stand head and shoulders above his contemporaries, as pinpointed by Orwell in his 1942 essay, was his way with words and verse, yes, but also his dedication to a cause, however blindly it may have been. Similarly, the broken home in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. is a political statement about the shallowness of the post-war nuclear family of the baby boomers, a motif the director still employs with panache (e.g., the destruction of the model “nuclear family” during the nuclear test at the beginning of the latest Indiana Jones flick). Spielberg has subtly remained a political filmmaker through the years, with, for example, the one-two punch of 2005’s War of the Worlds and Munich possibly being the two greatest artistic responses to the 9/11 attacks.
In Super 8 (and, to a certain extent, his Star Trek reboot), J.J. Abrams peddles in nothing but nostalgia, with no hint of incipient sexuality, no political subtext, no social commentary. Of course, the presence of those elements does not automatically mean artistic superiority; if anything, such heavy-handed digressions into “meaning” usually turn a piece of art into a piece of shit. However, Abrams makes such blatant use of both the early ’80s time period and the kids’ ages that one seeks an explanation, and hopes that it is not simply, “Because I thought it would be cool.”
Of course, it did not have to be that way. Abrams could have utilized that era to tug on the heartstrings with nostalgia and all that horse-shit while actually saying something that mattered. And he didn’t have to look too far for inspiration, either. Abrams’ sometimes-partner-in-crime Matt Reeves (and another one of Spielberg’s latter-day protégés) deftly weaves themes as diverse as religion, politics and child abuse in the “coming-of-age” narrative of Let Me In. Out of the godless, Scandinavian Let the Right One In, he recreates a totally American work of art, and neither the ages of the protagonists nor the story’s time period grate; in fact, they reinforce the film’s strengths.
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